BOOK ONE: THE ASHKORE CHRONICLES
*Three Weeks Before Crysillia's Fall*
Borin Ironfoot had mined Pietrafungo for forty years. His fingers knew every vein of Ferrosporale, every whisper of growing metal. So when the stone screamed, he listened.
The sound came from Tunnel Seven—the deep one they'd been pushing toward the Underworld proper. Not a groan of shifting rock or the pop of gas pockets. This was organic. Afraid.
"Just pressure release," Foreman Thok grunted, his headlamp fungus flickering nervous purple. "Keep digging."
But Borin saw the black veins spreading through the wall's phosphorescent growth. They pulsed like arteries, like something feeding. The Ferrosporale—living metal that had sung to him for four decades—went silent where the black touched.
"Look closer." Borin grabbed Thok's shoulder, forced him to see. "The metal's dying."
"Metals don't die."
"Ours do."
They had forty-seven words for silence now. This particular quiet was *thurvak*—the silence of spores deciding whether to trust new soil. His clan had developed twelve new words just this year, after the Plague taught them that some silences could kill.
"Since when does Rocciascura have deep claims?"
"Since they started paying. Now dig, or find another mine."
That night, Borin found his wife, Dura, in their garden, tending the beard-mushrooms. Their bioluminescence usually pulsed cheerful gold. Tonight, they flickered like dying candles.
"The Matron Spore is whispering," she said. "Says something's wrong in the deep. Says the Ferrosporale weeps."
Three days later, the Plague began.
It started in the deep workers. Black veins spreading through their beard-moss, spores turning gray then black then hungry. They attacked their own families, drinking something that wasn't blood but wasn't not blood either.
Borin led the evacuation of Level Seven. Saved thirty families before Rocciascura's "security forces" arrived.
"Quarantine breach," their captain announced, sealing blast doors. "No one leaves."
Two weeks later, when Clan Rocciascura opened the deep gates and welcomed their new allies, Borin understood. This hadn't been infection. It had been invitation.
He died holding the quarantine line while others fled, his Ferrosporale armor singing one last dirge as corruption ate through living metal. His last thought was a prayer to stone and spore:
*Let someone remember we tried to warn them.*
In the deep, something ancient and patient smiled.
The harvest had begun.
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