The main hall into which Lucas and I had just been thrown was dark, unsanitary, and particularly uncomfortable.
The air inside was heavy, saturated with humidity and the smell of ancient dust, making every breath a struggle for our exhausted lungs.
Deep within my quiet anguish, I wondered what would become of us, trapped like rats in the bowels of this floating fortress.
However, the lack of oxygen and the darkness quickly became the least of my concerns for a far more pressing reason: we were far from alone.
There were people.
A lot of people.
A low buzz of anxious whispers rose from every corner of the room, betraying a massive presence.
After a few minutes, my eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, allowing me to take in the geometry of this communal chamber.
It held a dense crowd, likely between two hundred and three hundred people, all crammed onto a freezing floor of packed dirt.
Every face was unfamiliar to me.
I turned to my companion and whispered a low question, asking if he recognized even a single face in this mass.
Lucas shook his head discreetly in response, his eyes wide with surprise.
Among the captives, I made out a vast array of species: Neïds with strange iridescences, ordinary humans, hybrids of all kinds displaying animalistic traits…
On the other hand, after closer observation, I noticed there wasn’t a single Astharté.
Those giants were likely too proud or too valuable to be thrown into the pit like this.
My silent analysis was abruptly cut short when one of the prisoners detached himself from the nearest group and approached us with hesitant steps.
“Hey, hi!
So…
are you apprentices too?
Ah, what am I saying, of course you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be locked up in here!”
He was a young man with an utterly average appearance, pale skin, and short-cut hair.
His expression showed no apparent threat, just an overwhelming weariness mixed with curiosity.
Lucas, faithful to his sociable nature, spoke up first:
“Ah…
uh, hi.
Yeah, we’re apprentices too.
Say…
do you know where we are exactly?
We were told there were rooms for the recruits.”
I preferred to stay in the background and not step into their conversation.
Even if this individual seemed completely harmless, he was still an Eresboros apprentice, just like everyone surrounding me, and I knew that in a criminal organization of this scale, suspicion had to be my absolute rule.
Besides, I knew that by letting Lucas take the lead, it would be much easier to extract free information.
My friend’s face radiated such innocence and candor that people naturally tended to see him as an easy target—or even a malleable tool that could be manipulated without risk.
It was a strategic advantage I fully intended to exploit.
The man continued his conversation with my companion, lowering his voice:
“I think this is the famous waiting room for the new recruits…
But I didn’t think there’d be so many of us.
Look around you, it’s madness.”
A serious flicker of doubt crossed Lucas’s eyes.
“What do you mean, too many?”
“Well, you know…
we’re at the headquarters of a powerful shadow organization.
Even if they constantly need labor and cannon fodder for their operations in Malbour, joining their elite ranks isn’t supposed to be an easy feat.
Gathering this many people in a single room doesn’t bode well. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
Though, maybe I’m wrong—I hope I’m wrong.”
The stranger was touching upon a disturbing truth that echoed my own fears.
The room held nearly three hundred heads, and this artificial overpopulation made me foresee some kind of special treatment from the leaders of Eresboros.
After a few hours of fruitless discussion and whispers of shared rumors, Lucas and I bade the young man farewell and went back to sit apart, our backs propped against the rough stone wall.
Taking advantage of our isolation, I decided to press my companion for a bit of information:
“I thought you knew exactly what awaited us here, considering you’ve been running around Eresboros for quite some time now.
You looked even more surprised than that guy by the turn of events.”
Lucas let out a heavy sigh and ran a nervous hand through his hair.
“Well…
you know, Drey, before our test, I wasn’t really an official member of the organization.
I was mostly their errand boy in the lower districts of Malbour, an insignificant cog.
The only people I saw daily were Sir Callis when he came down to give orders, and low-level enforcers.
I had no idea what was going on up top.”
His sincere words confirmed what he had told me when we first met: he was at the very bottom of the social and criminal ladder.
But another question had been burning on my lips since our flight in the archéfléa:
“I see.
That means you had never come up here…
to this castle suspended above the clouds?”
“No, never.
This is the first time in my life I’ve ever crossed into the third space.”
Where I had naively thought Lucas would serve as my guide and advisor thanks to his prior connections with the underworld, I had to face reality: we were in the exact same boat.
Two greenhorns lost in the mouth of the wolf, without a single landmark.
Time stretched on agonizingly.
In the deepening darkness, groups were already forming along the walls as individuals gathered by racial affinity or survival instinct to secure temporary alliances.
I paid them no mind, focused on another burgeoning problem that was far more vicious: hunger.
On empty stomachs after the previous day’s ordeals, the first complaints began to rise, shattering the ambient murmurs.
The tension shot up.
A massive man suddenly stood, strode to the center of the room, and screamed with all his might, driven by sheer rage:
“WE’RE HUNGRY!
YOU BASTARDS, WHEN ARE WE EATING?!
WE’VE BEEN ROTTING HERE IN THE DARK FOR HOURS!
AT LEAST GIVE US SOME DAMN FOOD!”
Following his rallying cry, a deathly silence instantly descended upon the room.
Every prisoner held their breath.
Suddenly, with a sinister screech that made everyone set their teeth on edge, the heavy reinforced iron bars at the far end of the room swung open.
Men dressed in dark black tunics, their faces entirely concealed by rigid masks, appeared on the threshold, carrying large wicker baskets at arm’s length.
Without uttering a single word, they began tossing pieces of bread at random, throwing them directly onto the packed dirt floor like feeding beasts of burden.
As soon as they emptied their baskets, they stepped back, and the bars shut with a deafening metallic crash that shook the walls.
Calm still reigned, but it was now tinted with a profound collective confusion.
“Wait…
is that it?
Really, that’s all?
There’s at least three hundred of us here and you throw us dry bricks?
And look closely…
there isn’t even enough for half of us!”
The masked figures turned on their heels without deigning to give him a single glance or the slightest explanation.
Their heavy footsteps faded quickly down the adjacent corridor.
A heavy, menace-laden silence settled over us, but my mind instantly went into high alert.
I had just made the grave mistake of underestimating the cruelty and perversity of Eresboros’s methods.
They weren’t trying to house us.
They were locking us up, starving us for hours, and then throwing us a pitiful handful of bread to provoke a natural selection.
This wasn’t a welcome meal.
It was a fighting arena.
It took a fraction of a second for me to grasp the full horror of the situation.
I leaned sharply toward my friend and hissed in an urgent voice, devoid of any hesitation:
“Lucas…
quick.
Grab some bread.
Right now, don’t wait!”
Lucas stared at me, deeply shocked by the harshness of my tone, but a flash of realization hit his eyes after a few seconds.
Unfortunately, at the exact moment he reached out toward a loaf that had just rolled near our feet, a sharp thud echoed through the air.
A violent blow, followed by a groan of pain.
Around us, the crowd froze for a fraction of a second, seeking the source of the attack, until a prisoner shouted at the top of his lungs:
“There won’t be bread for everyone!
And we don’t know when these monsters will come back to feed us!
So it’s simple…
either you eat, or you croak right here!”
That brutal realization acted like a detonator on a powder keg.
In the dark, the prisoners’ eyes lit up with a wild, purely animalistic glare.
The instinct for self-preservation overrode reason.
The first blows landed, triggering a chain reaction of unimaginable ferocity.
Everyone now had to tear away their own survival with their bare hands at the expense of their neighbor.
The communal hall exploded into a chaotic chorus of enraged screams, snapping bones, curses, and dull impacts.
I had to throw myself into the fray, dodging the fist of an alert hybrid, to secure at least two pieces of bread for Lucas and myself.
I struck without thinking, guided only by the necessity of not starving to death.
The famine orchestrated by Eresboros had shattered the last barriers of humanity in these recruits in less than a minute.
The hours dragged on with agonizing slowness, punctuated by groans and the muted violence that broke out whenever a loaf changed hands.
When morning finally peeked through the tiny gaps in the stone walls, the room looked like a true medieval battlefield.
Dozens of bodies lay on the ground, covered in blood and dust, unconscious or too weak to move, while the survivors of that hellish night fiercely gnawed on their meager spoils, cowering in the blind spots of the room.
We hadn’t closed an eye all night, remaining on high alert to protect our food and our lives.
Lucas and I were in bad shape, our faces bruised, our clothes torn and covered in welts.
When the heavy bars opened once more at first light to order us out, we painfully climbed the stairs back to the surface, our bodies aching.