The tremor in my bones refused to settle. My head throbbed, a dull echo of the cosmic scream that had torn through my mind. I found Jax near the ore conveyor, his broad back hunched over a sputtering lantern. The air in the tunnel hung heavy with the damp smell of rock dust and stale sweat. He was inspecting the intake chute, oblivious, his rough hands smudged with fine grey silt.“Jax.” My voice came out a rasp, not the sharp command I intended.He grunted, not looking up, his shoulders tense. “Mirren? What is it? Quotas aren’t meeting themselves, you know.”He always went to the quotas first. Everything came back to the Company’s demands. I pushed closer, the faint blue hum from my left arm a secret vibration against my ribs. “It’s not the quotas. It’s… what happened in the seam.”His head snapped up then, eyes narrowed in the flickering light. He saw the tremor in my hand as I gestured, the way my gaze kept darting back to the tunnel mouth, as if the God itself might follow. “The tremor? The flash? I already sent a report. Said it was a pocket of compressed gas, unusual but not unheard of.”He said it with too much conviction, too much rehearsed certainty. He didn’t believe it, not really, not after what we’d all seen. Not after the way Valerius had looked at us, at the ichor.Jax wiped a hand across his jaw, a nervous tic. “Look, the ground shifts. The seam breathes. We’ve seen stranger things down here than a little rumble.”“Not like this,” I insisted, my voice gaining a desperate edge. “It wasn’t just a rumble. It was… a memory. I saw it, Jax. I *felt* it. The God. It didn’t just fall. It shattered.”I tried to explain the immensity, the impossible scale of it. The emerald wings, vast beyond comprehension, tearing apart against an indifferent blackness. The agony of a celestial body breaking, fragmenting into a million pieces, those pieces becoming the very rock we mined. My hands moved, trying to sketch the impossible images in the air between us, as if he could pluck them from my imagination. Jax watched my wild gestures, his expression unreadable. His gaze flickered from my face to the tunnel walls, searching for something concrete, something he could grasp. He saw only my agitation. “Shattered? Mirren, it’s a rock. A big, old, dead rock. Always has been. The Company says so. The Elders say so.”“The Company lies!” The words burst from me, raw and unthinking. “It felt… alive. Not dormant, not sleeping, but in pain. Trapped. I saw the fall. It was like… being there. Like it was happening to me.”My chest tightened, a phantom echo of the God’s last breath. The air grew thin, too thin, and I had to fight the urge to gasp, to suck in the stale mine air as if it were the last gasp of a dying star. Jax recoiled a step, his eyes wide. He wasn’t looking at me, but past me, at some unseen danger in my words. “Mirren, you’re talking nonsense. The gas got to you. Or the dust. We’re deep down here. The air isn’t always good. You’ve been working too hard.”He reached out, then pulled his hand back, as if afraid to touch me. His fear was palpable, a cold wave in the close air. It wasn't for me, but for the implications of what I was saying. For the Company's wrath, for the disruption of their carefully constructed reality. “Look, just… calm down. We’ve all been on edge since Valerius showed up. The quotas are tighter than ever. It’s stress, that’s all.”He spoke over me, trying to smooth away the sharp edges of my terror with his foreman's placations. His words were meant to reassure, but they only served to push me further out onto the precarious ledge of my own experience.---I pulled my left arm from beneath the sleeve of my tunic, pushing the rough fabric up to my elbow. The internal blue light pulsed, a steady, rhythmic thrum, visible even in the dim lantern glow. It cast strange, shifting shadows on the rough rock. Jax stared at it, his brow furrowed, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. Then I turned my forearm, showing him the patch of skin just below my elbow, where the tiny, iridescent scale now sat.It was barely the size of a thumbnail, a perfect, shimmering oval. It caught the light, refracting it into a rainbow of muted blues and greens, like a fragment of polished opal. It was cool to the touch, and strangely smooth, unlike the calloused skin around it. It felt utterly alien, yet undeniably part of me. “And this,” I said, my voice quiet, almost a whisper, “this isn’t dust. This isn’t fatigue. This is… growing.”Jax leaned closer, his nose almost touching my arm. He squinted, turning his head from side to side, trying to catch the angle of the light. His calloused finger, thick and stained, brushed against the scale. I flinched, a jolt of something electric running through me, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just grunted, a low, dismissive sound. “Just a… bit of a rash, eh? Or maybe some kind of mineral deposit. Happens sometimes, when you’re working with the richer seams. The dust can get under your skin, irritate it.”He pulled back, shaking his head. “The star-tears, maybe. That blue shimmer? It’s potent stuff. Got on your arm. You haven’t been washing properly, have you? You know the Company says to scrub down after every shift, especially when you’re working the 4th Marrow.”His tone was paternal, condescending. As if I were a child, careless with my hygiene. My jaw tightened, a hard knot forming. He was looking for any explanation other than the truth, any way to dismiss what was happening to me. “Jax, it’s not a rash. It’s not star-tears. It’s part of me. It’s changing me. Like the God is changing itself.”I watched his face, searching for any sign of understanding, any crack in his practical facade. But his eyes were blank, resolute. He looked away, focusing instead on the dull shine of the conveyor belt. His fear of the unknown, of anything that challenged the order of their grim reality, was a thick wall between us. He was a foreman, a survivor, and that meant rejecting anything that couldn’t be explained by rock, dust, or Company directives. “Mirren, you’re just tired. Overworked. We’re all feeling it. Valerius pushed us too hard this cycle. That’s all this is. Your body reacting to the strain.”He kept his back half-turned to me, fiddling with a loose bolt on the conveyor, avoiding my gaze. The blue light from my arm pulsed, mocking his denial. The scale seemed to shimmer brighter, asserting its strange, alien presence. It was a tangible piece of the God, grafted onto my flesh, and he saw only dirt.---Jax straightened, his gaze sweeping over the conveyor, a deliberate shift in focus. He ran a hand over his balding head, leaving another streak of grey dust. “Look, this isn’t good, Mirren. Not good for you, not good for the crew. You start talking like this, people get nervous. Valerius has eyes everywhere. You know what they do to troublemakers, to anyone stirring up… *superstitious fancies*.”He practically spat the last two words, mimicking Valerius’s disdainful tone. The implication was clear: keep quiet, or suffer the Company’s wrath. His concern, I realised, wasn't for my sanity, but for the stability of their precarious existence. He was trying to protect the status quo, the fragile balance that kept them all fed, clothed, and out of the deeper, deadlier pits. “You need to get some sleep. A proper rest. Get off shift early. I’ll cover for you. Say you got a touch of the seam-shakes, a cough.”He turned to face me fully now, his expression earnest, almost pleading. His eyes, usually sharp, were lined with worry. “Go back to your bunk. Don’t talk to anyone about this. Not the visions, not… whatever that is on your arm. Just sleep it off. Clear your head. You’ll feel better in the morning. We all get a bit… lightheaded down here sometimes. The pressures.”He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, a gesture meant to be comforting, but it felt like a dismissal. A final push away. He meant well, I knew, in his own gruff, pragmatic way. He thought he was helping me, by urging me to deny what I was experiencing, to shrink back into the familiar, safe narratives of fatigue and stress. But his words were a barrier, not a bridge. They sealed me off, alone with the impossible truth.The weight of his hand, the sincerity in his eyes, only amplified the chill that had settled deep in my chest. He was offering a solution that negated my reality, erased my experience. He couldn’t see it. He wouldn’t. The Company had conditioned them all too well, taught them to distrust their own senses, to attribute anything out of the ordinary to mundane causes. To deny the divine, even when they were mining its very flesh.I pulled away from his hand, a cold certainty solidifying within me. “I’m not tired, Jax. And I’m not lightheaded.”My voice was flat, devoid of the earlier desperation. There was no point in arguing, no point in trying to make him see. He had made his choice. He would cling to the familiar, to the explanations that kept him safe, even if they meant turning a blind eye to the monster growing beneath their feet. He watched me go, his face etched with a mix of frustration and pity. He shook his head slowly, a silent confirmation of his belief that I was simply cracking under the strain.---The long, winding tunnels back to the bunk area seemed to stretch endlessly, the air growing heavier with each step. My bootfalls echoed loudly, a hollow sound against the pervasive hum in my arm. Each pulse of blue light under my skin felt like a lonely heartbeat, a rhythm utterly out of sync with the dull, thrumming machinery of the mine around me. Jax’s words, Jax’s words, heavy and dismissive, echoed in my ears, making the air taste like ash. They tried to smooth over the rough edges of my reality, to sandpaper away the impossible, leaving only the dull, familiar grit of the mine. But the blue pulse in my arm intensified with every step, a stubborn, defiant beat against his denial. It hummed a silent, urgent song, pulling me deeper, not towards the sterile comfort of my bunk, but back into the heart of the mountain.My boots crunched on loose scree, the sound muffled by the vastness of the tunnel. The path to the bunk dorms lay to my left, a narrower, less-lit passage. I veered right instead, towards the deepest, most recently excavated sections of the 4th Marrow. This was where the God-flesh was exposed, raw and potent. This was where the star-tears bled from its wounds, where the air itself felt thick with something ancient and alive. I needed to see it, to touch it again, to find proof not for Jax, but for myself.The air grew cooler here, damp and heavy, carrying the metallic tang of fresh ore and something else, something sweet and faintly fungal. The deeper I went, the more the conventional supports thinned out, replaced by massive, crystalline buttresses that seemed to have grown from the rock itself, shimmering faintly with internal light. The Company rarely sent crews this far in without heavy supervision. The ground beneath my feet felt different, less like inert rock, more like something resilient, yielding subtly with each step.I reached the section we’d opened yesterday, a freshly blasted chamber where the living rock presented a sheer, smooth face. It pulsed with a soft, bioluminescent glow, a deep, bruised violet under the surface that bled into shimmering veins of sapphire and emerald. This wasn’t stone. This was tissue, vast and monumental. The air here vibrated, a low, constant thrum that resonated in my teeth, in my very bones. My arm, where the scale sat, tingled fiercely, the blue light beneath my skin now a rapid, frantic flicker.I raised my hand, the light in my forearm casting an eerie glow on the raw face of the God. My fingers, calloused and stained, hesitated just inches from the surface. A wave of vertigo washed over me, a sense of falling upwards into infinite space, but I pushed through it. My fingertips brushed the cool, smooth surface. It felt like polished bone, but with an underlying, subtle give, like taut muscle. A faint tremor ran through it, a slow, deep ripple that moved through the vast expanse, a living breath.My gaze traced the surface, searching. Not for star-tears, not for rich veins of ore, but for something else, something personal. My eyes scanned the vast, luminous wall, following the subtle undulations, the minute fissures caused by the blasting charges. Then I saw it. Not a crack, not a seam, but a deliberate mark. It sat almost at eye level, a ragged line cutting across the smooth, violet-blue flesh.It was about two inches long, a thin, jagged scar, almost perfectly straight, but with a slight, unnatural kink at one end. The edges of the wound were lighter than the surrounding tissue, a pale, almost white hue, as if the God-flesh had healed imperfectly, leaving a silvery track. It looked ancient, faded, yet undeniably present. My breath caught in my throat.I lifted my other hand, my right one, feeling along my own left thigh, where a faded scar crisscrossed the skin. An old memory stirred, the crunch of falling rock, the searing pain, the crude stitches from the Company medic. It had healed poorly, a thin, white line that sometimes itched in damp weather. I had carried it for years, a permanent reminder of my first near-miss.My fingers found the old mark, tracing its familiar, uneven path. I looked from my thigh to the God-flesh. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drum against the hum of the living mountain. The scar on the God, the one etched into its very being, was identical. The same length, the same jagged kink, the same pale, almost silvery hue. It wasn’t similar. It wasn't 'like' it. It was a perfect mirror. A precise, impossible match.A cold dread gripped me, tightening its hold around my chest. How could it be? How could a wound I’d received years ago, a random accident in the deep tunnels, be replicated here, on the very flesh of the God we mined? Was it a coincidence? No. The precision of it stole that possibility. It was too exact. Too chillingly specific.The blue light in my arm flared, a sudden, blinding pulse that made the entire chamber seem to throb in response. My scale tingled, a burning pressure against my skin. It felt like a key, slotting into an impossible lock. The God was not just reacting to me, not just changing me. It shared my wounds. It bore *my* mark.The vast, living wall seemed to lean in, to breathe around me. The hum intensified, no longer just a vibration, but a chorus of silent whispers, curling around my mind. I was not alone in this chamber. The God knew me. It knew my pain. And as I stared at that mirrored scar, a horrifying, undeniable truth began to crystallise in my mind, a truth far more terrifying than visions or scales. I was looking at a wound that was mine, on a being that was not. Or perhaps, a being that was, irrevocably, becoming me.

Chapter 11: Scarred Divinity