****** Chapter 2: Dust
It came as no surprise to anyone that the coal mine was abandoned.
The coal output each year dwindled further and further. As they had to dig deeper, the casualties mounted higher and higher.
Few wanted to work in the mines. Death and dust clung to everything. Whispery puffs blew up with each step to resettle even more firmly onto the living trespassers. Black dust engrained into the etchings of their worn hands and creases of their faces, the mine's inhabitants could never cast off the shadows their work left on them.
And when they tried to wash away their past, when they fled that abysmal place first in trickles, then in torrents, they left behind a child covered in the coal dust. It was a child as crooked and bent as a plant that had sprouted in the dark.
They loathed the child. Drawing near it gave people a sense of wrongness. It was the same feeling they hated the most about the mine. It was the feeling of the dust that came off so easily, covering everything they touched, yet would never come off completely no matter how hard they scrubbed. Bent and stunted from pulling the carts and covered with dust, the child was a constant reminder of the monstrosities the mine could produce.
They whispered that it was an unlucky child. It had wandered in, several years ago, back when working the mines was harsh, but still allowed a person to live. No one was willing to—God of Light forbid—take the child in as one of their own, but it was only fair to allow the child the chance to survive by working for its own food. They were charitable people. They wouldn't condemn a child to its death.
So the child grew up living in the mines. Whenever the charitable people remembered to feed it, the food it crammed into its mouth was covered in coal dust. It never spoke much, not even to give thanks for the food. Lungs that had constantly inhaled fine particles of dust couldn't support the laborious effort of speech for long. Sleeping just required finding the darkest corner to hide in, to avoid being kicked awake by a miner too soon.
The miners were scared of the ghosts of their fellow workers who had perished before them. But they didn't seem to notice that skeletons of a different sort were hidden in the rocks. The imprints of plants and animals had been left behind. An entire long-dead world had been compressed into one mass grave. The child could feel it.
He thought the others could too. Whenever they had to pick a new direction to tunnel in, having exhausted the previous vein, they always picked the direction away from the long-dead feeling. Then they complained about how the mine had to be almost all played out.
There were masses of coal left in the mine. They just didn't seem to want to find it. Maybe they were repulsed by it in the same way that they were repulsed by the child. The miners hated the coal dust that settled on everything. The child had long discovered that he attracted the dust. It clung to him, more strongly than it did to any of the others, but it felt natural and comfortable. The others called the layer of dust a suffocating second skin they couldn't ignore.
First in trickles, then in torrents, the miners tried to wash away the remains of their previous lives and search for a life in the blessed sunlight.
The child didn't mind. With fewer miners around, he could sleep longer in the darkest corners of the mine.