Cassor Varian lasted one week before he stopped counting the days.

  At first, he marked them carefully. Scratches in stone near the quarry road, cut with a chipped nail he’d found in the dirt. One line for each sunrise he survived. He told himself it mattered. That if he could see time, he could endure it.

  Then hunger arrived.

  Not all at once. Hunger was patient. It sharpened in the mornings, dulled by midday, and returned meaner by nightfall. Some days it felt like a blade twisting just beneath his ribs. Other days it was a pressure behind the eyes that made the world feel far away and slightly unreal. Cassor learned quickly that hunger was not a warning. It was a condition.

  Cold followed close behind.

  Nights stretched long and thin, with nowhere to sleep that deserved the name. He shivered until his teeth ached, until his hands locked into claws he had to pry open when morning came. He woke stiff and burning, joints screaming as if he’d slept pressed directly into the mountain.

  Because he had.

  Life for a Giftless boy in Therikon did not move forward.

  It pressed downward.

  Cassor worked anywhere that would tolerate him.

  The mines took him first. Hauling shattered stone and slag from collapsed tunnels, loads meant for men with Earth in their blood. Cassor staggered beneath them, legs trembling, breath tearing at his throat. He was shouted at for slowing the line. Shoved aside when he stopped to rest. Told to be grateful for the work.

  The forge scrap yards came next. Sorting twisted metal and burned-out slag while sparks rained down around him. Heat blistered his palms and split the skin between his fingers. Fire-born children worked beside him, bare hands lifting pieces that sent Cassor reeling backward. They didn’t look at him. They didn’t need to.

  The markets paid worst. Sweeping refuse at dawn and dusk for half-stale crusts and irritated looks. Vendors snapped at him to move faster, to stop blocking the way, to make himself smaller. He learned which stalls tossed scraps and which threw stones.

  The irrigation channels were cold enough to numb his legs within minutes. Cassor waded knee-deep through freezing water, clearing silt by hand while Water-born children reshaped the flow with lazy gestures. They laughed as the current obeyed them. Cassor’s fingers went blue before he finished his shift.

  He took every task offered.

  He failed at almost all of them.

  Not because he didn’t try.

  Cassor tried until his vision blurred, until his lungs burned like they’d been scraped raw, until his legs shook so badly he had to lock his knees just to stay upright. He tried because stopping felt like admitting something final.

  But everyone else had Gifts.

  Earth-born hands lifted and carried with ease.

  Air-born feet turned long routes into short ones.

  Fire-born bodies endured heat and exhaustion as if pain were optional.

  Water-born children closed their own wounds before blood had time to matter.

  Cassor had none of that.

  A task that took others minutes took him hours.

  Supervisors shouted.

  Workers mocked.

  Children laughed openly.

  By the end of the first week, his knees were a map of bruises that never quite faded. By the second, his ribs showed when he stretched. His hands cracked and bled until the pain became familiar enough to ignore.

  Every night he slept somewhere different.

  An abandoned crate near the grain silos.

  An emptied bin that smelled of rot.

  A drainage tunnel where water dripped steadily onto his shoulder until dawn.

  He learned to curl tight. To tuck his chin. To keep his hands pressed against his chest so they wouldn’t go numb. He learned how to wake without moving, how to listen for footsteps before opening his eyes.

  One night, exhaustion finally won.

  Cassor pressed his face into his arms and cried without sound, shoulders shaking, breath hitching in short, broken pulls. The release lasted only a moment before footsteps passed nearby.

  He bit down hard on the sound and swallowed it.

  Crying was weakness.

  Weakness was noticed.

  Being noticed was dangerous.

  By the end of the month, the scratches in the stone meant nothing to him.

  He stopped adding new ones.

  The days had not changed.

  Neither had he.

  Except that everything hurt more.

  And lasted longer.

  And healed slower.

  And somewhere along the way, Cassor learned the first real lesson the city had to offer him:

  Trying did not make you worthy.

  Violence did not arrive all at once.

  At first it was incidental. A shoulder checked too hard in a line. A foot stuck out just enough to make him stumble. Laughter that followed a little too quickly to be coincidence.

  Cassor learned to keep his eyes down. Learned which alleys to avoid and which crowds were safer to disappear into. He stayed close to walls. He made himself small.

  It did not help.

  Winter storms rolled down from the mountain in hard bursts, driving people inward, tightening spaces that were already too narrow. Tempers shortened. Hunger sharpened. And in a city built on strength, weakness began to look like an invitation.

  Older boys started hunting Giftless children for sport.

  Not all of them. Not openly. Just enough that everyone knew. They moved in loose packs, confident and bored, their Gifts flickering idly as they walked. Earth-born with stone-hard knuckles. Fire-born whose hands steamed in the cold. Air-born who could close distance faster than Cassor could react.

  Cassor’s name made him interesting.

  A fallen Varian.

  A joke that still carried weight.

  One afternoon, while scavenging for discarded food near the market’s outer wall, Cassor felt it before he saw it. The shift in sound. The way the noise behind him changed shape.

  “Thought I smelled a Varian rat.”

  He turned too slowly.

  Four boys stood between him and the street, boots planted wide, expressions loose with confidence. The one in front smiled like he’d already decided how this would end.

  Cassor backed toward the wall, heart slamming against his ribs. “I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “Too late,” one of them said, rolling his shoulders.

  Cassor didn’t fight well.

  He’d never had proper training. Never had a Gift to brace his body or blunt the pain. He raised his hands anyway, more instinct than strategy.

  It wasn’t enough.

  A fist slammed into his ribs, driving the breath from his lungs in a sharp, choking burst. A knee caught him in the stomach. Hands tangled in his hair and dragged him down into the dust.

  The world narrowed.

  Pain.

  Grit scraping his cheek.

  A boot catching his side.

  He curled inward, arms tight around his head, knees drawn up, the way he’d learned to do when things got bad. Someone laughed. Someone spat.

  “Stay down,” the leader said casually, as if offering advice.

  Cassor stayed down.

  When it was over, the boys left without hurry, their interest already fading. Cassor lay gasping where they’d dropped him, dust sticking to the wet tracks on his face.

  “Next time,” the leader called over his shoulder, “stay hidden.”

  Cassor didn’t answer.

  He didn’t trust his voice to be steady.

  He lay there until the shaking stopped, until the pain settled into something dull enough to move through. Then he pushed himself upright and limped away, careful not to draw attention.

  He did not report it.

  There was no one to report it to.

  By the end of the month, the beatings were no longer surprising.

  They came in different forms. A shove into a wall. A sudden kick when his back was turned. Hands that lingered just long enough to remind him he couldn’t stop them.

  Cassor learned something important then.

  Violence wasn’t random.

  It was organized.

  The boys didn’t hurt him because he’d done something wrong. They hurt him because he existed in the wrong place, in the wrong body, without the protection of power.

  Weakness wasn’t punished.

  It was harvested.

  Cassor learned to watch shadows. To listen for laughter that didn’t include him. To leave before being seen, and if he couldn’t leave, to make himself forgettable.

  It worked.

  Sometimes.

  And when it didn’t, he learned how to take the pain quietly.

  People stopped noticing him.

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  Not in the way that came with pity, or disgust, or even contempt. Those still required attention. Cassor slipped past all of that and into something worse.

  He became background.

  A shape at the edge of vision. A pair of eyes in an alley that didn’t belong to anyone important. Another Giftless body moving where bodies were expected to move and vanish again.

  The city did not decide this out loud. It didn’t need to. Cities like Therikon were good at forgetting anything that failed to justify its own existence.

  Cassor learned what that forgetting felt like.

  He spoke less, not because he chose to, but because there was no reason to waste the effort. Words went unanswered. Requests were ignored. Eventually, even insults became rare. There was no satisfaction in kicking something that didn’t react.

  Some days he didn’t speak at all.

  Other days, the only sound he made was a curse breathed into his hands to keep them moving.

  Work came and went without explanation. Sometimes he was waved away without a glance. Other times he was used until his strength gave out and then left where he fell. No one bothered to shout anymore. Shouting was for things that might improve.

  Cassor moved when he was told. Stopped when he wasn’t. He learned the shapes of alleys and the timing of guards. He learned which corners stayed warmer when the wind cut down from the mountain, and which ones flooded when the meltwater ran too fast.

  He learned how to exist without being seen.

  The Varian estate sat high on the mountain, visible from the upper cliffs if you knew where to look. White stone catching the pale winter light. Clean lines. Order. Permanence.

  Cassor avoided looking at it for as long as he could.

  But one night, while scavenging for coal scraps near the forge road, he glanced up by accident.

  The windows were lit.

  Warm, steady light spilled out against the dark stone. Not torchlight. Hearthlight. The kind that meant people were inside, sitting down, talking, eating.

  Cassor stood very still.

  He imagined his mother at the long table, hands folded tight the way she did when she was worried. His brother across from her, practicing the careful control of a Gift that had never failed to answer him. His father at the far end, studying maps, sharpening plans instead of blades.

  The world continuing.

  Cassor’s fingers went numb before he realized he hadn’t moved.

  He turned away sharply, breath catching in his throat, and pressed his hands into his coat until the ache forced him back into himself.

  Later that night, curled against a stone wall where the wind broke just enough to make sleep possible, Cassor whispered into the dark.

  “Why wasn’t I enough?”

  The words didn’t echo.

  They didn’t drift back to him.

  The wind carried them away without comment.

  By then, he could no longer say how many days had passed since the beating near the market. Or how long it had been since he’d last slept somewhere that didn’t smell of rot or damp stone. The city blurred into a series of familiar paths and familiar pains, none of them worth naming anymore.

  Cassor still knew when it was day.

  He still knew when it was night.

  But the space between them had started to thin.

  He moved when hunger pushed him. Slept when his body folded in on itself. Woke without knowing what had woken him.

  Time didn’t feel like something happening anymore.

  It felt like something he was being carried through.

  And somewhere in the Red Fields, beneath the mountain that never shifted and the city that had already forgotten him, Cassor Varian continued to exist.

  Not seen.

  Not wanted.

  Not missed.

  Hunger stopped coming in waves.

  It settled in.

  At first it had been sharp, demanding, loud enough to organize his thoughts around it. Now it was constant. A low pressure behind his eyes. A dull ache that never left his stomach, no matter how little he put into it.

  Cassor learned new rules for living.

  He learned which refuse piles were thrown out early and which sat long enough to rot past usefulness. He learned that bread soaked in rain lasted longer than bread left dry. He learned to eat quickly, not because someone might take it from him, but because his hands shook too badly to hold onto food for long.

  He learned to sleep in short stretches, curled tight, one hand tucked into his shirt to keep his heart warm. He learned that if he slept too deeply, the cold crept into his joints and stayed there.

  His body began to change.

  Not the way warriors boasted about.

  Not the way Gifts reshaped muscle and bone.

  He shrank.

  His shoulders narrowed. His ribs pressed against skin like the bars of a cage. His knees bruised easily now, the marks never quite fading before new ones replaced them. The skin on his hands split open from overwork and never fully closed again.

  Sometimes they bled without him noticing.

  Sometimes he noticed and didn’t care.

  Work became harder to find, not because there was less of it, but because Cassor no longer looked useful. Men who needed laborers watched him approach and quietly chose someone else. Those who did take him worked him until his strength gave out and then waved him away without anger.

  One morning, hauling a crate of broken tiles for a construction crew, his knees buckled without warning.

  The crate shattered on the stone.

  The sound echoed too loudly.

  Cassor went down with it, hands scraping raw against the ground as he tried and failed to catch himself. He lay there for a moment, breath coming too fast, vision swimming.

  The foreman didn’t shout.

  That surprised him.

  The man stepped closer, looked down at Cassor, and sighed.

  Not in frustration.

  In resignation.

  “Boy,” he said softly, “go lie down somewhere before you die on my shift.”

  Cassor stared at the stone beneath his face.

  He waited for anger.

  For shame.

  For something sharp enough to remind him he was still there.

  Nothing came.

  He pushed himself up slowly, joints screaming, and walked away while the crew resumed work behind him. No one watched him go.

  That was the worst part.

  By then, he no longer flinched at pain.

  It came too often, stayed too long. His body absorbed it the way stone absorbs rain, not fighting, just enduring. His hands trembled even when he rested. His legs shook after short distances. Sometimes his vision darkened at the edges and he had to stop moving until the world decided to stay solid again.

  He stopped caring about appearances.

  Stopped brushing dust from his clothes.

  Stopped noticing the smell of himself.

  He was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t touch.

  One night, huddled beneath an overturned cart at the edge of the Red Fields, Cassor realized he could no longer remember what it felt like to be warm.

  Not recently.

  Not clearly.

  The memory existed, but it belonged to someone else. A smaller boy. A different life. A body that had expected to last.

  He pressed his forehead against his knees and breathed through the shaking.

  His body was failing him.

  Quietly.

  Methodically.

  Without drama.

  And the city did not notice.

  By the fifth month, Cassor stopped looking for work.

  Not because the city had run out of it.

  Because something in him had decided there was no point.

  He still walked the same streets. Still drifted through the Red Fields at dawn and dusk. Still passed the markets and the forges and the training yards where boys younger than him learned how to turn Gifts into futures.

  He just didn’t step toward them anymore.

  Rejection had become predictable. Almost polite in its consistency. A glance, a shake of the head, a quiet turning away. Cassor learned to read it before words were needed. It saved everyone time.

  So he wandered.

  He slept wherever there was shelter enough to block the wind. Abandoned animal pens. Empty grain sheds. Beneath wagons no one had claimed in years. Sometimes against stone walls still warm from the day, sometimes in places so cold his breath fogged even in sleep.

  He stopped talking.

  At first it was accidental. There was no one worth answering. No one who asked his name. No one who expected him to have an opinion.

  Then it became deliberate.

  Words required effort. Thought. Presence.

  Cassor learned that silence cost less.

  He avoided the markets, not because of guards, but because seeing food he couldn’t afford felt like reopening a wound that never healed properly. He avoided the shelters because they asked questions. Names. Ages. Lineage. Things he no longer knew how to answer without flinching.

  He avoided the upper districts entirely.

  The Varian estate still stood where it always had, white stone cutting into the mountain like a declaration. Cassor could see it from certain ridges if he climbed high enough. He avoided those places too.

  Most days.

  One night, while scavenging coal scraps near a forge runoff, he looked up without meaning to.

  The estate windows were lit.

  Warm.

  Golden.

  Light spilled outward, steady and contained, like the mountain itself had chosen to glow just enough to remind the valley who mattered.

  Cassor stopped walking.

  He stood there longer than the cold allowed, fingers numb, breath shallow. In his mind, he filled the rooms with ghosts.

  His mother seated at the long table, hands folded too tightly.

  His brother practicing, proud and clumsy, coaxing sparks or stone from the air.

  His father standing over maps, sharpening strategy the way other men sharpened blades.

  Cassor imagined what it would feel like to step inside.

  Not to be welcomed.

  Just to exist there again.

  The thought hollowed him.

  His lips moved without sound at first. Then a whisper scraped its way out.

  “Why wasn’t I enough?”

  The mountain did not answer.

  The city did not answer.

  The wind took the words and scattered them across rooftops and chimneys and streets that did not care where they landed.

  After that, something closed in him.

  Not suddenly.

  Not cleanly.

  It was like a door that had never quite fit its frame finally giving up on staying open.

  He stopped hoping to be seen.

  Stopped wondering if things could still change.

  Stopped imagining himself anywhere other than where he was.

  When a guard found him one night curled against a warehouse wall, Cassor didn’t move.

  “You can’t sleep here,” the guard said, voice lazy, practiced. The kind of warning given without expectation of resistance.

  Cassor stayed where he was.

  The guard sighed and grabbed him by the collar, hauling him across the dirt like an empty sack. Cassor’s body bounced once, twice, ribs knocking against stone. He didn’t raise his hands. Didn’t protest.

  Didn’t even look at the man.

  The guard dumped him outside the gate and stepped back.

  “You’re going to freeze to death if you keep this up,” the man muttered, already turning away.

  Cassor lay there, staring at the sky.

  He wondered, distantly, whether freezing hurt less than living.

  The thought didn’t frighten him.

  That was how he knew something was wrong.

  By the end of the fifth month, Cassor Varian was still breathing.

  But he was no longer trying.

  By the sixth month, hunger stopped announcing itself.

  It no longer clawed. It no longer burned. It no longer rose and fell in waves that could be anticipated or managed. It simply existed as a constant absence, a hollow where something vital had once lived.

  Cassor moved because stopping required more effort than continuing.

  His steps were slow and uneven, each one negotiated with a body that no longer trusted him. He drifted through the Red Fields without direction, without urgency, without the faint hope that tomorrow might differ from today. Time had stopped being something he measured. It had become something that happened to other people.

  People noticed him again.

  Not because they recognized him.

  Because something about him was wrong.

  He was too thin. Too quiet. Too detached from his own movements. His eyes did not track the world properly, as if they were always a half-second behind whatever passed before them. When he stopped, it was sudden, like a puppet whose strings had gone slack. When he moved again, it was with delay, as though the decision had to travel a long distance before reaching his limbs.

  Mothers drew children closer as he passed.

  Men stepped aside without comment.

  Not disgust.

  Not pity.

  Unease.

  Cassor Varian no longer walked like a boy.

  He drifted somewhere between breath and absence.

  The cold no longer registered. Wind cut through his torn clothes and found nothing in him worth biting. The stones beneath his bare feet might as well have been sand. He did not notice when his hands shook. Did not notice when his vision narrowed at the edges. Did not notice how thin his shadow looked, stretched and brittle against the ground.

  Days passed. Or maybe hours. Or maybe nothing passed at all.

  The city fell behind him without ceremony.

  Forge-hammers softened into distant echoes, then memory, then nothing. The Red Fields thinned into rock and scrub. The noise of Therikon receded until there was only wind and the sound of his own breathing, shallow and uneven.

  The mountain rose ahead.

  Dark. Jagged. Unforgiving.

  Its peak vanished into low, churning clouds, the stone face cut with old scars where avalanches had torn paths through weaker rock. No road climbed it. No marker guided the way. It was not a place meant to be challenged.

  Cassor did not look up at it.

  He simply walked toward it.

  Step.

  Drag.

  Step.

  The ground sloped upward. His legs trembled violently. His breath came thin and scraping, each inhale shallow, each exhale weaker than the last. Several times he nearly fell, catching himself only because falling demanded more effort than remaining upright.

  At the base of the mountain, he stopped.

  Not because he chose to.

  Because his body no longer knew how to go forward.

  He stood there, swaying slightly, one hand braced against his thigh, staring at nothing in particular. The world felt far away. Dimmed. As if he were already remembering it instead of standing inside it.

  Fragments surfaced without warning.

  The training yard.

  The laughter.

  The dust in his mouth.

  His father’s voice, calm and final. You were.

  The estate door closing.

  Not slammed.

  Just shut.

  Quiet. Absolute.

  Something inside him tightened.

  Not into hope.

  Not into belief.

  Into something small, cold, and immovable.

  Cassor exhaled. The breath barely fogged the air.

  “Fine,” he whispered.

  The word was thin. Almost nothing.

  But it was enough.

  He reached out and pressed his palm against the stone.

  The mountain did not yield.

  His skin did.

  Pain flared sharp and immediate as the rock tore him open. Blood smeared across the stone in a dark, trembling line. Cassor sucked in a breath, raw and broken—

  and did not pull his hand away.

  He lifted it again.

  Slowly.

  As if confirming that pain still applied to him.

  His fingers split further. Nails cracked. His feet slid on loose gravel, skin tearing against jagged edges. Each movement sent fresh pain through his body, sharp enough that it should have stopped him.

  It didn’t.

  Because pain requires something to protect.

  Cassor climbed.

  Not fast.

  Not strong.

  Relentless.

  One hand.

  One foot.

  Blood.

  Breath.

  Stone.

  His body shook violently, muscles failing and catching and failing again. Several times he nearly slipped back down, catching himself only by instinct, skin tearing deeper each time.

  His vision narrowed.

  His breath stuttered.

  But his eyes—

  sunken, hollow, rimmed with months of hunger and cold—

  held something that refused to die.

  Not hope.

  Not faith.

  Just resolve, stripped raw and sharpened by suffering.

  Cassor Varian climbed into the cold dark with nothing left to lose.

  No future.

  No name.

  No place in the world below.

  Just a mountain that did not care whether he lived or died.

  And he climbed it anyway.