Once beautiful world, now laying in ruins, debris everywhere. Empty houses, only standing out of good will. Zombies roaming the streets, skeletons shooting innocent animals as far as the eye can see. The sun was nowhere to be seen, hidden behind its cloudy shield, as if trying to ignore what was happening to its planet.
This is what Sky saw every time he crawled on his hard bed and stood on his tiptoes to gaze out of the tiny window in his room. The scenery looked always the same, and he would've believed it was stationery, were it not for the mobs that clearly did move.
Sky peered at the cloudy mess of a sky and judged by the intensity of the light that he finally managed to adjust to that it was a little past six AM. The warden would be there soon to escort him and his friends to the mines, where they would spend their whole day, trying to sneak a few sentences to each other and not go absolutely crazy. They'd have to swing the overweight pickaxes and mine the ores from the miles deep mines and then carry them up to the surface and give them to the other unlucky slaves to refine.
Truth to his words, the warden came only moments later, a zombie dressed in tatters of what once could've been an actual warden's uniform, but now was only shred of fabric haphazardly thrown over his decaying flesh. Sky's stomach turned from the smell that always accompanied the warden, but he fought the urge to throw up, not wanting what little there was in his stomach to leave him. After all, the next meal will be only at dawn, if they were lucky.
The metal bars that were his room's door opened with an ear shattering cry and the warden's voice that Sky could now distinguish anywhere tore through the still air, bringing with it numbing smell of rotten flesh.
"Come on!"
Sky rose from his position on the metal bed and followed the warden out of his room, trying (and failing) to stay out of his smell's range. He joined two of his friends, Seto, a sorcerer whose powers were blocked by thick metal band around his neck that kind of resembled a collar, and Fluffy, actually named Jerome, but called Fluffy by Sky because of his fur. They were soon joined by a few other friends, namely Mitch, Jerome's bacca, as they preferred to call each other, Jason, who (nearly) never takes off his spacesuit, saying he'd let down all his Stars if he took it off and surrendered, Kermit, a frog that has a problem with pronounciantion, Husky, a Mudkip who they often teased by saying he's a fish, and Sundee, who, just as Sky, never took off his sunglasses.
The nine of them were best friends even before the war took place, and stuck together even as they fell into slavery. They tried to joke through it, but it was obvious it was too much for them. The work they had to do was brutal, they ate once a day (if they were lucky) and their young bodies just couldn't handle it. Mitch was leaning against Jerome's shoulder as he tried to stay upright, the furry having wrapped an arm around him for stability. Seto didn't look much better, one hand around Jason's neck and the other uselessly clawing at the iron band around his own neck. Sky remembered Seto saying something about magic channels, how they ran through mages' bodies and helped with their overall health, and figured Seto must've problems with breathing by the looks of it. Jason's hand rubbing soothing circles onto his back obviously didn't help any.
Sky saved them a bit of pain by grabbing his and three other picks when they entered the tool storage, which was in reality just another cell. Jason nodded his way, holding Seto up, and Jerome shot him a thankful look while he grabbed his own pick and guided Mitch down the seemingly endless stairs that led to the mine.