The wind howling down from the jagged peaks of the Frost-Fang mountains was not merely cold. It was hungry. It clawed at the stone walls of the barn and rattled the heavy timber doors where the refugees were huddled in quarantine. Behind the barn, sheltered from the biting gale by the sheer cliff face, a different kind of work was happening.
Lady Lysandra stood in the snow wrapped in three layers of wool and white fur. She looked utterly miserable. Her hands were encased in black lace gloves, and they moved in sharp and jerking rhythms. At her command, ten skeletal warriors dug into the frozen earth with silent and tireless efficiency. They did not use picks or shovels. They used their own bony fingers, tearing at the rock and permafrost like desperate dogs digging for a bone.
Valeria watched them while her breath plumed in the air. She checked the straps on her leather armor to ensure the vials of alchemical fire and flash-bang powder were secure in her bandolier. She felt heavy. It was not just from the weight of the gear but from the weight of the decision she had made. They were leaving the relative safety of the Necrotic Dome to crawl into the throat of the enemy. It was a tactical gamble that terrified her.
"Done," Lysandra said. Her voice was thin and brittle against the wind. "And if my fingers freeze off, Duchess, I am taking yours."
The skeletons stepped back. Their finger bones were worn down to nubs from the abrasion of the granite. They had revealed a dark and jagged fissure in the rock face. It was not a natural cave. The edges were square and hewn by ancient tools, but the timber supports had long since rotted away to leave the entrance looking like a jagged and toothless mouth.
"The Ironclad Mines," Ignis murmured as he stepped forward. He held a lantern, but it was not lit by magic. Inside the glass housing was a stick of chemical phosphorus that glowed with a harsh and cold white light. He adjusted his goggles and squinted into the gloom. "The air pressure is dropping. There is a draft pulling inward. It goes deep."
"It is breathing," Kael said. The Tiger stood at the front of the group with his golden armor dull in the darkness. His left arm was fully healed by the Spirit Essence, and he gripped his tower shield with a strength that reassured Valeria. He did not look like a slave anymore. He looked like a vanguard. "I can smell the staleness. Nothing has lived down there for a century."
Valeria stepped forward. She addressed her family.
"We are going into a mana-vacuum," she said. Her voice was steady despite the cold nipping at her exposed face. "No spells. No cantrips. No casual displays of power. If you light a spark, the swarm above us will sense it through the rock. We use chemistry. We use steel. And we use physics."
She opened her pack and handed out the supplies. There were glass spheres filled with blinding powder and flares that burned on magnesium.
"Lysandra," Valeria added as she turned to the Necromancer. "Your skeletons are constructs, but they are animated by necrotic mana. Keep them on a tight leash. If the Phages sense them, they will be eaten first. Can you mask their signature?"
"I know how to control my pets, Duchess," Lysandra snapped, though she looked nervous. She waved a hand, and the green fire in the skeletons' eye sockets dimmed to mere embers. "They are in low-power mode. Only enough mana to move. They won't draw attention unless they are touched."
"Good," Valeria said. She looked at the dark hole. "Into the dark."
Kael nodded and stepped into the fissure.
The transition was jarring. One moment they were in the biting and dry cold of the surface. The next they were in damp and heavy stagnation. The air smelled of wet rust and old dust. The temperature rose rapidly as they descended because the geothermal heat of the mountain was trapped by miles of insulating stone.
Ignis took the lead while holding the phosphorus lantern high. The light cast long and dancing shadows on the rough-hewn walls. The floor was littered with rusted pickaxes and the remains of ore carts that had collapsed under the weight of time.
"Stop," Ignis hissed after twenty minutes of walking.
He froze and held up a hand. He adjusted the lenses of his goggles by turning a small dial on the side.
"Mana-Void ahead," he whispered. "Ten meters. It is like a bubble of static. If we walk into it, any active enchantments will short out. My goggles are flickering just looking at it."
"Path?" Valeria asked.
"Lysandra," Ignis directed. "Steer your boys to the left. Hug the wall. The void pocket is centered on the tracks."
They navigated the invisible hazard. The mines were a labyrinth of collapsed tunnels and rusted rail tracks. This place had been abandoned a century ago when the Guild declared the ore veins depleted. Valeria knew the truth now. They hadn't been depleted. They had been abandoned because the miners found something they couldn't kill. The silence was absolute. It pressed against their ears like water.
Skritch. Skritch.
The sound came from the ceiling. It sounded like wet leather rubbing against stone.
Kael stopped instantly. He raised his shield slowly and angled it upward.
Above them, Lucian's eyes widened. The Phoenix had his Ember-Sight active, which was a passive biological trait rather than a spell.
"Movement," Lucian squeaked. His voice was barely audible. "Twelve o'clock high. A lot of movement."
Valeria looked up. At first she saw only stalactites hanging like stone teeth. Then the shadows shifted.
They looked like rats, but they were the size of dogs. Their fur was gone, replaced by the same shifting grey geometry that the wolves on the surface had worn. They didn't scurry. They glitched. One moment a rat was ten feet away, and in the next blink it was five feet closer, bypassing the space in between.
"Phage-Rats," Silas whispered as he drew his short swords. The sound of steel sliding against leather was deafening in the silence.
"There are dozens of them," Caspian noted. His grip tightened on his trident. "They are clustering."
The rats shrieked. It was a sound like tearing metal. They dropped from the ceiling.
"Don't cast!" Valeria shouted as a reflex.
A rat lunged for her face. Its jaws unhinged to reveal a void of grey static. Before she could react, a blur of motion intercepted it.
Silas didn't strike the rat. He phased through it. His body turned to grey mist for a fraction of a second, allowing the rat to pass harmlessly through his chest. As he solidified, he spun and drove his sword into the creature's spine. The rat dissolved into grey dust instantly.
"Contact!" Silas yelled.
Two more rats landed on Kael's shield. They bit into the steel, and their teeth sparked against the metal.
Kael didn't panic. He didn't flare his aura. Instead he simply allowed his body to do what it was evolving to do. He engaged his core not to project mana but to generate internal thermal energy.
"Burn," Kael growled.
His armor began to glow cherry-red. The heat coming off him was intense. It was a physical wave of radiation that hit Valeria like an open oven door.
The rats on his shield squealed as their claws began to melt. Kael slammed the shield into the wall and crushed them. The heat instantly cauterized the Phage entities, burning the void-energy out of the physical host before they could drain him.
"Ignis! Flank!" Kael roared.
Ignis threw a flask. It shattered on the ground and released a puddle of alchemical fire. It wasn't magical fire. It was Greek Fire, sticky and chemical. The rats that ran through it caught alight and screeched as they burned.
Caspian moved like a wrecking ball. He used his trident to skewer a rat mid-air, then slammed it into the ground. His skin, hardened by the Spirit Water, deflected the claws of the ones swarming his legs.
It was a brutal and messy melee. Without magic they had to rely on speed and violence. The tunnel became a slaughterhouse of grey dust and burning fluid.
Valeria stayed in the center flanked by Lysandra's skeletons. She used her crossbow to fire bolts tipped with silver. She put a bolt through the eye of a rat leaping for Ignis.
"They keep coming!" Lysandra shouted. She swung her fan to direct a skeleton to intercept a rat. The skeleton shattered, its bones turning to dust as the Phage ate the necrotic mana holding it together. "My boys are food to them!"
"Push forward!" Kael ordered. "We need to get to the shaft!"
He became a battering ram. Glowing with heat, he charged down the tunnel and smashed rats aside. The Phages recoiled from his touch, unable to consume the raw thermal energy quickly enough to survive the physical impact.
"Clear!" Silas shouted as he decapitated the last rat in the immediate vicinity.
The tunnel fell silent save for the heavy breathing of the team and the crackle of the chemical fire.
Kael cooled down. The red glow faded from his armor. He looked at the pile of grey dust.
"They are weak individually," Kael noted, wiping ash from his visor. "But they are endless. We need to move before the noise draws the rest of the hive."
They pushed deeper. The tunnel began to slope sharply downward. The air grew hotter and smelled of sulfur and ancient decay.
Finally they reached a vertical shaft. Rusted iron ladders descended into the blackness.
"This is it," Ignis said as he checked the map. "The main lift shaft. It drops two miles straight down. The bottom connects to the pre-Imperial strata."
Valeria looked at the narrow tunnel they had just come through. She could hear skittering in the distance. More rats.
"Lysandra," she said. "Seal it."
The Necromancer nodded. She commanded her remaining skeletons to attack the wooden support beams of the tunnel entrance they had just exited.
The wood splintered. The roof groaned.
"Run!" Kael ordered.
They scrambled onto the ladders and began to descend. Above them the tunnel collapsed with a thunderous roar. Tons of rock crashed down, sealing the entrance to the Ironclad Mines forever. Dust billowed down the shaft and choked them.
Valeria looked up at the cloud. There was no going back to the surface now. The only way out was through the heart of the mountain.
"Down," Valeria said, gripping the cold iron rungs. "We go down."
The descent was grueling. The ladder was old, and flakes of rust coated Valeria's palms, mixing with the sweat of exertion. Every twenty feet the temperature seemed to rise a degree. It wasn't the dry cold of the surface anymore; it was a humid, suffocating heat that radiated from the planet's core.
Below her she could hear Ignis counting the rungs under his breath, a habit from his military days to keep focus. Above her, Kael descended with heavy, rhythmic thuds, his shield strapped to his back.
"How far?" Caspian called out. His voice echoed strangely in the vertical tunnel.
"Another mile," Ignis replied. "Save your breath."
Valeria's arms burned. She focused on the rhythm. Hand over hand. Foot over foot. Don't look down. Don't think about the tons of rock between you and the sky.
After what felt like hours, Ignis stopped.
"Ground," he called.
Valeria dropped the last few feet, landing on solid stone. Her legs wobbled.
They were in a small antichamber. The floor was smooth basalt. Ahead of them was a massive archway, blocked by a gate of black iron.
"The gate to the Deep Roads," Ignis whispered, raising his lantern.
The gate was covered in runes, but they were dark. The magic that had once powered them was long gone.
Kael stepped forward. He placed his hands on the bars. He didn't use magic. He used the raw strength of a Tiger Hybrid.
He pushed. The hinges screamed in protest, a sound that pierced the eardrums. Slowly, agonizingly, the gate swung inward.
A blast of stale air hit them. It smelled of ozone and mushrooms.
They walked through the archway.
Ignis raised the lantern higher. The light spilled out into the space beyond.
Valeria gasped.
They were not in a tunnel. They were on a ledge overlooking a cavern so vast that the darkness swallowed the light. But in the distance, illuminating the void, were millions of patches of bioluminescent fungi. They clung to the stalactites and the walls, creating a galaxy of blue and green stars underground.
And below them, bathed in the eerie light, lay a city.
It was monumental. Buildings carved from the living rock rose hundreds of feet into the air. Bridges spanned bottomless chasms. It was a metropolis of stone, silent and dead.
"The City of Silences," Ignis whispered. "The Dwarven capital. I thought it was a myth."
"It is real," Valeria said. "And the Hive Queen is somewhere down there."
She looked at the stairs winding down from the ledge. They were wide enough for a carriage.
"Stay close," she ordered. "If the rats were the welcoming committee, I don't want to meet the guards."
They began the descent into the city. The silence was absolute. It felt heavy, pressing against their minds.
As they walked, Valeria noticed something. Along the road, spaced at regular intervals, were statues.
They were Dwarven warriors carved from grey stone. They held axes and hammers. They looked incredibly lifelike.
Too lifelike.
Valeria paused next to one. She activated her Monocle.
[Target: Unknown.]
[Material: Stone?]
[Warning: Quantum Displacement Detected.]
"Don't touch them," Valeria whispered. "There is something wrong with these statues."
"They are just rocks," Silas said, sniffing the air. "They have no scent."
"That is what worries me," Valeria said.
She looked at the statue's face. The eyes were blank, staring ahead.
But as she turned to walk away, she felt a prickle on the back of her neck.
She spun around.
The statue hadn't moved. But its eyes... she could have sworn they were looking at her back a second ago. Now they were looking forward again.
"Move," Valeria said, her voice tight. "Faster."
They hurried down the stairs, leaving the silent sentinel behind. But Valeria couldn't shake the feeling that the moment they turned the corner, stone feet would start to move.