Our procession shuffled down the gritty dirt path with a collectively grudging disposition, until we approached the guard with the deep blue cap, at which point morale suddenly stiffened. A bulging wooden crate sat beside him, loaded with pickaxes and hammers, seemingly on the verge of shattering apart into splinters. Once the group had gathered its tools, each man readjusting his chains and contorting his spine to accommodate the burden, I clumsily maneuvered through the resultant dust cloud to retrieve my own. The blue guard regarded me silently, and as I struggled to support the massive weight of the hammer on my shoulder, he scratched at his lean jaw to express his unbridled disdain. Then, with a gruff chuckle, he slung a rifle across his backside and, satisfied with the state of things, marched to his post at the watchtower.
Attending to my duty, I uncovered a rockpile and brought down my hammer to smash the rocks into fragments. All that could be heard in the valley was the incessant clanking of the picks and hammers against the solid stone. The quarry echoed the cacophony endlessly, creating a monstrous symphony that reverberated through the skulls of the workers. After what must have been hours of monotonous, synchronized hammering, I faltered under the agonizing toil and lost hold of the hammer in a pang of exhaustion. Suddenly, a shot pierced the air and ricocheted off the marble blocks to my left. It did not take much hesitation for me to resume the pounding.