It's strange, ripping something so ancient and beautiful from darkness and dirt, paws dripping blood from chafing manacles, panting shirtless and weak in hellish heat. My first diamond glittered in the lantern light like a door to heaven I could never step through.

I pressed it's coolness to my forehead, right between my red rimmed eyes. My ears went back and for just an instant I felt the dull, aching agony that had been my body's constant companion ebb.

Then came the whip's crack. It's lash across the flesh of my back was electric and I felt a well of wetness. More blood. Was this place anything else?

"Oy fox, give it over," the potbellied weasel overseer snapped, swaggering out of the shadows with claw outstretched. "You know the rules maggot. Instantly report a find. You're a good digger, wouldn't want to have to send you to the Cage..."

Ah the Cage. I hadn't been there myself yet I'd heard the stories. It was where they put slave miners who didn't follow the rules. Brackish water welled up from the bowels of the nearby volcano, glowed an evil green. The place stank of sulfur and death.

After a stint most got sick after a few weeks. Sores would appear in their fur, some huge and raw and weeping and as large sometimes as dinner plates. Some sort of poison down there. Everyone was sure.

If I weren't already dead inside I would have felt a shiver of fear. Whenever I try to feel sorry for myself though...

Where did that crown go? The head that wore it however, well, that lifeless tear stained gaze still haunts my nightmares and-

I gave the diamond to him and his eyes widened. In the old world, before the Change, the stone's size could have been compared to a baseball.

"Struck it rich, vulp," the weasel whispered, hypnotized by the filthy gleam of what seemed a million faucets. In his eyes was what I'd seen a million times in people who finally think they've defeated the darkness in their lives, found a way to save themselves from the Hell this world certainly is.

After that, though, I was careful not to let him see me seeing. I watched him calculate. I'm a general, not a commoner, and as a lifelong student of other's motivations it comes naturally.

He had three choices.

The one with the least appeal was to turn the gem over to his superior, keep on keeping on as a big gut with a whip. He should kill me, just so that the discovery stayed within the high command. They probably wouldn't kill him...though they still might. Such a prize was the sort of thing royalty would murder for...origin stories didn't need a reeking weasel and a slave with paws crusted in coagulated blood.

More appealing, though dangerous, was to drop his whip and slay me, then try to slip out of the mine with the diamond and sell it to a foreign sovereign. As fate would have it the sword of my liege's grandfather had been given to him, dark and grim across his back in a makeshift sheath. The problem, though, was that he'd face the same fate in a foreign land. He was still a loose end.

Option three? He knew I was sly, and he wasn't the brightest star in the sky. Everyone down there seemed to recognize I was strange somehow, though I'd been careful. I had a sharp mind. Make a deal? Maybe with the help of a tricky fox he could pull it all off. He'd have to free me though, and that was risky as fuck.

Ten seconds passed as I planted my aching ass on a rough rock, the heat truly was terrible. The pick axe slipped from my grip and I closed my eyes, leaned against the cavern wall. Option A offered the best outcome if he could keep breathing, so I waited for the bite of the bastard sword. He'd tell some story about an attack to his superiors, insubordinatory attempt at homicide. It might work.

In his place what would I have done? Whatever the strategy peril in all four corners. I had an inane flash of the butler stepping in on me and the king in a sunlit parlor before the end of the war, a day before the final siege in fact. Tea or coffee, he had asked.

"Your name is Rif, isn't it?" the slave driver asked.

My left ear went back and I met his gaze. It was soft and brown, strangely luminous in the flicker of the lanterns. Hope and fear at war. Anger and cruelty had left his face lined in a lot of ugly ways yet tragically no one is one dimensional. Doting father? Painter? Did he cherish and water flowers in a hovel garden or avidly read the paperbacks that had survived the Fall? Was he human after all?

"Yeah," I said softly. "Rif."

"I...I know someone who would pay a king's ransom for this. We could share. There's talk you were there at the siege of Karatomb, that you're a warrior. If we could get it across the border..."

I arched one eyebrow, felt a twisted smile steal away the exhaustion that haunted my face. "That sword you've got. It was mine. If we're going to make that work I'll need it back."

The weasel looked down at the titanic diamond. His paw was shaking. Then he looked at me.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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