The bell rang before the light had fully climbed the hill.
Eryk was already half awake when it struck. His body jerked at the sound out of habit more than fear. His hands ached before he moved them. When he flexed his fingers, the skin across his knuckles cracked and pulled, stiff with scab and cold.
Yesterday had been pain.
Today was memory.
He swung his legs over the edge of the pallet without thinking and reached for the clothes folded at his feet. The motion felt wrong only because it felt easy. He did not hesitate. He did not search the dark for where he was. He put on the same stiff trousers, the same rough shirt, tied the same knotted strip of cord at his waist.
Around him, other boys rose in the same quiet rhythm. No one spoke. Straw whispered. Someone coughed. The bell rang again, sharper this time.
Outside, the yard was gray with morning. Smoke from the kitchen fire curled low and sour in the cold air. Hala was already there, one hand on her hip, the other holding the ladle like a short baton.
"You," she said, flicking it at Eryk. "Water first. Then baskets."
He nodded and moved.
No one had to tell him which buckets were his anymore.
Work shifted in small ways today, just enough to keep it from becoming invisible.
After the first run of water, he was sent with Bran to carry empty baskets across the upper yard toward the sheds that squatted closer to the quarry slope. The air there smelled different, coal smoke and damp stone instead of grease and broth. Shadows stretched long beneath scaffolds where men moved above, their boots thudding on plank.
Voices carried from behind stacked crates.
"Short again," someone growled.
"Pit's clogged."
"Foreman won't like that."
"When does he?"
Eryk kept his eyes on the path as Bran had taught him. Forward. Down. Don't linger.
Still, his gaze slid once, only once, toward the break in the earth at the far end of the yard. The quarry's lip lay just beyond the sheds, dark and stepped, the inside of the hill torn open. He could not see the bottom from here, only the heavy iron chains that crawled up from its edge like ribs.
A man barked from nowhere close.
"Eyes forward, Hollowford. You stare at holes long enough and they start staring back."
Eryk snapped his gaze to the stones at his feet.
No punishment followed. Only the warning.
It stayed with him.
Later, at the pump, Tomas worked beside him in silence for a while, hand over hand on the bucket rope. Stone chips crunched underfoot. The handle was cold enough to bite.
"You're on old work," Tomas said at last.
Eryk glanced sideways. "What?"
"This pump." Tomas spat into the grit. "Used to be another boy here. Before you."
Eryk said nothing.
"He was strong," Tomas went on, as if talking about the weather. "Kept the bucket steady even when it jerked. Talked too much. Snuck crusts to the dogs."
The rope rasped as Tomas lowered the bucket again.
"He slipped once."
The words were small. They landed anyway.
Eryk waited.
Silence pulled tight between them.
"What happened?" he asked.
Tomas's posture changed instantly, shoulders tightening, back stiffening as if a hand had touched a hot plate.
"Don't ask that out loud," he said.
He leaned closer without looking.
"You want to stay where you are, you don't ask where others went. You'll hear it in the hammer sounds soon enough."
From the quarry's direction came the steady, distant rhythm of iron on stone.
Tomas pulled the bucket up.
By midday, sweat and stone dust had pasted grime into the lines of Eryk's skin. His arms trembled with exhaustion as he crossed the upper yard again with a bundle of rags slung against his chest.
The steward's door stood open.
Inside, the narrow-faced man sat at his high desk, one finger following lines across the page while his quill rested in the ink well. Sunlight spilled in across the ledger's open leaves.
Eryk did not intend to look.
He looked anyway.
Names lay in tight, upright script.
Tomas, pump.
Hala, kitchen.
Bran, yard.
Others he half knew by face but not by voice, fixed in place by ink.
Lower on the page:
Jory, pit.
His stride faltered for a fraction of a breath.
And below that, one line crossed through cleanly with a single stroke. No smearing. No hesitation.
The name Tomas had spoken of.
Neat. Final.
Beside it, in the same careful hand:
Reassigned.
Eryk stepped closer without meaning to.
The steward did not look up.
"Ink isn't for your eyes, boy," he said, calm as water. "You want things noticed about you, that's how."
Eryk stepped back at once.
The quill scratched on.
That evening, when the yard slowed into the dull lull between shifts, Eryk found Lysa by the wash trough, scrubbing stone till her hands shone wet and red.
"What happens when someone gets crossed out?" he asked quietly.
Lysa did not pause in her work.
"They stop being a problem."
The water sloshed once as she plunged the stone again. Then she added, sharper:
"Don't chase ink, Eryk. Ink chases back."
She straightened, wrung her hands once against each other, and went back to scrubbing.
That was all the warning he would get.
The rest of the day unfolded with a new kind of attention.
Eryk began to notice who was sent closer to the quarry's access paths. Which men were limed white at the edges of their boots. Which boys were pulled from one task and set to another without explanation.
No one vanished at night.
They vanished between bells.
A man hefted his load in the morning and did not heft it in the afternoon. A boy worked the pump before the meal and did not return after.
No one asked where they'd gone.
Work filled the space where questions might have lived.
Near dusk, the quarry sang.
The sound was not loud. It did not rise and fall like shouting. It was a continuous, patient rhythm, hammer on stone, chain on stone, breath in dust.
Eryk carried baskets past the sheds and did not turn his head.
The stone did not look at him today.
That night, on the pallet, he lay awake with his hands folded over his ribs.
Somewhere, long ago, Hollowford had become a line in a book like the one he'd seen today. He could almost imagine it now, an unknown steward, an unknown desk, a neat stroke of ink marking a village from future columns.
Not destroyed.
Processed.
Garren had not burned their home.
He had delivered it.
That understanding settled into Eryk slowly, like a weight sinking through water.
By the time the weight reached the bottom, his questions were already silent.
He memorized the bell's rhythm. The yard's paths. The sound of chains at a distance. He traded curiosity for control.
In Blackstone, silence was not the absence of fear.
It was the cost of staying where the light still reached.