The wind, a mournful whisper through the jagged peaks surrounding Whisperwind Quarry, carried the scent of dust and despair. Corvus, no more than a wisp of a lad despite his seventeen years, hunched lower, the coarsespun fabric of his tunic doing little to ward off the biting chill. Each swing of his pickaxe against the stubborn granite sent tremors through his aching arms, a rhythm of misery echoing through the desolate pit.
He was a ward of Whisperwind, an orphan left to the 'care' of the village elder, which in practice meant indentured servitude to the quarry. His days were a brutal cycle of back-breaking labor, meager rations, and the ever-present threat of Grok, the quarry overseer, a mountain of muscle and malice who seemed to derive pleasure from the suffering of others. Grok's booming voice, laced with a guttural growl, was a constant reminder of their servitude. "Faster, whelps! Aetherstone doesn't mine itself!" it would bellow across the quarry.
Corvus's quota for the day was a pittance – barely enough aetherstone to fill a small satchel – yet it felt insurmountable. Each vein of aetherstone pulsed with a faint, inner light, a light Corvus couldn't see, not like the others. Or so he thought. He was considered unremarkable, his aetheric sensitivity practically non-existent compared to those destined for greater things. The quarry was filled with such people, those deemed useless by society, sentenced to a life of hardship and toil.
The sun, a pale disc in the clouded sky, offered little warmth. Corvus paused, wiping sweat and grime from his brow with a dirt-stained sleeve. His pickaxe, a tool as worn and weary as himself, chose that moment to betray him. The head, weakened by countless strikes, snapped clean off the haft, the dull thud echoing mockingly in the silence that followed. Panic flared in Corvus's chest. A broken tool meant no quota. No quota meant Grok's… displeasure. He glanced nervously towards the overseer, a looming figure silhouetted against the sky.
Desperation clawed at him. He couldn't afford to stop. Not now. Scrabbling through the dust, he found the broken pieces. The haft was splintered, useless. But the head… He picked it up, his fingers tracing the jagged break. As he did, a strange sensation washed over him, a faint tingling in his fingertips, a resonance he'd never felt before. It was as if he could *feel* the flow of aether within the metal, the disrupted pathways where the break had occurred. An instinct, primal and unfamiliar, surged within him. He didn't understand it, but he obeyed. He closed his eyes, focusing on the tingling sensation, and *pushed*.
A faint blue light flickered around the broken edges of the pickaxe head. The air shimmered, almost imperceptibly. When Corvus opened his eyes, the break was… mended. Not perfectly, a hairline fracture still visible, but strong enough to hold. He stared at the tool, his heart pounding. He didn't understand what he'd done, but he knew, with a certainty that resonated deep within his soul, that something had changed. He had touched the aether, not as a passive observer, but as a weaver. A sliver of hope, fragile but persistent, bloomed in the desolate landscape of his existence. Grok's shadow still loomed, but now, for the first time, Corvus felt a flicker of defiance, a whisper of possibility in the wind.