Chapter 27: Ch. 027 – (Then) Alone in A Crowd

The day that Boriv left on the train back to the crossroads, Jonathan closed the book on his own life in some ways. As he watched the train leave he felt that all the best parts of it were behind him, or above him. Either way they were someplace he’d never reach again. Along with everything else the dwarf was returning to the surface with, he took along a bundle of letters that Jonathan had asked him to give to those he’d left behind, and the boiled bones of Marcus’ body in tow for burial. At first Jonathan was concerned by the practice. It seemed unnecessary and macabre, but after Boriv explained that dwarves often did this because the corpse itself would have rotted long before it got where it needed to go.

 Jonathan thought that everything would change after that, but in the days that followed though, Jonathan’s life changed less than he would have thought. Indeed - after a few weeks of the same routine he was fairly certain that it would never change again. He still went to work every day for Boriv’s cousin. He still spent all day calculating figures and doing maths before going home to a hard pallet in a dusty warehouse. He still ate bad food and practiced his fireblood talents until he was so exhausted that he could finally sleep. If he was dead to the world now, then the routine of his afterlife took on all the worst parts that his life had to offer. 

The only thing that really changed was that his new boss’ Wenlish was much worse than Boriv’s, and that he insisted on paying him for what he’d been doing this whole time for free. Jonathan wasn’t sure if it was a joke or some kind of game to Maxom though. At the end of every week he would pay him a few silver eighths and copper eighty eighths before going through the long list deductions related to room and board which he dutifully prepared every week and taking almost all of them back. Room - one eighth and two coppers. Sausages - eight coppers. Stew- three coppers. Bread, six servings - four coppers. This list of food went on and on every week, like it mattered what he ate and how much it cost. It was highway robbery of course, and Jonathan expected that the reason Maxom did it was to show just how fair he was being to the boy when he was being anything but.

That was fine though. What was Jonathan supposed to do about it anyway? He still had a place to sleep and food to eat, even if his diet consisted of overpriced leftovers. Only the last item was ever really annoyed him. Custody and mentorship - seven coppers. The dwarves expected him to pay for his own imprisonment and the rate of a copper a day. That was almost four silver eighths a year. Said another way - his life sentence, which is what it was if they were being honest, was perhaps thirty crowns until he finally died of old age. It was bad enough that Maxom was expecting him to pay full price for his day-old table scraps, but to pay your own jailer for the privilege of being locked up? 

There was nothing Jonathan could do about it though. Every week he had a few more coppers that slipped through the system and nothing he could really do with them anyway, so it didn’t matter. It was just a sick game to rub it in his face, Jon decided, but he lacked the connection he’d had with Boriv to dispute it, or even ask the dwarf why he was doing this anyway. Maxov, for his part, seemed to resent being forced to babysit a man like this anyway. No doubt he did what he did because of some obscurely legalistic clan requirement, but he made it clear to Jonathan in a hundred small ways that he didn’t want him here and wouldn’t tolerate any funny business. “Ye - go count,” was the thing he said most commonly followed by “Back to work,” and “day is over. Take food and go.” He also learned his first dwarven words from the dwarf, simply because he heard them from him every day: ‘Too slow.’ At first Jonathan had thought that a phrase repeated that often had to mean thanks, or something like that, but eventually the context gave it away. Nothing was ever good enough for Maxov.

Jonathan hadn’t realized that being underground could become more depressing, but he had no idea what a comforting Boriv’s familiar face had been until it was gone. His master had been gruff but at least he’d cared about what happened to his apprentice. In darker moments he considered that maybe this wasn’t about Boriv at all. Maybe he just lost the last friendly face the same day he lost the hope of ever leaving this hell hole again. It was impossible to say which was true. The only reason that Maxov might care if Jonathan fell over dead one day was that he would stop getting his cheap labor and free coppers. Jonathan wasn’t entirely sure that anyone else even knew his name down here. Well, except maybe Fedon - another dwarf that worked on the loading docks hauling crates on and off of freight cars. He’d taken a special interest in Jonathan after a few weeks, but only so he could let him know how much he hated men, and how non-dwarves like him had no business in Khaghrumer. 

As a bully so far, Fedon had been pretty ineffective. Jonathan had been tormented for years by an expert like Marcus. Between that and the language barrier he mostly made jokes about men to his friends and then they shared a laugh without Jonathan ever understanding what they were mocking him about this time. He’d actually been responsible for teaching Jonathan most of the dwarvish he knew actually, but just so he could better understand when his better’s were insulting him, as Fedon put it. Jonathan had found their insults too strange to actually be very offended by them though. Giant. Surface dweller. Weakling. Cold blood. Only weakling made much sense as an actual insult, but the rest - well they just highlighted the differences between them, and no one had to remind Jonathan that even if he lived in this city until the day he died, he would never belong. 

As time passed and the verbal hazing had no real effect, they switched to messing with him while he was trying to work. Mostly that consisted of moving objects around while he was trying to count them or getting in his way, but Jonathan took that stoically. So what if they didn’t like humans. Increasingly the feeling was becoming mutual. Between Maxov’s indifference and Fedon’s aggressive disdain, what was there to like? On the surface he’d been mystified by dwarven magic. Trains and brands seemed a thousand times more interesting than being fire blooded, and he tried to learn all he could about them even though Boriv had been tight lipped. Their sense of justice and fairness was almost entirely lacking though. At best dwarven law and custom seemed to be transactional - not just to outsiders either, but their own kind as well. Jonathan would have gladly given up trains for life in which he never had to leave the company of his own kind again. The race of men might not always be just or fair either of course. He knew that, but he knew that they were at least capable of it. In the flinty heart of dwarves there were only rules though, and Jonathan knew he would make no friends here. 

Without friends he didn’t really belong anywhere when he wasn’t working. He spent most of that in the warehouse he lived in conducting experiments with fire or on its roof looking at the skyline and pretending he had a sky. The only quality of life improvement Jonathan had managed in these long months was figuring out that he could cool the stones of the floor under his bed to a frigid temperature before he went to bed, making his sleep much more peaceful for a few hours. He’d even toyed with cooling himself off, but his control wasn’t fine tuned enough, and so half the time he tried to play with his body’s own temperature he ended up on the floor shivering with something that bordered hypothermia. Needless to say after a few tries he’d decided that it wasn’t a good idea. So after that he stuck to practicing on inanimate objects. 

As often as not, most nights he spent his nights playing a game with a loose railroad spike he’d found. He’d see how quickly he could make it glow with heat by pulling as much of the fire the hot stones as he could, and then seeing how quickly he could remove that fire until the spike was cool to the touch. He’d managed to make it glow a dull orange a couple of times, but suspected that without an actual heat source he wouldn’t be able to make it glow white hot, let alone melt, and he was loath to burn anything to try. Burning would mean smoke, and that might attract someone’s attention. He was well aware of how much dwarves hated magic. The last thing he wanted to do, afterall, was make things even worse for himself. 

So he practiced in secret, not really sure what he’d ever use the ability for, but unable to do much else. The last thing he wanted to do was to burn someone’s house down, or worse, hurt someone with his fire manipulation, but there weren’t even any books around he could read, so it was that or sleep. As the weeks passed though, he was surprised at how much stronger he was getting. Before he’d come here he could barely snuff a candle flame, but now he could extinguish a campfire if he had to, and he could start a fire without pulling directly from another one, which was something he didn’t think was possible before. The only real use for heating anything at all turned out to be the food Maxov sold him every day. It turns out that the things Jonathan had hated the most, like some of the stews were terrible at room temperature, but they weren’t half bad if you heated them back up. Those were the sort of small victories he could expect to find here in Khagrumer. Little things that made life slightly more bearable, but nothing that would ever really make it happy. 

So every day ran together. Each individual day seemed to drag on and on, but the weeks started to fly by. Every morning Jonathan would awaken at the beginning of second watch, dress, spend a watch and a half at work checking figures and counting boxes, and then come back to his poor excuse for a home, where he would have half a watch to toy with magic, bemoan the current state of his existence, and try to remember how Claire had smelled before he finally went to bed at the start of first watch. That was the rhythm of his days now, and the only thing that seemed to change was the speed at which he attracted Fedon’s ire. No amount of cooling his bed or warming his food, or any other parlor tricks would ever turn his existence here into something resembling a good life.

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