The cold was secondary to the poison. The air in The Crucible was not a fluid; it was a punishment. It was the acrid, metallic stench of Manore—toxic, solidified mana—that promised death by slow consumption. Corvin breathed it, knowing every inhalation was a step closer to the grave that had already consumed his parents.
The mine was a vast, terrifyingly precise wound in the earth—a circular hole of unknown depths, a geometry of despair. The tiers plunged downward, and the bottom was utterly drowned in complete darkness. The further one was forced down, the less light, and the more palpable the threat of unknown creatures and structural collapse. Corvin survived in the precarious middle ground—the boundary between the systematic cruelty of men and the primal terror of the void.
Corvin was one of thousands worked until they died, for the Trazarch Trade Union was explicit: Currency is King. Life was worthless; only ownership mattered.
Corvin's survival was an act of cold, exhaustive calculation. He was one of the strong, yet his strength was spent maintaining a terrible self-control, ensuring every movement, every breath, adhered to the brutal efficiency necessary for survival. He did not hope; he calculated.
The Systemic Extinguishment
Corvin was born into slavery; he knew no other life. His existence was defined by loss.
He was a child, still clinging to the thread of his parents' love, when the first blow fell. The systemic cruelty of the Union was not subtle. His mother was not merely subject to the Union's vile demands; she was taken and violated.
It was Taskmaster Verdan, then just an ambitious, sadistic overseer, who led the guards. Verdan was the instrument of the Union's law, proving that ownership licensed atrocity. Corvin remembered the precise moment his father was seized, held fast, his own desperate struggle overridden by the brutal force of the guards.
Corvin, a child, reacted with pure, frantic love, screaming and launching himself toward his mother. He was stopped by the strong, desperate grip of his mentor—the kindest slave he had ever known—who held him back, his voice tight with fatal knowledge: "No! You'll die for nothing!" Corvin was forced to watch as Verdan and his guards dragged his parents away, the ultimate lesson in helplessness branded into his young soul.
His father was forced to watch by two guards holding him in place and holding his head up so give him a better view of what was about to happen. Verdan began by tearing what was left of her ragged slave clothes from her body revealing every part of her body that was for her husband only to see and feel. His hand began to grab at her breast and fingers between her legs forcing them into her. Every motion a violation of the highest degree. When she wouldn't comply he would slap her with the back of her hand, picking her up back heir hair and forcing himself inside her mouth. Tears fell down her husbands face unable to do anything. Complete powerlessness. He proceeded to use every orifice on her body until she will filled with his fluids. When we was done he let his guards have their turns. At this point her husband broken beyond just mind but soul. By time the third man was done she had already died. Her heart giving out, body already weak from abuse and starvation and hard labor.
His father was brought back, a man broken. The father had been forced to witness the entire violation—the cold, calculated act that destroyed the dignity of his wife and shattered his own protective spirit. He returned a ghost, his soul consumed by the profound shame of his powerlessness against the Union's malice. He never spoke another word. Corvin spent weeks watching the quiet, final destruction of his father's will, until his father made the final, tragic choice. Corvin was forced to witness his father taking his own life—a definitive conclusion that the world had no sanctuary for the kind or the vulnerable.
The final betrayal came later: the kind mentor slave who had saved Corvin's life was tragically murdered in front of Corvin during a routine quota enforcement. That loss extinguished the last possibility of emotional sanctuary, confirming to Corvin that love and trust were fatal weaknesses that malice would always destroy.
The Contagion of Chaos
The Union's cruelty was so absolute that it became a contagion, eliminating all morality among its victims.
All who worked faced the constant threat of the whip. Failure to work fast enough or efficiently enough meant immediate, brutal punishment. Quotas were designed to be just barely out of reach, and failure resulted in the combined trauma of savage beatings and the denial of food. Often, the beatings were inflicted just for the sick pleasure of the Taskmasters, reinforcing the absolute, chaotic power imbalance.
This brutality fostered a final, terrible moral collapse among the enslaved:
The Visible Scars: Women slaves were returned to the hovels bearing visible bruises, blood, and fluids not their own—a daily, chilling testament to the Union's ownership.
The Final Corruption: The system's poison was viral. Male slaves, their spirits eroded by trauma and pain, abused female slaves, completing the cycle of depravity and eliminating the last possibility of human community or solidarity.
The Indignity of Death: When a slave finally succumbed to the toxic labor, other slaves were forced to remove the bodies—a final, mandatory task that replaced mourning with cold, mandated labor, turning the dead into a line item: "Removal, 0.5 billable hours."
Corvin's mind retreated into an iron fortress. He stopped mourning; he started calculating. He realized that this pervasive, viral chaos was the ultimate flaw that must be eradicated.
The Shadow Heart's Calculation
Corvin spent the next months focused on a single support pillar. It was an old archway, structurally sound, yet compromised: saturated with the corrosive Manore gas that had chemically weakened its stone structure—a vulnerability the Union's greed allowed them to ignore.
He dedicated his energy to finding the perfect point of failure. His mind became a cold instrument, logging the minute shifts in the structure, calculating the precise resonant frequency required to amplify the chemical decay already in progress.
He sent a final, powerful surge of psychic energy—the first, desperate activation of his Shadow Heart—into the pillar. The pain was excruciating, a cold fire that threatened to consume his consciousness, but Corvin endured, focusing entirely on the stone's final fracture point. He was not asking for power; he was commanding it.
When he drew his hand away, the final variable was set.
Above the gaping maw of The Crucible, the sky began to answer. A vast, dense pressure descended, followed by the synchronous clamor of beating wings. The Black Flock had arrived—drawn by the birth-scream of their kin, sensing the emergence of the being who would claim the ultimate Shadow.
Corvin looked up, his eyes meeting the dark, knowing shapes of the ravens. The broken slave was gone. The Raven Lord's genesis had begun.