Asgard Awakening Read online

  The unwashed thug hissed in fresh pain, holding his good arm against the new wound. A pool of blood almost immediately started spreading in the dust. Trav said, “That was stupid, Duncan, very stupid.” With a frown of distaste, he pocketed the shiv. Trav didn’t usually carry a weapon; if the guards caught a slave with anything dangerous other than tools for work, all the slaves were punished for it. This was also why Trav had made the decision to take the shiv. He’d need to dispose of it somewhere.

  Trav sighed and said, “You can just lie there for a while and have a nice rest. Hopefully, that wound on your leg won’t get infected, right? Right.”

  “Fuck off, freak,” hissed Duncan.

  Trav shrugged. “So be it. Have a nice day,” he said and began walking away.

  “Too bad your little wife isn’t here to see you acting all high and mighty. She acted really good for that monster, huh, freak?”

  The words hit Trav in the back like red-hot darts, burning with regret and shame. He turned and just stared for a second, but finally shrugged. Why restrain himself? What was the point? His voice cold, he said, “So, so stupid. Your pride has such a grip on your balls…” The words trailed off as he plodded back, his feet heavy with intent. Duncan grinned nastily right up until Trav knelt and planted the shiv into the idiot’s throat, then with another economical motion, slid the blade home through the bastard’s heart.

  Trav sprang backward, avoiding most of the sudden spray of blood that patterned walls and began puddling on the floor. The dying scum on the ground thrashed, his eyes bulging. Duncan stared in horror and accusation at Trav. He probably couldn’t believe that a man that some of the other slaves called “Protector” had killed him so easily. Duncan’s world had been one of fear, bluster, and threats.

  It was true that at one time in Trav’s life, he could not have imagined doing anything like this. The entire scene would have made him feel sick, given him nightmares. He would have felt sadness and remorse for killing another human being. Now all he felt was annoyance.

  He’d seen a lot worse. Three years as a slave on Asgard had taught him lessons that would be burned into his soul for eternity. He’d learned other things too, secret things. Some of the secret things he knew were helpful, especially right now. A body in the mines dead by blade wounds would definitely bring the ire of the guards. Even the guards didn’t usually kill healthy slaves outright on purpose. No, that power was reserved for their masters. The old hate welled up in Trav’s heart, and he made a fist so tight his hand began to hurt.

  Trav needed to make this death look like an accident, and to do that, he’d need to move fast. It was dangerous to run in the tunnels, but there was no time to waste. Luckily, he’d been down this way so many times, the bumps and ruts in the stone were familiar. He was one of the lucky ones. A lot of slaves didn’t survive long enough to grow accustomed to anything except despair.

  After heading deep enough, Trav did his best to ensure nobody would be caught in a cave-in. Then he ran up the other direction and did the same. Finally, he came back to the body and made a face. “Stupid bastard,” he muttered. In another place, another time, he might have thought killing someone over words was wrong. But now, in this place, life was cheap, and sometimes he made hard decisions.

  Duncan’s actions had been so stupid, so aggressive. Killing the man would probably make Asgard a tiny bit safer for the rest of the slaves, and that was something worth killing for. Beth would have wanted Trav to keep caring. Her memory was one of the only things that kept him going, so he clung to it. He cherished all of Beth’s dreams, what had made her special, like a drowning man struggling for air.

  Trav stared up at the top of the tunnel and pulled up his Mystical Overlay, the name he’d come up with for the strange thing he could do with his fake eye. Just like his artificial sight, it worked right through his eyepatch. Now that Beth was gone, not another soul knew about his replacement eye. If he were to ever take his eyepatch off, the stone eye would glow a baleful red, and needless to say, avoiding notice would be impossible.

  Attracting the attention of the guards was bad. Beth had learned that the hard way.

  Trav swallowed at the sudden memory and focused on the present, running through the list of glyphs, sigils, and runes he could somehow remember. As far as he could tell from his three years on this world, the knowledge of runes had been lost long, long ago. Even glyphs were only used by the most powerful monsters that ruled Asgard like old Earth warlords. Sigils were incredibly rare, known only to the oldest or most powerful monsters, or Kin as they called themselves. Runes...well, he still didn’t know how to use those, maybe he never would. One thing he was fairly sure of though, was that he might be the only person on this world holding rune knowledge.

  Too bad he couldn’t use it to save the other slaves and himself. Powerlessness was having great power he couldn’t actually use...it was the story of his life.

  Trav used the Mystic Overlay to trace a single sigil on the rock of the tunnel. Then he added a series of glyphs around the sigil with his mind. After that, he...channeled...through his arm and the dirty shiv to scratch out the symbols that he saw in his mind’s eye. Glowing red lines appeared as he did so, and when the last symbol snapped into place, he began running up the tunnel.

  The rumbles began almost immediately, and Trav hissed, hoping he hadn’t overdone it. The tunnels were so shoddy, and the stone so easy to destroy with all the red ore nearby—even as careful as he’d been, he might have made a mistake.

  Finally, after the crashing from behind stopped and a billow of dust caked him from head to foot in filth, Trav decided he was probably safe. He slowed down, panting, and leaned against a wall. Other slaves would come soon to check on all the commotion. Maybe the guards would come too. Trav didn’t want to deal with either, so he looped around to another tunnel and started moving lower into the mines again.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have killed Duncan. Now the collapsed tunnel might need to be dug out, and that would put more lives in danger. No, what was done was done. There was no use worrying about it.

  It was just too bad he couldn’t kill a guard. Trav snarled, letting old hatred and all of the terrible memories he still carried run through his mind, warming him. This deep in the earth, the air was cool, but Trav’s skin burned hot from a combination of raging emotion, and the energy from the stone he’d put in his eye socket a year before.

  Of course, that was back when he had still been able to hear the voice. The voice had helped him, but now it was silent, gone, probably dead like everything else he’d ever trusted.

  Trav plodded deeper into the bowels of the mines. He was aware of the irony in working for masters he hated, on a task he despised, to fetch materials he didn’t understand, probably to be used as weapons. He desperately wished he could stop, to just give up like so many others had, but duty was heavy. It never went away, just got stronger.

  He’d made a promise to Beth before she’d died. In hindsight, it’d almost been like she’d known what was coming. Trav had already thrown away a number of unnecessary things. Innocence, naivete, and even kindness in some ways. But there were aspects of who he was that he refused to give up, continuing to hang on through sheer stubbornness.

  The inhuman bastards that had captured him would never beat Travis Sterling down enough to break a promise, not least of which one he’d made to the wonderful, gentle woman he’d called his wife.

  The gloom pressed in from every side, but Trav forced himself out of his regrets and pain. Instead, he remembered Beth’s smile, her grace, and the way she’d gone out of her way to reassure the slave children.

  “Baby, am I doing okay? What am I supposed to do?” he whispered, his words carrying through the surrounding gloom.

  No answer came. Beth was gone, and even the voice in his head had died. Trav was alone.

  Chapter 2

  Trav finally descended deep enough to start seeing specks of glowing red ore in the walls. Any of the other hum
ans would be showing signs of pain or discomfort at this point. Trav thought it was too bad the ore was so dangerous—he thought it could be pretty, even mesmerizing.

  Some of the other slaves called the stuff twinkledeath, or glow agate, but Trav knew its real name—emberstone. Of course, he also knew better than to name it out loud. The Kin never used the real name for the stone, and if they ever heard its real name, there would be questions.

  The Kin, he thought and growled. Most of the slaves just called them monsters, and they weren’t wrong. From what Trav had seen, Kin had many forms. Some seemed to be unique, or at least rare.

  Privately, Trav had to admit that a few Kin he’d seen had been beautiful, at least in a dangerous, bestial way. Meanwhile, others like the hideous, rat-looking Dacith were obviously all part of the same group or tribe. The sad thing was, while the Dacith were the weakest and lowest rank of the Kin, the unsettling creatures were still far faster, stronger, and tougher than humans. The absolute weakest of the Kin could easily overpower a healthy, full-grown human male—meanwhile, most slaves were not healthy, not by a long shot. Rodent-faced Dacith usually acted as servants for their betters, but they still enjoyed mistreating the human slaves. The rules the terrible creatures seemed to be compelled by were all that saved the human slaves from being eaten or worse.

  Trav’s lips drew back from his teeth as he thought about his captors. His thoughts turned dark, his eyes glazed over and he almost tripped. Not good—need to pay attention. He was familiar with this part of the mine, but attention to detail was still important. If he were to get hurt, he would heal faster than a regular person, but if he had to take any time off, the other slaves would suffer.

  Without Trav, more slaves would need to go deep enough to mine ore, and would slowly die. Well, they’d die quicker than they were already. Trav was a much faster worker for multiple reasons too, so without him, the others would be punished for not making their ore quota. When the slaves were punished, people usually died, especially the children. Some of the Kin seemed to live for the chance to kill or torment the slaves. Some, like the Dacith, stalked around like hounds straining at a leash, just waiting to be loosed.

  Of late, the ore quota slowly kept getting higher...because of Trav. He was aware that his efficiency was the reason that the others couldn’t survive without him now, at least in the short term. Of course, it was one thing to know that he was potentially making it harder on the others and himself, but it would be another matter to mine less ore and deal with the resulting suffering until quota levels were lowered.

  Trav picked up a pickaxe he had left leaning against the wall sometime before. Since he was really the only person mining most of the time, he kept tools in every tunnel that he could just pick up to use, then leave behind again. The pick had been left near some crude, wooden ore wagons.

  The way the slaves’ mining process usually worked was simple. Travis would work to fill up the ore wagons and leave them behind. That way, none of the other humans ever had to touch the stuff, and their captors would see other slaves working. The slaves would slowly cart out the wagons to draw out the workday. Trav usually only put a few pieces of broken rubble and emberstone in each wagon so the other slaves could bring up more wagons every day, making the mine look busy.

  This process had been working for over two years. The guards didn’t like to come down this far into the mine since the emberstone scared them. All they really cared about was that the quotas were being met and their masters thought the lazy brutes were doing their jobs, so they usually hung around close to the entrance of the mine and randomly beat people.

  If the guards ever did descend farther, there was always plenty of warning, and the connecting tunnels that had been dug by the other slaves had proved invaluable. As long as everyone looked busy, the guards assumed they were busy.

  Trav’s job was to mine the ore—nothing else. Everything the other slaves did was still important, backbreaking work, but Trav staying focused on the ore saved an untold number of lives every month.

  After descending for another few minutes, Trav passed the strange fissure in the rock on the wall of the tunnel. The crack seemed to lead down, and every time Trav passed the opening, he could swear he felt a breeze. The workers that had dug this tunnel out a year before had claimed they could hear things from the hole, like growling or breathing. Trav was skeptical, but the gap was definitely something out of the ordinary.

  There was a good chance that a natural cave was actually beneath the man-made mining tunnel. Trav thought it was unlikely, but he didn’t know much about geology, and he was already in a fantasy world anyway. Compared to bird-headed or skeletal Kin with magic powers, a deep cave didn’t seem all that unlikely.

  Finally, Trav found a new vein of ore that had been unearthed at the rear of the tunnel. The slaves had already used the glyph-stamping tool to cast yellow-red light in this portion of the cave too. Trav wasn’t sure when the Kin had created the glyph stampers. They’d been in use before he had been captured as a slave...he grimaced and focused on the task at hand. This day had already dredged up enough bad memories.

  The tall, dirty man spat on his weathered hands and began swinging his pick. It was getting late, and most of the other slaves had already left the mine at this point. Trav was usually one of the first slaves into the mine, and the last to leave. The guards were so used to it at this point, they didn’t always wait for him to be done for the day. He wasn’t usually upset about the unfairness of it. Beth would have wanted him to keep caring, keep working. The other slaves had to live without his advantages.

  Life was unfair, and Asgard was worse. All the other slaves got worn down by time, lack of food, poor living conditions, hard work, and exposure to the emberstone. Meanwhile, Trav was currently in the best shape of his life. He wore loose, layered clothing most of the time so the guards wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but three years of hard labor had turned Trav’s body into a mining machine.

  His biceps contracted as he swung again and again, dislodging ore. The meager amounts of gruel, cornmeal, and mystery meat had somehow been more than enough to sustain him over the years. He knew it had to have something to do with the voice he’d heard before, but getting answers had been difficult in the first place. Now it was gone.

  Just like the strange cave he’d passed earlier, hearing a voice hadn’t been all that remarkable compared to being enslaved by monstrous Kin on another world.

  Trav lost himself in the rhythm of his work for a while. He had a feeling the ore quota might go up soon—a new group of slaves had been added a week before. The situation was looking grim. Trav hadn’t hit his maximum productivity yet and usually had to wait on new tunnels being dug anyway. But still, in less than another year, additional slaves would need to start directly working with the emberstone again. More people would die...well, faster. All of the slaves were doomed anyway.

  “Fuck this,” Trav hissed, the sudden surge of emotion making him vent out loud. There was nothing more he could do, though. Every day he tried to figure out how to use his tricks, his powers to help him save the other slaves—maybe even himself. But it was no use; the Kin were too strong. Trav knew he couldn’t even use the full range of his strange abilities yet. He just didn’t have the magical energy, or whatever it was he needed. Everything he could actually do now drew energy directly from the emberstone-laced rock and was really only good for causing cave-ins or helping the digging crews when they were not around to watch.

  If the Kin ever found out about his abilities or knowledge, he was absolutely sure they’d dissect every inch of him. He didn’t want to be eviscerated, which was at odds with his general plan to stay alive.

  Suddenly, Trav thought he felt something. A tremor? His boots were crude. Basically, just bindings made with dirty cloth and rubber soles. Maybe he’d stepped on a mouse? He paused, and it came again. “Okay, I definitely felt that,” he muttered. He began walking back up the tunnel, listening as hard as he
could. Nothing else seemed amiss, but he was really far down in the mines. Then he felt another vibration.

  “What the…” Trav shook his head, wondering if the whumping tremors he had felt had anything to do with the fool he’d killed earlier. That didn’t seem likely, though. Cave-ins had a particular feel to them. The guards that had no doubt checked on the cave-in that day probably would have retreated to deal with it tomorrow. It wasn’t like they cared about saving the lives of slaves.

  The vibrations didn’t feel like an earthquake, either. Something was happening. Trav felt a premonition and began hurrying up the tunnel, moving as fast as he could. He almost placed his pick against the wall on the way up, but thought better of it and kept it. Most of his life, moving up an incline in a cramped tunnel while carrying a heavy iron pick would have exhausted him almost immediately. However, working in the mines for the last couple years while infused with whatever the voice had done to him, and the emberstone sphere he’d crafted and used to replace his missing eye…

  Thinking of the eye reminded Trav he could use it right now. The tunnels were dim, and he was trying to move quickly. He activated his darksight, allowing the eye to help him see more clearly even through the patch covering it. Trav didn’t use this ability very often. Any time he used the eye, the emberstone glowed more brightly, and even with its covering, he worried about being discovered.

  The voice had told him how to make the eye. In fact, that had been one of the last times he’d heard the voice, not long after Beth had died. Trav shook his head, focusing on the present. Bad memories had been crowding him all day, and he’d even killed a man. The bad omens should have been a clue that trouble was coming. Misfortune usually arrived in groups of three.