A Worthless Crown

The voice of Alcors Pallen.

Every adventurer who passed through the city of Alto Mora shared the same line of thought. Never had they seen a place so grey, so devoid of life and so hopeless and bleak.

There was a saying in Alto Mora, "Your bread is down in the mines." Thus, from a young age, citizens of the city would trek into the mines, an experience that, whilst novelous at first, quickly became a death sentence.

Truth be told, Alto Mora was a city in the middle of nowhere. Its only value was the mines it had been built over. Its once pristine and prosperous undergrounds had been hollowed out entirely, replaced by empty chambers. The gemstones that had sold for generational wealth had all been taken away into faraway capitals, and now the mines were a shadow of their former glory.

At first, a council of powerful families ruled over different sections of the mines, meaning that if one attempted to abuse their control over the workers, their section of the mine could simply be left for another. However, as the mines were hollowed, the wealthy families slowly vanished. And then, only one remained: the Vista Family.

Under their reign, miners were sent down on makeshift lifts to parts of the mine that saw no light. In order for profits to flow, mining became a deadly line of work, where the lives of workers were thoughtlessly traded off for the rare ores found deep below the safe levels of the mines. The deepest parts of the mines were said to have monsters, it was said people became insane. It was said demons lurked under the rocks.

Thus, the call was feared by all.

When I was young, I thought I would die in the mines. I assumed that one day I would receive the fated call to take the lift down, towards the deeper levels where true riches were said to be hiding. The call was feared by all in Alto Mora, because if you did not take the call, you would be exiled. Outside of Alto Mora lay barren wastelands, droughted land where life had long since left, for miles around.

However, whenever a miner's body was retrieved, due to the population density of Alto Mora, the corpse would be thrown out. Thus, the outside of Alto Mora had become a graveyard, which you would be soon to join if you were ever exiled.

I was a twelve year old youth who hailed from a middle-class family of miners, no different from many other families in Alto Mora. Mother worked as a maid for the Vista family, Father worked in the nicer parts of the mines. I was an only child. I shared the same name as my father's deceased brother, Alcors. We all had beaverish brown hair, slightly hunched backs and naturally tanned skin. I wanted to be a great warrior when I first heard of fairy-tales, but that dream quickly vanished.

The school in Alto Mora taught two things: how to mine and how to ration food. School was misleading and manipulative. Mining was brought up as an honorable line of work, like a soldier at war. The Vista Family were treated like royalty, who would appreciate our work in the mines dearly.

Tales were told of legendary miners who owned mansions on the edge of the city, but they were all lies. There were no mansions, only empty storage units that the people were forbidden to enter or investigate.

Whenever it rained in Alto Mora, there was a chance that the rain would not stop and the mines would flood. If such a thing were to happen, a large funeral would be held on the edge of the city. The patriarch of the Vista family would walk up to the podium and recite a poem every time the miners died:

The sky has rained black once again,Let the last tears fall, let lamps burn low.

Those good men are gone now,

Can you hear them beneath the rocks?

Let roses wilt, let rain fall,

Let bells toll, let sorrows keep.

Tomorrow begins, do not mourn loud—

Let the dead sleep, let the dead sleep.

It did not come as a shock when I one day heard that my own father had been lost in a part of the mines that had collapsed. They were unable to retrieve the bodies of the fallen. He had lived to the age of wrinkles and gray hair, a sign of great fortune in a city as grim as Alto Mora.

At the time, my world had already collapsed. I had long accepted there was no way out of this black hole of hopes and dreams. I watched the people whom my father drank with and would call his closest swiftly move on; his name soon became another number in the records. A tally in a chart, a splotch of ink on paper.

Mother mourned in silence. There was no funeral beyond the recited poem and the bells that tolled at dusk. She continued working for the Vista Family, and I continued school, though we both knew it was only a matter of time before I, too, was sent below. The rationing of food grew tighter, the faces around the city gaunter and . The streets that once had vendors, selling what little they could, slowly emptied until only scavengers and the desperate remained. It was not just the mines that were being hollowed out—it was the city itself.

The deeper the miners were sent, the more the city lost its soul. Alto Mora had always been a place of quiet suffering, but now it was as if the very air carried the weight of all those lost beneath the ground. The only thing that remained constant was the poem, recited time and time again, a reminder that death was the only certainty in Alto Mora.

And when my time came, when the call arrived for me to take the lift into the abyss, I did not protest. I simply stepped forward, knowing there was no other path. As I descended, the echoes of that old poem rang in my ears, the last words I would hear above the surface before I, too followed in the footsteps of my father and the ancestors before him.

The gravel crunched beneath my feet, as the fiery torches on the side of the walls caused my shadow to sprawl back in fear.

The further down one went, the more they shivered. I did not shiver that day, I was already dead.