"Heave ho! Swing the pickaxe wide, make the moon shiver!
Heave ho! Bite three feet deep into the black stone!
Don't say the mountains are iron slabs-we'll nail our blood and sweat into a road!
At the ruined city's border, the moon shone bright amid scattered stars, seemingly unchanged.
Unlike the silent city center, a booming voice kept shouting at the border.
Forceful work chants echoed across the fields barely lit by scattered streetlights.
Accompanying them was the clatter of countless pickaxes striking.
Druha chanted with abandon, directing the 'workers' before him to toil away.
Only, those workers did not look to be in very good condition. Every one of them had a rope around their neck, suspending them in midair.
Countless dried-out people hung silently before an endless stretch of black rock, swinging their picks with a clanging din.
Each time a pick fell, the rock wall remained unmoved. Only as the picks scraped across it did wisps of fine black dust drift down.
Crack!
The head of one dried-out worker's pick suddenly split, giving a crisp cracking sound.
The suspended, dried-out man said nothing and silently withdrew from the crowd. Another immediately took his place.
Once away from the crowd, the departing worker began dismantling his pick without a word.
The pickhead was not iron-it was stark white bone.
Then the dried-out man silently detached one of his legs and ground all its flesh away against a red rock covered in minced meat.
He found a huge pit filled with white bone dust and, over it, began sanding that leg bone down bit by bit with a small whetstone-
These countless dried-out people ground their own bones into picks, all to scrape a wisp of dust from that seemingly unyielding rock wall before their pickheads broke.
What were