JD's bazaar

[doe.1971]

The chains bit into Aloy’s wrists like the jaws of a Sawtooth. Iron, not the alloyed smart-matter the Old Ones favored, but crude, honest iron forged in the fires of Sunfall. The Shadow Carja liked their prisoners to feel the weight of the past.

They had taken her bow at the gates of Sunfall, snapped it in front of her like kindling. Her quiver was emptied, arrows broken one by one while a priest in a golden sun-mask recited the crimes of the “Nora savage.” Then the hood came down, smelling of incense and old blood, and the world went black.

She woke in the back of a prison wagon rattling west, toward the mountains that bled red dust. The other captives—outcasts, foreigners, anyone who had looked too long at the buried secrets under the Citadel—kept their eyes down. Aloy tested the manacles, felt the rivets, counted the guards. Six. All tired. All afraid of what waited in the mines.

The place was called the Pit of Cinders, a scar in the earth where the Shadow Carja dug for the glowing relics they called “Sun’s Tears.” Machines prowled the lower galleries—Corruptors, Scrapper packs, even a tethered Deathbringer half-mad from decades of containment. The priests said the Buried Shadow itself whispered through the metal there. Aloy didn’t care what it whispered. She only cared that the deeper you went, the sloppier the guards became.

They stripped her of armor, affixed the mine slave rings then gave her a pickaxe. Her hair, once braided tight for the hunt, hung matted and dull. They thought that would break her. They were wrong.

Weeks passed—or maybe months; the sun never reached the lower shafts. She learned the rhythms. The clang of the shift horn. The way the overseers drank fermented cactus juice after dusk. The blind spot behind the ore crusher where the watchers couldn’t see. She learned names, too. Jalah, the Oseram foreman who owed the Carja a blood debt. Little Tidemen, a Nora boy taken in a raid, barely twelve. And Hekarro, a towering Tenakth who smiled with too many broken teeth and spoke softly of freedom.

At night, in the slave barracks that stank of sweat and despair, Aloy traced plans in the dust with a stolen nail. A collapsed tunnel here. An old ventilation shaft there. A guard post that changed only four men instead of six when the moon was new.

All she needed now was a distraction.