DRAAK

Before Brugge, before Gent, before men drew borders across wet earth and killed one another for the right to name them, there was pressure.

Water moved through stone. Heat rose where no eye could see it. Minerals gathered along fractures deep beneath a mountain whose future nations had not yet been imagined. Copper waited there without color, value, or purpose. It was neither beautiful nor useful. It belonged to no one.

Then a hammer struck rock.

The miner’s name was Tomas. He entered the mountain each morning before sunrise, although sunrise meant little once he had passed the timbered mouth of the workings. Within fifty paces, day and night became rumors. The only weather was damp. The only horizon was the reach of his tallow lamp.

He had been told as a boy that the mountain breathed. Old Miklos, who had lost two fingers and most of his hearing underground, said a man could feel the breath if he stood still and placed his palm against bare stone. Tomas had tried it many times. He had felt water, vibration, and once the faint movement of air from an unseen passage. Whether any of those things counted as breath depended upon how badly a man wanted the mountain to be alive.

On the morning he found the green stain, Tomas wanted it dead.