Trilogy of the horrors of slavery.
Book 1
Mark thinks he understands systems. In his village, problems are solved with ledgers, schedules, and the stubborn belief that people can be coordinated toward a common good. Then the raiders come on the wind, and Mark learns what a real machine looks like: the slave trade, built to turn lives into units, and units into profit.
In one night, Mark and his twin, Mike, go from citizens to inventory. Mark hesitates when their escape tunnel starts to fail, staring at the weakening seal like an engineer trying to diagnose a crack. The barrier collapses. Mike takes the hit protecting him, again. When the dust settles, Mark is the one still standing, and he hates himself for it.
The intake pen is not chaos. It is process. Silent enslaved handlers chain ankles, march captives in lines, and ignore questions like they have been trained to ignore pain itself. Names are not asked for. Water is rationed. Food is tossed like feed. Privacy is removed as efficiently as clothing. Mark watches every step, cataloging it the way he used to catalog crop yields, because noticing is the only kind of control he has left.
Sorting follows. Bodies are assessed, tagged, separated. Mike is pulled away for strength and scars, punished for surviving. Mark is pulled away for being "clean," for being "new," for being worth more untouched. He tries to fight, and learns what the system does to fighters: it spends a little pain now to save itself a lot of trouble later.
Days blur into transport wagons, holding yards, and markets where people bargain over him in a language he barely understands. Friends made in chains vanish overnight, sold, dead, or simply removed. Mark clings to one thing that feels unstealable: his name. If he lets that go, the machine wins completely.
When a broker finally buys him for a specialist serving the Wind Sanctum, Mark expects cruelty with a different perfume. Instead he hears rumors of a Wind Master who collects problems the way other rulers collect trophies, and who wants a human not for labor, but for leverage. By the time Mark is delivered into bright halls and clean stone, he is exhausted, trained, and furious in a quiet, controlled way.
He is pushed down at the feet of Wind Master Liora. The room waits for him to accept a new name. Mark lifts his head, meets the gaze of the most powerful person he has ever seen, and says, steady as a vow, "It's Mark, actually."