As recorded by master Eonod of Oemon, from the words of the survivor, and from the ash-stained tablets of Cail Rim. I tried to reference the area from a Thergen perspective. They are so proud of their mountains as if they created them. They may seem a bit gruff, but I am forever grateful for their hospitality. I met Morn in his elder years; his wit had waned and the loss still weighed heavy on him.
There are mountains that rise from the earth like massive fortresses and others that crumble away into hills near shores and valleys, just remembering the time when they stood tall. Nur Modan was of the second kind, short, ragged, overtaken by forests.
The eastern mountains of the Thergen Empire did not climb the sky with the proud regality of Ael Maern, nor did they wear eternal snow like the northern crowns. They were lower, older in appearance, not in years, for all the Spine was born of divine ruin, but in sorrow. Their backs had begun to bend. Their cliffs broke into long shoulders of grey stone. Their forests clung to them like old cloaks, black pine and iron-root, and from their high roads a watcher could see far south and east, where the lands sank into mist. There lay the swamp borders of Starfall.
On clear mornings the marshes seemed almost peaceful from the balconies of Nur Modan. Moist vapors moved like sleeping cattle, pools caught the sun and bent harrowing trees showed their tips above the haze. Yet no Thergen child was allowed to point at them and laugh, for their fathers had told them what walked there when Therril got high and the light went away.
The city itself was no mere settlement upon a mountain. Men build cities around roads and wells, fey and the mixed blood build them where beauty desires to sleep. The Thergen raised monuments, giant structures, binding stone with law.
Nur Modan stretched over cliffs, into cliffs, beneath cliffs, and through the mountain’s deeps. Its outer walls plated in dark iron, each one carved with runes that had been struck by hammer, kissed by flame, and cooled in waters blessed by Ydor. Towers squatted along the ridges, wide and blunt as mailed fists. Their roofs were not delicate spires but armored helmets. Between them ran roads of polished basalt, broad enough for six shield lines to march abreast. Beneath those roads were halls. Beneath the halls were deeper roads. Beneath those were cisterns, granaries, furnace vaults, tombs, temples, barracks, and sleeping districts where entire clans dwelt without seeing open sky for weeks.
The Thergen loved the mountain not because they hid from the world. They loved it because it had taken them in when the world was fire and dark. It has been their home, their refuge, their fort, and the place where they hosted the valley races when demons poured under Therrils darkness.
A week’s ride north of Elianor, where men spoke of Angels and Fey, of swamp fever, drowned lights, and the cries of things that imitated lost children, there stood Cail Rim, the Old Castle. It was older than many human dynasties and yet counted young among Thergen works. Its upper keep had been cracked by war, and its westward tower had fallen long ago into a ravine, but the lower fortifications remained. No gate of Cail Rim had ever been breached by an enemy hand. Its hinges had rusted thrice, but its defenders had not.
Its hinges had rusted thrice, but its defenders had not.
Near that ancient fortress, in the under-roads of Nur Modan, the tremor came. It began as a murmur in the stone. At first the miners only paused. Hammers hung in the air. Lantern chains trembled. Dust slipped from the ceiling in fine threads. Then came a sound like an Eternal turning in sleep. The floor jumped. A rail-cart full of black ore bucked from its track and crushed a young miner named Borrim Tal under one wheel. His brother tried to lift it alone and tore both hands bloody against the iron. Farther down the passage, a support pillar split from crown to base, and a ceiling slab fell upon three rune braces that had held firm since the reign of the first Golden King. The braces glowed once, flared blue, and died.
Then it was silence. The kind that does not entice peace. The one that acts as the messenger of ill omens, of death and a slight thumping noise like something marching somewhere deep inside. Every Thergen in the shaft knew the difference. From the broken wall beyond the ore vein came wind. Cold but not stale, as if Therra breathed from within darkness. No known tunnel had been there before, at least none recorded in the Thergen tablets of memory.
The miners gathered in a half circle, lanterns held high, beards grey with dust, faces broad and grim beneath leather caps. The opening was not wide at first, only a crooked tear between two plates of granite. But the air that breathed from it turned sweat into needles. It smelled of deep water, of fungus, and something old that had rotted long ago. One miner spat. The spit froze on the rocky floor.
“Fetch the wardens,” said Old Hadruk, foreman of the third eastern shaft. “And fetch a priest.”
“They will ask why,” said another.
Hadruk stared into the black opening.
“Tell them the mountain has burped, and I dislike the smell.”
Hadruk nodded at his hesitant digger for a second and then the latter turned running upward. Orders were never spoken twice in the caves. So, the wardens came.
The first was Brunnak Veyr, Defender of Nur Modan, shield-brother of the main Gate and veteran of the Anvil marches. He was not tall by the measure of men, but he was nearly as wide as a chapel door. His armor had been made in layered plates of steel, close fitted over mail so thick it whispered like chains dragged over stone when he moved, the kind only his kin was able to smith. His helm carried no plume. Only a brow of hammered iron, carved with the oath of the defenders. Simple, functional, deadly, three things Thergen admired.
His shield was taller than a human boy and shaped like the face of a fortress gate. Its rim was bitten from old battles. Its surface showed the faint lines of layered runes. Across his back hung a maul with a square head of dark metal, balanced for one hand but heavy enough that few men could lift it with two.
Brunnak’s beard was faint grey though he was not old, braided into three thick cords bound by bronze rings. One for each parent and one a present from his eternal mate. He would grow a fourth when his youngling was born. His left eye had gone cloudy from demon bile at the Battle of Ragen, but his right eye missed nothing.
With him came Khadra Theral, war priestess of Thera. She wore armor also, though hers was brighter, oiled steel under a mantle of dark red wool. Upon her breastplate was stamped the open mountain and the mothering hand in three circles beneath it. Her hair was black with a single white braid at the temple. Her face stern with a claw mark close to the chin, a present from a bear she fought during her initiation. At her side hung a great axe, crescent bladed, its shaft wrapped in leather darkened by prayer oil and blood. Small tablets of stone hung from her belt, each carved with a name of the dead, three potions and a scroll case.
Her voice was rough as a millstone.
“Who opened it?” she asked the foreman with a voice that could make men piss themselves.
“The mountain,” said Hadruk.
Khadra stepped near the crack and laid one bare palm upon the stone. Her eyes closed. The miners lowered their lamps. She listened.
“Don’t shit me digger. I will break your skulls with my bare hands if one of you did this.”
No one mocked the silence, no Thergen mocked one who listened to Thera.
After a time Khadra opened her eyes.
“This stone was not cut,” she said. “It was accidentally broken. Broken by magic, I can still sense it. But the source is not evil, it feels familiar, fey. The spell was cast quite far from here. This is just a weak stone succumbing in a long range of granite. Nonetheless, we must investigate.”
Behind them came the third who would enter the hole.
Morn Gald, miner, guide, and occasional disgrace to three captains. He was younger than Brunnak, older than foolishness, and possessed of the cheerful face of a man who had survived many things by pretending they were funny unlike the grim of his kin. His beard was golden brown, wide, and badly kept, with two iron beads and one fishbone in it from a creature no one knows in these parts, the result of a wager with a wandering mage. He wore no full plate, only a reinforced mining harness, shoulder guards, a thick coat of scale, and a helm whose wax lamp had been cracked and repaired more than once. Across his back rested a miner’s maul, long handled and practical, its head rune-notched to break stone and skull with equal honesty. At his belt hung chisels, wedges, chalk, a folding hook, two coils of wire, and a flask he claimed contained “liquid medicine”.
Khadra smelled it at once in his breath and said, “That is not medicine.”
“It cures fear,” said Morn.
“It causes stupidity. Not that your empty skull can withstand more.”
“Then I have been overdosing since childhood.” Morn laughed, echoing in the cavern ahead.
Brunnak grunted. “Shut your mouth and do your work. Of all the cavern tracers you should be on my watch”. He cursed and used Therra’s name, looking apologetically to Khadra.
The orders came swiftly. No large force would be sent until the passage was known. That was Thergen law in deep breaches. Too many armored boots could collapse a newborn shaft. Too many torches could drink foul air or set a pocket of gas ablaze. Too many hearts could be lost to one unseen trap. First came the measuring party. A defender, a priest and a guide. Three witnesses, three bodies and three names to carve if they did not return.
Before they entered, Khadra took ash from a silver bowl and marked each brow.
“To Thera, who received us.”
“To Ydor, who guarded us,” Brunnak answered.
Morn leaned forward for his mark smiling. “To whoever keeps ceilings where they belong.”
Khadra struck him with two fingers hard enough to click his teeth smearing his face with discontent.
Then they went in through the opening though it narrowed after ten paces, forcing even the priest to turn her shoulders. Their armor scraped the stone. Sparks came and died. Morn said “I will go first, not because I am courageous.”
“Then why?” asked Brunnak falling to his trap.
“Because if you get stuck, we would have to rename the passage after your arse.” Morn laughed content.
Brunnak told him to walk.
Beyond the crack, the tunnel sloped sharply downward. It was not one made by Thergen hands. That became clear at once. No chisel pattern marked the walls, no water groove ran along the floor and no side cuts had been made to relieve pressure. The stone seemed to have been melted in some places, smooth as yellow wax, then split suddenly into jagged teeth. Crystals grew from the ceiling like pale roots, giving off a faint green light. When the lanterns passed below them, shadows moved within the crystal, too slow to be reflections.
Morn marked the wall every twenty steps with white chalk. After the tenth mark, it disappeared before their eyes. He stopped. Brunnak raised his shield, while Khadra whispered a prayer and touched one of the stone tablets at her belt. The mark had not been rubbed away. It had sunk into the wall, as if the stone had swallowed the chalk.
Morn stared at it. “That is a rude rock.”
“Keep marking,” said Brunnak.
“With what? My optimism?” said Morn.
“Without teeth, if needed. Move, I don’t like this place. It smells of magic and old lava.”
Khadra whispered: “Hush. Morn stop provoking him! or by the gods I will smite the abyss out of both of you.”
They descended for nearly an hour. The air grew colder, then warmer, then colder again. Once they passed a pool so still it reflected not their faces but a wide cavern roof full of bright gems. Yet above them was only stone. Khadra forbade them to touch the water. Morn did not argue. That worried Brunnak more than the pool, but he could feel the magic trap like danger on his spine. The priestess knew more than met the eye.
Far below, they entered a cavern that had no right to exist beneath Nur Modan. Its roof vanished into mist. Pillars of natural stone rose in spirals, twisting upward like the bones of dead giants. Strange moss shone a pale sickening green along the ground. Veins of red crystal pulsed in the walls, slow and dim, like hearts sleeping under glass. A river crossed the cavern without sound. It ran black and bright, and where it curved around a field of white fungi, the fungi leaned away from it though there was no wind.
Upon the far side stood statues. These were not of the surface races, tall shapes with too many arms, long necks and heads at the height of their chest. The heads bowed, their faces hacked away.
Khadra’s jaw tightened holding her holy symbol.
“Demonic?” Brunnak asked.
“No,” she said. “Older. But something has prayed to demons here.”
Morn crouched near the ground. There were tracks in the glowing moss. Narrow feet. Clawed feet. Something dragged behind them.
“Many passed,” he said. “Some light. Some heavy. One bleeding.”
“Direction?” asked Khadra
He pointed with his maul. “Southwest.”
That word sat between them like a fourth companion. Southwest, beneath the mountain. Toward old cracks and the forgotten roots of the Spine. These passageways were not mapped even by Nur Modan. They led to death, but they followed.
The first attack came from above. It sounded like dry ropes sliding over stone making Morn look up. His lamp caught a pale belly, a hundred hooked legs, and mandibles opening wide enough to take his head. The centipede dropped. Her size was that of five grown men and her tail could scissor their shields in two thin pieces. Morn threw himself backward. The creature struck where he had stood, splitting a stone plate with its weight. It was black shelled, swollen with yellow growths that pulsed between its plates. Its head had been wounded by corruption. One of its eyes had burst and from the socket grew a small horn like black glass. It screamed unnaturally, unlike any insect more like a child drowning under water.
Khadra’s axe came first. She stepped in with terrifying speed for one so broad, both hands on the shaft, and hewed down upon the creature’s neck. The blade bit through shell, spraying pale fluid across her breastplate. The fluid smoked where it touched the holy mark of Thera. The centipede twisted, wrapping half its body around her legs. Hooks tore at her greaves. One pierced through the joint behind her knee. She hissed but did not fall.
Brunnak slammed his shield forward. The impact drove the creature sideways into a pillar. Stone cracked. The centipede’s legs battered against the shield in a storm of iron clicks. Brunnak set his boots and pushed, muscles swelling beneath plate. The creature’s mandibles snapped at his helm, catching the rim and tearing a strip of metal away from the cheek guard. Its other fang punched into his shoulder plate and stuck there. It could not pierce this armor.
Morn climbed onto a rock behind it. “Hold that disgusting vermin still! Let it dance with my maul” Brunnak growled and pressed it firm on the wall.
Morn swung his enormous hammer with both hands over his head crushing three plates of the centipede’s back. Something inside burst. The creature reared, dragging Khadra off balance. A hooked leg ripped through the leather under her arm and opened a red line from rib to hip.
Khadra roared, a sound not of pain but command. “Back to your hole, filth.” She planted one boot upon the creature’s lower jaw, wrenched her axe free, and brought the blade sideways into its mouth. The steel split mandible, tongue, and skull. Brunnak followed with the maul from his back, striking the axe head itself like a forge hammer upon a wedge. The centipede’s head burst against the stone. Its body thrashed for several breaths, legs beating, tail lashing, yellow fluid spitting from cracks in its shell. One lash caught Morn across the chest and flung him into the glowing moss. He landed hard.
For a moment none spoke. Then Morn lifted one hand. “I found the floor.”
Khadra limped to him and looked at the tear in his scale coat. “It nearly opened your ribs.”
“Nearly is a generous word. I have always liked nearly.”
Brunnak wiped smoking bile from his shield. “Can you walk?”
Morn sat up, grimacing. “I can complain while moving. It is a family gift.”
Khadra bound her own wound with cloth and prayer. She pressed two fingers against the cut beneath her arm, whispered to Thera, and the bleeding slowed until it stopped. Brunnak said nothing of his shoulder, though the fang had punched deep enough that each movement of his shield arm left fresh blood along the black steel. The priestess gathered the group and prayed again. After some long minutes their wounds closed, although some of the pain remained.
They burned the centipede. It took poorly to flame at first, then too well. Green fire ran along its body and showed markings beneath its shell, symbols cut not by nature but by ritual. Demonic signs. The insect corruption was not by chance. Someone had intentionally performed it with magic.
Past the cavern of pillars, they found the first body. It hung from a hook of crystal, suspended by its own hair. At first Morn thought it was a child. Then the lantern light showed long limbs, pale skin, and narrow ears as knife leaves. Fey. His body had been opened from throat to belly. Black stitches had closed him again in the pattern of a spiral.
Khadra bowed her head.
Brunnak examined the ground. “Scout?”
“No,” Morn said softly. “Warning. Demons mark their territory. They are in constant war with the deep Fey.” There were more signs after that.
Claw marks on walls. Old blood on stone. Small bones arranged in circles. A Thergen rune copied badly in charcoal, reversed so that its meaning changed from shelter to hunger. Khadra destroyed that one with the flat of her axe and spat on the dust. At the ninth hour of descent, when their legs had begun to ache and even Brunnak’s breathing grew louder behind his helm, they saw light ahead. This was not crystal light but real fire. They lowered their hoods, covered their weapons in cloth and moved without words as silently as a Thergen can.
The passage opened onto a ledge above a deep hollow. Below, a camp had been made around two circular flames that gave no smoke. Around them six figures crouched in tailored skins, adorning bone plates, and pitch-black armor. At first glance they might have been fey, but only if one had heard of fey from a drunk butcher. Their limbs were too long. Their joints bent with too much patience. Their pale faces had been cut with demonic sigils, and from the cuts grew black veins. One had antlers wired with finger bones. Another had a second mouth in his throat, whispering while the first mouth drank from a bowl. In the center of the camp a living prisoner knelt.
He was pale even for his kind, almost white as candle wax, with hair like starlight ash and eyes of soft platinum. His hands were bound behind him with iron cord. Blood covered one side of his face where a pointed ear had been half torn away. A pale Fey.
One of the inner races, if the old Thergen records spoke true. Lawful in soul, watchers of deep crossings, kin to the bright courts yet dwelling far beneath roots and forgotten hollows. Once they fought with the alliance against the demons. Few surface folks had seen one although the old oaths stood, forever in the minds of Thergen.
The corrupt hunters circled him. One leaned close, tongue black and forked. The pale Fey did not look away. Brunnak counted with his fingers: one, two, three, six in total. Morn touched the notch on his maul and pointed down a side slope. Slippery, but possible. Khadra’s eyes burned. She mouthed a prayer, then another word. “The oath stands, now!”
They descended like a rockfall. Brunnak struck first. He leaped more like a boulder dropping and scattering away anything in his path. His boots hit the ground behind the nearest corrupted scout, and before it could turn his shield smashed into its opponent’s spine. The creature folded backward over the shield rim with a wet crack. Brunnak’s maul rose and fell. A skull vanished into the moss.
Khadra came beside the fire, axe turning in both hands. One hunter shrieked and thrust a jagged spear at her throat. She caught the shaft under her arm, let the point scrape sparks along her gorget, and stepped in close enough that her forehead struck its face. Bone broke. Her axe took its leg at the knee. As it fell, she reversed the blade and opened it from hip to opposite shoulder.
Morn slid the last stretch on his boots, failed to stop, and crashed into the one with antlers.
Both went down.
“Planned,” Morn shouted, though no one believed him.
The antlered thing clawed at his face. Its nails scraped his cheek, tearing three red lines from eye to jaw. Morn jammed his forearm into its throat and reached for his belt knife, but the second mouth in the creature’s chest opened and bit into his sleeve. Teeth sank through leather and into flesh.
Morn howled, half rage, half insult.
“You have a mouth there? Fucking good appetite demon spawn.”
He seized a loose stone and hammered it into both mouths repeatedly until teeth flew like seeds.
The remaining hunters moved fast. Too fast. One sprang onto Brunnak’s shield, running up its face like a spider. It hooked both feet under the shield rim and stabbed downward with two curved blades. One glanced at Brunnak’s helm. The other slid through the gap at his neck. Blood ran beneath his beard. Brunnak dropped the shield and the corrupted fell with it from its weight. Before it could roll away, Brunnak set one boot on its chest and brought the maul down with both hands. The armor around his wound darkened, but his grip did not weaken.
Another hunter threw powder into Khadra’s face. The powder burst into bright sparks. Khadra staggered. The world around her seemed to bend. She saw, the face of Theril burning, sucking light and pyramids on its face split like skulls. She heard children at the gates during nightfall and doors closing. The hunter came with a hooked sword for her belly. Khadra caught the blade in her left hand. It cut through her glove and into the meat of her palm. She clenched harder. Her blood ran down the steel.
“Do you think,” she said, voice low and shaking, “we have not laid eyes upon death before?” She pulled the vile creature close and buried her axe in its chest so deep the blade stuck out from its back.
Morn, still pinned beneath the antlered creature, finally drew a chisel and drove it into the thing’s ear. It spasmed. He rolled, got one knee under it, and used his maul like a ram, smashing the horned head sideways and into the blue fire. The fire climbed eagerly over the corrupted flesh.
The last hunter turned to flee. The pale Fey moved, although bound and bleeding as he was, he swept one foot into the fire and kicked ash into the hunter’s eyes. It screamed. Brunnak’s shield flew across the camp like a slab torn from a wall. It struck the hunter between the shoulders and drove its face into the stone.
Silence returned, broken only by Morn’s breathing and the soft crackle of magic flame eating dead corruption.
Khadra cut the prisoner’s bonds and the pale Fey swayed but did not fall. He placed one hand over his heart another on his forehead and bowed with such grace that even blood could not ruin it. “I am Saelyon of the Hollow Court,” he said. His voice was gentle, but there was iron under it. “You have my life.”
Brunnak retrieved his shield. “Keep it. Tell us why demons hunt you beneath our mountain.”
Saelyon looked toward the southwest passage. “They are moving.”
Morn pressed cloth to his bleeding arm. “Everything moves if chased hard enough.”
Saelyon shook his head. “No. Not just scouts or raiders. Hosts, whole Chains of them. Brood scores and siege beasts dragged with hooks, abyssal priests of the cursed flames. They traverse roads under the Spine where they have not roamed for centuries. It seems like Othmog, or what’s left of it is pouring into Evernight. I came to warn the stone folk of Nur Modan. I mean we came, me and my companions, all lost now.”
Khadra’s face hardened. “How many?”
The pale Fey hesitated and that hesitation was an answer enough.
Brunnak stepped close. “How many?”
“Enough to drown your lower gates in flesh,” Saelyon said. “Enough to rise beneath the eastern halls if they find the old throat.”
Morn looked at the dead abominations. “And these?”
“Hunters. Pale fey that fell to abyssal corruption. Sent for us. Others will follow.”
As if called by his words, an unnerving horn sounded far away. This was not a Thergen one. It produced a wet, low, curling note that moved through the cavern walls like creeping doom. Even the twin fires flinched toward it like seeking their maker.
Khadra lifted her axe and Brunnak looked at Morn. “Can you guide us back faster?”
“Yes, but not in his condition.” Morn looked at Saelyon’s battered form.
“That was not a question asking your consent.” Khadra scoffed.
“And that was not an answer lacking it.” Brunnak tended to speak the last word.
The horn sounded again, a tiny bit closer.
Saelyon closed his eyes. “They have my blood. They will follow where I walk.”
“Then we walk where stone hates them,” said Khadra.
Morn smiled despite the blood running down his cheek. “Good. I know several unpleasant places. Gathering places, not very cozy for demons. I think I can find our way to one fast.”
They moved at once, while they did not take the same path. For Morn dared not lead them by the one reeking with their scent but relied on his senses and reading the stone in these unknown caverns. He followed through a crack beside the silent river, then along a shelf of dark green mineral that rang like bells under their boots. Behind them came distant cries, more than the four could handle.
Saelyon ran lightly through pain, one hand pressed to his side. Khadra had healed him but there was no time to close the wound fully. His bright hair trailed behind him. Beside the Thergen he looked like a candle flame among anvils, yet he did not falter. Once he stumbled, and Brunnak caught him by the back of his torn cloak with two fingers.
“You weigh less than my breakfast.”
Saelyon blinked. “Is that insult or comfort?”
“With him,” Morn said, “both.”
They reached a narrow bridge of stone over a chasm that breathed heat from below. Across its span grew burning crystals in clusters, and inside each crystal tiny sparks moved like trapped insects. Morn stopped there looking at the lava below.
“This bridge is old.”
“How old?” asked Khadra.
“Old enough that I would not tell my mother I crossed it.”
The cries behind them sharpened and long shapes appeared in the far tunnels. Corrupted fey scouts came first, thin and fast, crawling along walls. Behind them lumbered heavier things, squat demons with horned skulls and limbs ending in blades of bone. Bulks of crooked flesh and chaotic anatomies filled with oozing eyes and mouths. A banner rose among them, made from stitched skin and hung upon a spear of black iron. Upon it burned a sign Khadra knew and hated. Entropy’s insignia. The war priest’s face changed. No weariness left or pain could turn her features that stern. What remained was older than anger and less gentle than faith.
Brunnak planted his shield at the near end of the bridge.
“Morn,” he said, “take the Fey.”
“No.”
“Take him. You fucking slob. The city needs to know.”
“No. We are not leaving you behind like a hinged door.”
Brunnak turned his one clear eye upon him. “Guide.” That word struck harder than command. Morn’s mouth tightened. A guide’s oath was not to die at the proudest place. It was to bring others out.
Khadra placed one of her stone tablets in his hand. It was blank. “For our names,” she said.
Morn closed his fingers around it. “You miserable holy goat.”
She smiled then, and it was terrible because it was warm. “Go.”
Morn seized Saelyon by the arm and pulled him across the bridge, while Brunnak and Khadra stood side by side at its mouth. The first wave hit like rain against a fortress. Brunnak absorbed them. His shield took three bodies at once. He shoved, crushed, hammered. A corrupted scout tried to slip under the shield rim, and he brought his armored knee up into its face, then stamped it flat. Bone blades scraped his breastplate. Spears broke against his shoulder. One demon hooked his wounded neck and pulled. Brunnak headbutted it so hard his damaged helm split the creature’s brow, then smashed its jaw away with the maul into a spray of burning ash.
Khadra fought beside him in arcs of red blood death. Her great axe rose, fell, turned, and rose again. She took hands from wrists, heads from shoulders, legs from bodies. One demon drove a blade into her thigh. She stepped forward, trapping it in her own flesh so the creature could not withdraw, then split it from collar to groin. Blood filled her boot. She did not look down. She was out of prayers but never out of faith.
She was out of prayers but never out of faith.
Morn and Saelyon reached the far side and turned one last time.
“Move!” Brunnak shouted. Instead, Morn took wire from his belt and began wrapping it around the burning crystal at the bridge’s far anchor.
Saelyon stared at him. “What are you doing?”
“Improving architecture.” Brunnak whispered.
“You are breaking it.” Said Saelyon, his eyes widening with realization.
“Sometimes improvement is honest.”
Across the bridge Brunnak was driven back one step, just one was enough to prove there was no chance of survival. Defenders never step back.
A horned demon larger than the rest forced its way through the pack. It wore armor made of ribs, not its own, and dragged a black cleaver that smoked along the edge. Its face had no eyes, only a vertical mouth full of square teeth up until his back and two sets of appendices walked more like insect hands than leg.
It struck Brunnak’s shield and the sound filled the chasm as the shield cracked and Brunnak’s arm broke behind it. The defender made no cry. His hand spasmed once, then clenched the inner grip harder. The demon struck again and the crack widened. A third blow would break through taking his arm off.
Khadra hurled herself at the eyeless demon, axe high. It turned with impossible speed and caught her in the chest with the back of its cleaver. Her breastplate caved inward. She hit the bridge stones and blood burst from her mouth like a thick short-lived fountain. Brunnak slammed his broken shield into the demon’s knee and drove his maul upward beneath its chin. The blow broke teeth and lifted the creature’s head. Khadra, from the ground, hooked her axe behind its leg and pulled.
Together they brought it down and then the smaller demons covered them like a tide. For a moment Morn could not see either friend, only bodies, weapons, splashing blood and the flicker of Khadra’s axe rising once, twice, again. Saelyon gripped Morn’s shoulder. “We must go.”
Morn twisted the last wire. “Not yet. We have only one chance Fey.”
Brunnak emerged from the crush with one demon hanging from his back, biting through the mail at his shoulder. Another clung to his leg. He dragged both as he rose. His shield was broken in half then. He used the remaining piece like a butcher’s slab, smashing faces away. Khadra was bleeding beside him, her life draining away. Her chest armor was ruined, and each breath painted her beard red. She had lost her helmet, and her white temple braid was dark with blood, her will alone still held on her axe.
She began to chant, whispering at first. “To Thera, who received us.”
Brunnak answered, voice thick. “To Ydor, who guarded us.”
They stepped backward together onto the bridge as the demons followed. Morn understood then. They were not holding it anymore. Drawing as many as they could onto the span for him to send them to the melting pit became their only purpose. Khadra looked across the chasm at him. Her eyes found the blank tablet in his hand.
“Tell them,” She yelled with a cracked voice. “Tell them the deep roads are not empty.” Brunnak lifted his maul in salute. “And tell Hadruk his tunnel is ugly.”
Morn laughed once. For the first time it broke in his throat. Then he struck the wire wedge with his maul. The burning crystals screamed. Light burst through them, not outward but inward, as if the bridge swallowed a star.
In that heartbeat she looked upward, not toward the ceiling, but beyond all stone. “Mother,” she said. Then her axe broke free and she leapt into the falling mass chanting her rites. The chasm swallowed them. Heat roared up. Bodies struck the lava below. Demons screamed until the heat took their voices. They could withstand fire but not this. A flash of red lit the underside of the cavern, then vanished. Dust and stone rolled over the far ledge.
Saelyon said nothing and for once, neither did Morn standing with his maul lowered. They fled after that, because grief is no shield and the dead had purchased movement, not mourning. The pale Fey led when Morn’s memory failed, for some paths beneath the mountain belonged to the races below. They crawled through a tunnel of roots made of crystal. They waded a stream that whispered their childhood names. They passed a wall where shadows of winged things were burned into stone, though no bodies lay nearby. Twice they heard hunting horns far behind them. Once they saw lanterns moving below in a cavern, so vast that clouds had formed beneath its roof. At last, after hours without measure, Morn found his chalk mark. It was the tenth. He leaned and kissed it as if the mark was spelling home.
Then he remembered the stone might swallow it and spat instead. They climbed further upwards to the known caverns. By the time they reached the rift near the mining shaft, Morn’s arm had swollen black around the bite. Saelyon could barely stand. The guards at the breach nearly struck them down before recognizing the guide’s beard and the pale Fey’s raised hands. Old Hadruk was there. He stood and looked past Morn but only two had returned. No one asked where Brunnak and Khadra were, they knew. That too is a mercy of the Thergen. No words when loss is evident.
Morn gave them the blank tablet. On it, with shaking hands, he carved two names:
Brunnak Veyr.
Khadra Theral.
Trembling he remarked: “The only friends of Morn.” A single tear broke down his cheek like a thin trail amongst crusted dust. Then below them he carved a warning, deeper than names:
Saelyon of the Hollow Court was brought before the wardens of Nur Modan before the next bell. He spoke of a demonic horde moving southwest beneath the Spine. Countless, a throng of disaster spinning in Therra’s bowels leveling all life in its path. Was it targeting their city? No one knew, but the surface races were warned.
The gates of Cail Rim were reinforced and the lower armies were summoned. Rune crafters descended with stone chains and living braces. Priests burned white incense in every under-temple. The defenders oiled their shields and tested the rims. Across Nur Modan, hammers rang through the night, not just in labor, furnaces burning with war in their minds.
As for Morn Gald, he lived but that is not always the kinder ending.
The bite took three fingers from his left hand before the priests stopped the corruption. The scars on his face would never fade. His beard would grow white along one side though he was not yet old. Some nights he would wake, swinging his maul at bridges that were no longer there. Some mornings he drank nothing stronger than water and stared at the eastern mists until someone insulted him back to life.
When asked what he saw beneath the mountain, he would say, “Bad roads, worse company.” When pressed, he would speak the truth. He told them of Brunnak, who held a bridge with a broken arm and a broken shield. He told them of Khadra, who leapt smiling into fire because death had failed to frighten her. He told them of the pale Fey who crossed half of Evernight to warn people not his own. And then, if the hall had grown too quiet, Morn would lift his cup with his remaining fingers and say,
“Next time the mountain trembles, send someone thinner.”
Darkness would hold outside for years; the slopes would be infested, the valleys scorched, the men’s towns demolished, but the city would be safe and sealed until light broke again. Until the drums of Nur Modan sounded and the names of Brunnak and Khadra chanted, now part of Thergen battle hymns. Because the stone never forgets.
— As recorded by Eonod of Oemon, from the survivor's words
