Harlow had never known what it meant to be clean.
Not really.
To sit in a bath so hot it turned your skin pink, all shiny and new. She had only heard rumors of such a thing.
Though a bath wouldn’t do her much good, anyway.
No, her dirt lived deeper than skin—an oily film that clung like a curse, unmoved by water, soap, or desperate pleading. Her hair, once a glimmering gold, had long since dulled beneath layers of clay and grime, now the forgettable shade of muddy water.
She didn’t mind. In a way, she was lucky.
Beauty in Molvaria was a curse, an invitation written in flesh. And if Harlow had learned one thing in all of her twenty years, it was this: the more forgettable one was, the safer they were. An old warning of her father’s that had never left her mind, even long after he did.
So, her sea-green eyes stayed lowered. Her hands always kept busy. Her shoulders rounded, her presence small.
She was but a worm, wriggling her way through the dirt.
You couldn’t scrub out the years spent digging, begging, bleeding for the bones of dead gods—all to fuel a power that was never meant for hands like hers.
And so she kept digging.
The stains kept growing.
Along with the realization that she would spend her entire life dirty.
As was a bone scavenger’s destiny.
*
“Anything? Is there anything?”
Mira’s voice was a thin whisper beside Harlow, raw and edged with panic. So unlike her usual sing-song lilt that radiated off her.
They had only been digging partners for a month, and despite herself, Harlow had grown rather fond of Mira’s constant humming and restless energy, always buzzing, never quite able to sit still. Mira was only three years younger than her, but Harlow felt ancient in comparison.
She was still new to the pits. Still clinging to that futile flicker of belief that if you dug deep enough, bled long enough, maybe you could claw your way out of being born a Leviathan. Or, in Mira’s case, out from under the weight of her debts.
Harlow didn’t look up from her digging. “Not yet. You’d be the first to know,” she said, sharper than intended. But when she caught the hollow marks under Mira’s sunken brown eyes, she softened.
She’s desperate because she’s hungry, Harlow thought. But so was she, though her hunger was a different kind.
Mira’s once filled-out features had vanished, leaving behind hollowed cheeks and bony fingers. The only thing that remained was her brilliant red hair. She imagined all the grime in the world couldn’t douse that flame.
“It’s only midday,” Harlow murmured, trying to ease the tension building in Mira. “Don’t let the seeds of doubt take root yet. You found a sliver just yesterday.”
Mira didn’t answer right away. She just nodded, lips pressed tight, and let out a quiet breath. She picked up her shovel and started humming the way she always did—faint at first, the notes dipping low before rising into a happy-sounding song.
Harlow knew that a sliver of a bone meant nothing.
But Mira didn’t know that yet.
She didn’t know that Harlow had found hundreds over the years, little fragments of faint glowing bones that left her fingers bloodied and hope—what little of it remained—sustained. They were never enough to buy freedom. Just enough to keep the Sanctified fed for another day. To prove they were still worth the rations it cost to keep the scavengers alive.
She knew Mira would find out eventually, and that when she did, the light that seemed to radiate from her would fade. And Harlow, who had long since stopped expecting light in a place like this, wanted to preserve it just a little longer.
According to legend, the gods’ remains were once entombed in grand, magnificent tombs across Molvaria, accessible only to the holiest worshippers. But when people discovered the bones still pulsed with remnants of divine power, the temples turned to battlegrounds. Thousands of lives were shed for fragments of godhood until the Sanctified—descendants of the gods and the only ones capable of wielding such power without succumbing to the darkness—wiped out their enemies with magic.
In doing so, they destroyed the very relics they meant to protect.
Now, scavengers waded through endless bonefields, sifting through remains like sand, hoping to find the rare ones still humming with godhood.
Sometimes, as Harlow dug through dirt and bugs, she wondered how things might have been if the gods had been left to rest.
Maybe she would have lived a quieter life. As a painter, maybe. Or an explorer.
A life where her hands didn’t always bleed.
But dreams like that were dangerous. Because when a dream was left unfulfilled, it turned into a living nightmare.
So, Harlow didn’t dream. She stayed rooted in reality.
The reality was the charred black pits that stretched for miles like a jagged wound carved into the earth so deep that it could swallow ten men standing on each other’s shoulders.
Her shovel struck stone, jarring her bones.
Again.
And again.
The practiced ease numbed her body, muscles stretching and rippling beneath her crusted tan shift and brown leather pants.
The earth didn’t give easily. It clenched its contents tightly, fighting against you every inch.
Up on the ridges, the Overseers watched—cloaked in ash-colored armor, blunt and sharp arrows resting easily in their hands, waiting for someone to slow down. You never knew if they would urge you to continue with a blunt arrow or end you with a sharp one. Harlow had no intention of finding out.
Breaks weren’t part of the job, not in the pits.
The pits were a way of life.
Many were born there, like Harlow was, never glimpsing anything beyond the jagged trenches of Molvaria—never seeing the endless ocean, never feeling wind shift through a forest canopy, never witnessing the horizon’s edge.
Harlow wiped a streak of dust from her cheek with the back of her hand, tasting the mix of salt at the tip of her tongue. Her eyes burned. Her shoulders ached. Dust coated everything, always—lungs, lashes, eyes. It turned sweat to sludge and crusted in the corners of mouths until even breathing felt like swallowing dirt.
Somewhere nearby, Mira’s quiet humming stopped. The air filled with the clanking sound of shovels, slowly picking the earth apart.
“I’m so tired, Harlow. I don’t think I can keep going today,” she murmured, voice barely a thread.
Harlow didn’t look up. Just shook her head with a huff. “If I had a token for every time you’ve said that,” she said, “I’d be sleeping in a warm bed, not on a mat that smells like dirt and shit.”
That earned her a soft laugh. Mira kept digging but whined back, “I mean it. My bones are tired, and I’m soooo thirsty.”
Harlow stopped what she was doing and gave her an assessing look before grabbing her own water canteen and tossing it to Mira. “Don’t make yourself sick drinking it all.”
Mira stuck out her tongue, her nose scrunched and smudged with dust, and for a moment, she looked like a child playing in the dirt. Not a scavenger.
Harlow looked away before a smile could catch hold.
Mira wasn’t Leviathan like Harlow, just human, not uncommon in the pits, but rare enough.
Humans broke faster. Skin split under the sun. Hands blistered raw by midday. Their bodies weren’t built for fourteen-hour days in undesirable conditions. They were best used as servants, and so they were rarely sent into the pits. Not unless their debts outweighed their usefulness elsewhere, like Mira, who had racked up hers trying to buy treatment for her brother, who had fallen ill quickly, and died just as swiftly.
In the end, his death didn’t matter. It never did. The empire saw only an unpaid balance that needed to be rectified, and so, they gave humans the only choice they ever offered in this predicament: dig, or be imprisoned.
Out of the corner of her eye, Harlow saw Mira hesitate, just for a second, before grabbing the canteen.
They each got one a day. Mira had already emptied hers, a novice mistake Harlow had warned her about more than once.
In time, she’d learn how to make a single canteen and a sandwich last the whole day, the way they all had. Or she’d learn to steal, though Harlow doubted Mira had the stomach for it.
For now, Mira drank like a baby ravenous for its mother’s milk, then lowered the canteen with a shaky breath.
“Thanks,” she murmured, her voice dry and cracking, water still glinting on her lips.
Harlow shot her an expectant look, her voice teasing, before the sharp hiss of an arrow split the air.
Her eyes locked onto Mira’s, already knowing what the sound meant. Dread pierced her chest as she lunged forward...
