Hunched over, he made his way up the shaft, his boots splashing through the pools made by the weeping rock. The trek took some time.

Eventually, he stood at the mine’s ragged entrance, blinking in the harsh sunlight. Sharp pains stabbed at his lower back as he straightened to his full height for the first time since rising from his cot that morning. Sweat streamed from him despite the air’s wintry bite, mixing with dust and grime as it ran down his bared torso. He could feel his muscles slowly contracting to the cold and it seemed as if simple light and clean, bitter air could cleanse him, scouring skin, flesh, bone and down into his very soul, and so yield the miracle of restitution, of redemption. In the wake of that notion came mocking derision.

Other miners were shouting, some singing, running like children across the snow-dusted ground. He heard the word freedom and listened to laughter that would make a sane man cringe. But Wareth looked to the prison guards for the truth of this day. They still ringed the vast pit that housed the mining camp’s compound. Many of them now ebon-skinned, they leaned on their spears and made grim silhouettes against the skyline on all sides. At the south edge, at the end of the ramp that climbed to a barricaded gatehouse and barracks, the iron gates remained shut.

He was not alone in remaining silent, and watchful. He was not alone in his growing scepticism.

No one freed prisoners, unless indeed the civil war had seen an overthrow of all authority; or, with a new ruler upon the Throne of Darkness, an amnesty had been announced. But the cries of freedom lacked specific details. ‘We are to be freed! On this day! Prisoners no longer!’

‘There will be justice at last!’

That last proclamation was absurd. Every miner in this camp belonged here. They had committed crimes, terrible crimes. They had, in the words of the magistrate, abrogated their compact with civil society. In more common diction, they were one and all murderers, or worse.

The guards remained. Society, it seemed, was not yet ready to welcome them. The hysteria of the moment was fast fading, as others at last took notice of the guards in their usual positions, and the barred gate with its barbed fangs. Elation collapsed. Voices growled, and then cursed.

Wareth looked over to the women’s camp. The night-shifters were stumbling from their cells, dishevelled and drawing together in knots. No guards stood between them and the men. He could sense their burgeoning fear.

All the animals loose in the corral. Even this cold air cannot stifle a beast’s passions. Trouble is moments away.