Chapter 1: ProvidenceConsidered to be the crown jewel of TDKWB to date, this story began in 2019 as a collaborative project between Akarea, Edofasia, and Candanadium, and is still yet to be concluded.
Written by Akarea
Edofasia, North Terra
Day 1; 0 miles travelled
“You mine the slate now, boy.”
Jonah always remembered the last words the government officer had uttered towards him before stamping his papers and shooing him away to serve the next man in the queue. They were spoken with derision and contempt, with not even the smallest effort made to mask it.
That specific moment remained more or less the closest thing he had to any particularly vivid childhood memories. They were childhood memories of a certain sort; He was only 20 years old at the time, so infantile and innocent and still with enough of a smooth face so as to get asked for proof of age at the pub or the tobacconist, regardless of how often he visited either to indulge in his vices, or lifelines as he often referred to them in some strange mixture of jest and despair. Nowadays, the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles in his forehead meant he was freely accepted at both with no questions asked, but a nod of the head and swift service for the working man.
Those words that had been so rudely spat at him all those years ago echoed through his mind every time his pick-axe struck the slate wall. He considered them the bars in his cell, the heartless condemnation to spend the rest of his insignificant life chipping away at rocks. Most of the time he was able to accept it at face value. The Ministry of Labour did often assign tasks to labourers, with the cold and ruthless efficiency that could only be expected of a box-checking and quota-fulfilling exercise. It was, symbolically speaking, the beginning of the rest of his life, and so far as he was concerned any unintentional disregard for anything that had happened prior was just down to him not being a particularly sentimental person.
Some days, however, he found it very hard. He hated himself for barely being able to recall his own parents, though in his defence they had both departed his life at fairly early stages. His mother died in childbirth. When he was a teenager, his father (who, for whatever it was worth, also mined the slate) was killed in an accident when an embedded sheet of loose chalk caused the front of the cliff to suddenly slip, burying him and several others. Accidents such as these were not uncommon, and every time he realised he could recall nothing but the most basic details of the home he ended up in after the death of his father, or his time at school beyond the occasional glimpse of a textbook, or any of his old friends or hobbies or achievements, he prayed that a similar accident might claim his life too.
This wasn’t to suggest for even a moment that in the eight or so years since he hadn’t gotten up to anything else. He had a small network of friends, mostly brothers-in-arms from the quarry, who after working up a sweat in the baking heat and humidity of the summers, or enduring the harsh cold and relentless slurry of rain and sleet that turned the ground to deep and disgusting mud in the winters, all washed away their woes and sins at their various choice pubs around the centre of Tara. They were united in having been cast down to one of the lowest echelons of society. They coped by hanging on for dear life, to a pint in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, basking in the smoke and their futile camaraderie.
“You mine the slate now, boy.” Sometimes he spoke the words aloud, either directly at the wall or to nobody in particular. In the occasional event that he was overheard, it was usually found funny - it transpired most of the men had endured similar interactions with the Ministry. He spoke the words, and it helped in a strange sort of way, like some sort of weird spiritual or psychological venting. Better out than in? He liked to think so. Whenever he was frustrated or tired, he spat the words out with incredible force, trying to forcefully eject the misery out of his body, sometimes heaving his chest so hard that he almost winded himself. It wasn’t a jailbreak however. The words really were the bars of his cell, and for all his internal turmoil and conflict, he had long since accepted that he did, in fact, mine the slate.
He’d sometimes come up against the idea of just ending it all. After all, whenever he put all the cards on the table, it became very difficult to justify the existence of his own life beyond the Edofasian ideals of the importance of the contribution of every able man et cetera. He wasn’t even particularly sure if, beyond a doubt, his particular labour could be considered much of a contribution, and yet he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that, at his core, this is what he was supposed to be doing - or, at the very least, it was what he deserved, for some terrible crime committed in a past life or something along those lines. It wasn’t that he believed in such frivolities, but he liked to imagine that there was at least some logic behind his inability to either take pride in his work or commit suicide, other than his own indolence and cowardice.
That being said, the mines were in desperate need of mechanisation, but for as long as the Ministry was able to keep enough feet in boots and pickaxes in hands, such progress was never going to happen. Instead, the quarry operated on record as a black box into which labour as a resource went in and wagons of slate and the occasional corpse came out. Whatever happened in-between was unimportant. The reality of it however was that it was truly horrible work; Jonah got off lightly by the standards of his quarry, simply having large callouses and finishing most days with sore joints and red-raw palms from clutching at his tools and hauling the sacks of slate back to the wagons. Some of the other men had far more debilitating issues, from repetitive strain injuries to missing fingers. And yet they mined the slate, from eight in the morning through to six in the afternoon, a rusty and wheezy work-whistle propped up on scaffolding so that it could be moved to wherever the work was at any given time announcing the start and end of their toil.
Occasionally, he’d stop for a second and look over his shoulder at the whistle. The sound it made was permanently embedded in his mind. Sometimes, after the more arduous days, he even heard it in his sleep. He’d hold a repressed hope, deep down in the pits of his spirit, that by some miracle the whistle would blow early, and he’d get let off easily, but it never happened. It just stood in place, like some great oppressive obelisk, representing the ten hours of torture each day of which the bulk of his life consisted.
Today, when he looked over his shoulder, expecting to see the whistle once more, for whatever good it did or didn’t do, he was instead greeted by the face of Sean, the site manager. His glare grazed the side of Jonah’s cheek, landing on the face of the quarry before him. He stared at the rock for a moment, before brushing past Jonah and vaguely gesturing at a small imperfection in the slate.
“Watch for that shit. Looks like copper. Hope we’ve not hit a deposit of some shit because I can’t be fucking arsed to deal with it.”
He then hacked up a glob of phlegm, spat it onto the ground by Jonah’s feet, then walked away, following the face of the quarry around to Jonah’s left before climbing the steps up through the base of the scaffolds above, off to belittle and patronise some of the other miners.
Jonah had opted to not respond, because he didn’t appreciate being told how to do his shit, simple job, and he knew that he would not have been able to refrain from saying something that could land him in more hot water than it was worth. Imperfections in the slate pit were nothing out of the ordinary. Sean, or Goblin as the men had secretly nicknamed him, owing to his unfortunate complexion, short stature and grimy voice, was obligated to occasionally show his pig-face in the quarry itself so as to give the impression that he was actually managing something other than his huge lunches or the stash of pornography tucked away in his desk. The man was an utter bastard, and possibly the worst part of the whole affair. Jonah often fantasised about driving a pickaxe through the man’s ugly snout, or pushing him from the top of the scaffolds, and while he was sure the men of the quarry would all cheer and celebrate, a metaphorical prison cell was far preferable to a real one.
Jonah turned back to the slate and began to tackle the imperfection. He started to chip around the edges, cutting out a broad circle hoping to extract it as a wholly contained lump if possible. He made the two largest incisions on either side about half a metre deep, then pulled away the loose chalk and bauxite above and below with a pry-bar, allowing him to lever it out from behind. After a bit of tugging and grunting it soon came loose, tumbling onto the floor. As it landed, a lot of the loose sedimentary stone throughout the chunk crumbled, revealing a few bronze-coloured metallic pipes and a few oddly detailed shapes which almost looked like clockwork.
Jonah peered down at the place where it had come to rest. He really hoped they hadn’t hit something of importance, because that would involve telling Goblin, who had a nasty habit of taking his anger out on the nearest fleshbag when faced with even the smallest and most insignificant of inconveniences. Jonah inspected the imperfection closer, hoping that it was just some bit of nothing that could then be discarded without any fuss. He picked it up; it wasn’t particularly heavy, he noted, as he tossed and turned it in his hands. He was able to push out the remaining chunks of various sandstones with his thumb, tapping it against the wall to shake off the dust therein revealing the whole artefact.
It consisted of three metallic pipes, bronze in colour and slightly reflective, each about thirty or so centimetres long, in a triangle formation around ten centimetres apart from one another. They were interconnected at the top end by a brass plate with a slight dome in its centre, from which a fourth pipe, shorter than the other three, descended in the centre of the whole formation. Around it was several layers of ludicrously complicated clockwork, so tiny and intricate and fulfilling some unknown purpose, though the basics of its functionality could be discerned through a basic visual inspection. The top of it connected to a pulley that disappeared into the dome at the top through a small slit at its base, and through all the various gearing which seemed to be constructed at various precise ratios culminating in a notched spinning disc at the bottom of the central shaft.
He turned the disc with his finger, and it began to spin, carried by the clockwork above it. Some gears span very quickly, and some very slowly, and some parts clicked backwards and forwards or span clockwise then counterclockwise, but the disc at the base of the central column maintained a constant speed. The whole mechanism carried relentless momentum, showing no signs of slowing. He concluded that there must be some power source in the dome at the top, though he still couldn’t fathom what the purpose of the device may be, or how all of its various incomprehensibly precise mechanisms were intact despite the whole thing having been buried deep in the earth just moments ago. He didn’t get what he was seeing. It defied all logic, and yet there it was, as real as the sweat on his brow. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything but laugh.
“Is something fucking funny down here, Northlane?” Goblin had stealthily returned down from the scaffolds, having had his fill of whatever shit he could stir upstairs. “You’re not on the clock to giggle.” He glanced over at the hole in the wall. ”See you’ve had that crap out. Fuck was it, anyway?
Jonah’s eyes widened. He caught his laughter, deftly substituting it for an exaggerated cough while he discreetly slipped the artefact into his slate-sack. “Sorry sir. It was a bit dusty down here. Must’ve gotten at my lungs."
Goblin’s bushy eyebrows furrowed, wrinkling his large forehead. His large mouth and its wide lips turned down. “We’re mining slate, Northlane.”
“I know.” Jonah took up a weak attempt at a reassuring smile.
“Slate has to be one of the cleanest things we can mine.” Goblin started to slowly walk further towards Jonah.
“I’ve been coughing for a while.” Jonah threw another fake cough in, although Goblin’s face showed that he clearly wasn’t convinced. “Need to see the medic.”
“Medic’s not on-site at the minute. Gone to see the, ah, Production Commissar.” He spoke the title in a mocking tone. “Also, why are you put something other than slate into your slate sack?” Shit, he’d noticed after all. “Are you getting thick on me, boy?”
“...It’s just slate.”
“Bullshit, it looked like a, I don’t know, radiator pipe or something.” He waddled over to the cart, pushing a protesting Jonah out of the way and pulling it out to inspect himself. “What the fuck is this?” He shot a powerful glare at Jonah.
Jonah rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the floor, enduring the torrent of abuse from his supervisor having once again adopted the quiet approach upon realising he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from getting into any more trouble.
Goblin took out a glass eyepiece from a pocket behind his dungarees and began to closely inspect the trinket. “Fuck, I hope this isn’t some archaeological bullshit. Those stupid virgins from the university will shut down the site for fucking months.” He tossed the object onto the floor at Jonah’s feet where it landed in the soil with a dull thud. “Found anything more like this? Actually, fuck you, I haven't got time. I shall have to report this now. I fucking love paperwork, don’t I Northlane?” Goblin started to waddle back around the wall, cursing under his breath. “Bastard cunting arsehole…”
“…Sorry?” Jonah chirped.
Goblin shouted back as he left. “Fuck off.”
As soon as Goblin was out of earshot, Jonah sighed as a wave of relief flowed over him. He was certain for a moment that it would be confiscated, or worse, destroyed, not to mention potential formal reprimands for whatever bullshit reasons Goblin could invent to fuel his odd grudge against him. He bent down and picked the artefact up, brushing off the dirt before inspecting it and failing to find any physical damage. The clockwork was still intact, and another spin of the disc confirmed that it had retained all of its impossible behaviours.
For the first time in Jonah’s life, the work-whistle blew early.