The Nameless Accounts
by A. Broadhead

I don’t remember much about those first years in the underground city. Or rather, I remember some things. The smells of male-musk and the perfumes of nobles, the echoes in tight corridors, the tastes of the fungi and crustaceans my people farmed for food, the feeling of smoothed rock under my fingertips. It is the way of my people to be born blind, coming into the world only knowing sound and touch, taste and scent, until several Greater Cycles have passed. When I close my eyes now, I can capture a little of that feeling of home. They loom large to me on starless nights or when closed inside a cellblock. Perhaps they would be lost on one who had never lived part of their life without the sun.

The sights of Vuzsdin? Those I don’t remember so much, even though for most Surfacers, with their keen eyes, that is the most compelling. Our city was largely a city of darkness, even once one reached their time of Awakening. Candles and lamps were kept for the holy days, the priests and the scholars, but most of us went about with only luminescent cave moss or enchanted crystals for lights, if we went about with any light at all.
A Surfacer may be handicapped by this lack of light, their eyes always searching for its patterns, until they go insane when they can’t get enough of it. It is a hard thing for an akor’mar to understand, as it is not something we notice while underground. Lights are a thing of wonder as well as a thing of discomfort for most of us. The best thing I can compare it to is the Surfacer’s sense of smell. The right hues are beautiful, awake a hunger in you for more, but the wrong intensities were painful, off-putting on an instinctual level. Most times you do not notice the presence of lights unless there was something particularly remarkable about them, for they were not useful to us in our daily life in Vuzsdin.

Touch, sound, scent…these instead were our guides in that city. Our tunnels were marked with engravings rather than painted signs. You knew your kin by the timbre of their voice, and a lover’s face by the dimples of their skin. You could pick out a beggar from a nobleman by the different cadence of their footsteps, tell a soldier from a merchant by the rustling of mail rather than the clinking of coin.

I myself was born to the lower class, our steps marked with shuffles and whispers rather than the confident rat-tat of nobler bloodlines. My birth family came from a long line of many such families living in the Great Den in the highest reach of the city. The air was thinner up there, closer to daylight and discovery, suited well for the dregs of my people, though I was later to learn there were many that lived far below as well.

How to describe such a place to you, who live on top the earth? When Surfacers picture our akor’mar burrows, they picture them as stone cottages and castles built inside a cave—the walls don’t even go all the way up to the ceiling in their paintings, leaving them open to climbing vermin up top. In truth, Vuzsdin is not built this way; none of our cities are.

What good is a wall if it can be climbed over? What is the good of carving out an entire chamber, only to fill it in again with dwellings? We akor’mari are burrowers, not builders. We carve straight into the rock, connecting existing caverns with tunnels, weaving together mushroom fibers or stacking bricks to fill in the spaces between stalagmites and stalactites. In the poor quarter, entire cavern walls were riddled with dwelling entrances, right up to the ceiling, where each front door was connected by stairs cut directly into the sides of the cave.

The biggest of these caverns was the Great Den, my home during childhood. If there had been enough light, I imagine it would have looked like a honeycomb, though doubtful that such a powerful light source could ever be produced to shine so high. The great expanse of emptiness in its main cavern would boom in our ears, the whispers of many families echoing and mixing in an unnerving mash of unidentifiable individuals. A Surfacer might remark on the rare flecks of candlelight indicating dwelling after dwelling in the great wall, like a torch glinting off the vast expanse of a still, vertical ocean.

The sheer size was off-putting to us. This was why those caves were not prime real estate. Small, intricate passageways and artful acoustics were the desire of the nobles. Bigger caverns were the mark of those grounded by their need to have large fields and subterranean lakes to farm, or without enough money to hire skilled architects to make homes pleasing to the ear or the touch of a fingertip. The simplicity of our homes matched the simplicity of our lives, and by extension, our income.