I DESTROY THE LAW'S OF HEAVEN

THE WEIGHT OF HUMANITY

A human life meant nothing when the roof started to cave in.

Thorn stared at the massive black door, his fingers trembling as he traced the glowing symbols carved into the metal. The stone in his chest pulsed hard, demanding to be let inside.

"Hey! What are you doing down here?" a loud voice shouted from behind him.

Thorn turned around fast. A older miner stood at the end of the narrow tunnel, holding a flickering oil lamp. His face was covered in thick black dust, and his eyes were wide with suspicion.

"Get away from there!" the miner yelled, stumbling forward over the loose rocks. "That area is forbidden! The guards will skin us both if they catch us near the old seal!"

"Go back," Thorn said softly, his voice dead and calm. "You should not have followed me."

"I saw you sneaking down the main drift," the man grumbled, waving his pickaxe threateningly. "I am not taking the blame for your mess. We are going back up right now, or I call the watch!"

"I am not going back," Thorn said.

He turned his back on the miner and pressed his palm flat against the ancient lock on the door. He did not waste time talking. He squeezed a dark pulse of power out of his chest, forcing the black energy directly into the glowing runes on the metal frame.

The sealing spell did not melt or burst. It simply unmade itself.

A loud, wet crack echoed through the deep shaft, followed by a violent shudder that shook the entire mountain. The glowing symbols on the door faded into dull gray dust, crumbling away in seconds.

The moment the seal died, a wave of cold, heavy air burst out from behind the door, hitting Thorn full in the chest.

"What did you do?" the older miner screamed, dropping his pickaxe as the ground beneath their boots began to roll like ocean water. "The roof is coming down!"

A massive slab of rock snapped off the ceiling, crashing into the tunnel floor with a deafening boom. Dust filled the narrow space, blinding them both. Thick cracks raced up the stone walls, swallowing light and air as tons of earth collapsed from above.

"Help me!" the miner shrieked, falling onto his hands and knees in the dirt. "I cannot see! Help me!"

Thorn looked up. A giant boulder, heavy enough to crush ten men into paste, snapped free directly over his head. There was no space to run. The tunnel behind them was completely blocked, and the doorway ahead was blocked by a falling curtain of gravel.

The older miner scrambled toward Thorn, grabbing his ankle with a desperate, bleeding hand. "Pull me up! Please!"

Thorn looked down at the man's terrified face. He did not feel panic. He did not feel pity. He did not feel anything at all. His heart beat slowly, steadily, completely cold inside his ribs.

Instead of pulling the man up, Thorn reached down, grabbed the miner by his collar, and shoved him hard into the open space right beneath the falling boulder.

The miner let out a short, wet scream as the massive stone crashed down, pinning his torso to the dirt. The heavy rock tilted on the man's body, stopping just short of the wall and leaving a tiny, triangular gap right beside the crushed corpse.

Thorn instantly dove under that gap, crouching low beneath the shelter of the trapped boulder as the rest of the ceiling collapsed around them in a roar of thunder.

For two long minutes, the mountain shook and roared. Dust filled Thorn's mouth and nostrils, but he stayed perfectly still under the dead man's shelter, staring at the dark blood pooling on the dirt inches from his knee.

When the roaring finally stopped, absolute silence returned to the deep mines.

Thorn pushed a pile of loose gravel off his shoulder and crawled out from beneath the gap. He stood up in the dark, wiping a streak of sweat and gray dirt from his face.

He looked down at the crushed miner beneath the rock.

"I killed him," Thorn said out loud, testing the words on his tongue.

He waited for the guilt to hit him. He waited for his hands to shake, or for his stomach to turn in disgust at what he had just done. Nothing happened. His chest remained icy cold. The stone beneath his skin felt smooth and satisfied, as if it had fed on his humanity.

"I really do not care," Thorn whispered, a small, chilling realization washing over him. "He was in my way."

The artifact was not just breaking the world outside. It was wiping away everything that made him human. Fear, regret, mercy, all of it was disappearing, leaving behind a cold, sharp blade of pure survival.

Thorn turned away from the dead man without looking back once.

He shoved his shoulders through the gap in the ruined metal doorway, stepping out of the dusty tunnel into a massive, hidden cavern buried deep beneath the roots of the earth.

The air inside was entirely different. It smelled of old ash and frozen iron, preserved from an era long before the divine sects ever built their first temple. This was a place built before the current gods rewrote the laws of creation.

Thorn took three slow steps forward into the pitch black space, his boots crunching on ancient dust.

"Is anyone here?" Thorn asked, his cold voice carrying through the dark hall.

No voice answered him, but the air pressure inside the chamber suddenly dropped to absolute zero. The stone in his chest began to burn with a violent, dark heat, vibrating so hard his ribs cracked under the strain.

High up in the shadows of the ceiling, twenty feet above the stone floor, a wet, tearing sound echoed through the dark.

A massive, jagged slit ripped open in the empty air.

Thorn froze, his hand dropping to his chest as a blinding, pale purple light burst from the tear.

An enormous, frozen eye opened inside the void, thrice the size of a carriage wheel. Its iris was a ring of swirling, dead stars, completely unblinking and ancient beyond measure.

The giant eye rolled downward, bypassing the dust, bypassing the room, and locked its cold gaze directly onto the black stone fused to Thorn's chest.