Ragnarök, Eternal Tragedy.
Chapter 133: What the Dust Remembers

Chapter 133: What the Dust Remembers

Lionel stood opposite Amari, the torchlight behind him curling upward like it was trying to escape the tension in the air. His dagger hung limp at his side, and blood still streaked faintly along his cheek where Amari had cut through mirage to land something real. Yet his smile held firm—steady, unreadable, shaped more by reminiscence than malice.

"You remind me of me," Lionel said.

His voice wasn’t mocking now.

It was remembering.

And before Amari could speak, the night folded inward—into memory, into distance, into something older.

Twenty-two years ago.

Orivath.

A district carved into the belly of forgotten ore country. No rivers. No harvest. Just stone cracked open and sold to anyone with boots polished enough to walk through the front gate untouched. Orivath was survival stitched from rust—a place where hope fermented too long and became bitterness.

Lionel was twelve.

He spent his days in the Kael Mines, hands raw from hauling rock, lungs choked with dust that glittered in torchlight but felt like knives after sunset. His shifts began before the sky changed color and ended when it gave up entirely.

His mother—Jareth—worked beside him when she could.

Her cough had worsened. A sickness that crept into bone. She tried to mask it, wrapping her mouth with cloth soaked in lavender root. It helped at first. Then it didn’t.

They were paid in meal credits and exhaustion.

And on the worst days, they ate silence.

That night, Lionel sat beside her in the shack they called home. Tin roof. Rotting floorboards. One candle. One bed. One piece of bread.

He tried to hand her the bigger piece.

She refused.

"You’re still growing," she whispered.

He couldn’t accept it.

He’d cried quietly.

"I can’t do this anymore," he said, chest tight, voice fraying around words he didn’t know how to carry.

Jareth smiled.

And her hands, as cracked and worn as the tools they used, cupped his face.

"You have to," she whispered. "We survive, Lionel. Even when we shouldn’t. That’s all we’re allowed to do right now."

Weeks passed.

Her body broke faster than his spirit.

She stopped coming to the mines. Stopped eating full meals. Stopped walking without pain.

Lionel carried her water. Carried her food. Carried the weight her body couldn’t fight anymore.

Every night she would whisper the same phrase before sleep claimed her in shallow breaths:

"Survive, Lionel."

He didn’t understand it then.

Not fully.

But those words calcified.

They sank into his blood like ore waiting to be refined. And by the time she died, he had already learned how to speak through silence, how to command through lack, how to turn survival into legacy.

A year had passed.

Orivath hadn’t changed—except Lionel had stopped waiting for change. His mother, Jareth, had crumbled into silence months earlier, buried without ceremony just outside the worker barracks. There was no grave marker. Just a coil of iron rope placed atop the dirt because it was the only thing he’d kept from her hands. Lionel hadn’t cried. Not again. That part of him had frozen where the prayer used to be.

He’d taken up her shifts.

And some of her pain.

The mines didn’t just demand labor—they drained meaning. Lionel had grown taller by then, arms corded with exhaustion, breath short, chest still rattling with stone dust. And the foreman—Joren—had made him a target. Beat him with a short baton when ore weights came in light. Spat curses at him in front of others. Called him rat, dirtspawn, grief-licked orphan. At night, Lionel slept with one arm curled around his ribs to ease the ache where the bruises stacked.

But he didn’t fight back.

Not yet.

That morning, the mine felt different.

The workers had been told to clear the eastern corridor. Torch lines were doubled. The gravel had been swept. Even Joren wore gloves for once, sleeves ironed and teeth brushed like ceremony meant survival.

Then they arrived.

A polished crawler rolled up the dirt path, its wheels glinting against the coal flecks. Out stepped a man in a silk vest and chain-cuffed boots—Governor Halbrecht, one of the mine’s owners, tall and gold-throated, followed by his son—Taviel—barely fifteen, face untouched by hunger, eyes fresh like his sleep had never been interrupted by rats clawing at the water bucket.

The workers bowed.

Lionel didn’t.

He stood still beside the weighing station, dust coating his hands, shirt clinging to his back with sweat not yet dry. Taviel glanced at him once, distracted. Lionel didn’t glance back immediately. But something hooked between them in that moment. Not recognition. Not rivalry. Just contrast.

Halbrecht spoke loudly as they walked the corridor.

"You’ll inherit all this soon enough," he said, gesturing to the reinforced walls and pressure drills. "Wealth comes from pressure. These rocks are your legacy. The people? They manage it. That’s all."

Joren kept laughing too hard at every sentence.

He pointed out the equipment.

Named the workers by fake nicknames to seem like he cared.

They didn’t care.

Halbrecht didn’t look twice.

Taviel kept glancing around, eyes tracing the stone lines like they were theatre props.

Lionel watched from the corner.

Quiet.

Burning.

He admired the boy’s ease at first.

How Taviel didn’t stagger when he walked.

How he didn’t flinch when Joren raised his voice at the others.

He had no bruises.

No bruises meant no punishment.

No punishment meant comfort.

Comfort meant legacy.

Lionel could barely remember the shape of comfort anymore.

And the more they wandered, pointing and commenting, the more Lionel felt something curl tight in his stomach—not envy, not fear.

Resentment.

The kind that felt older than his body.

Deeper than hunger.

Lionel didn’t stop working.

His fingers stayed deep in the gravel, wrist angled to sort ore by weight, splinters pushing through the edge of his palm where the basket cracked last week. The midday heat had thickened inside the tunnel, the kind of breathless warmth that turned sweat into stench. He was used to it.

The boy wasn’t.

Taviel stood just behind him now, cloak pulled over one shoulder, boots too clean, eyes pinned to Lionel’s back like curiosity had walked him there uninvited.

"You have a problem?" Taviel asked, voice clear, unshaken, but too careful to sound natural—like he’d rehearsed the line somewhere.

Lionel didn’t look up.

Didn’t turn.

He shifted one rock out of place. Picked another. Stacked. Sorted. Silent.