The Deep Vein was seven hundred meters below the surface of the Ironfields plateau.
Ryn descended in a mining cage — a stonesteel box suspended on chains, lowered through a shaft cut into living rock, dropping at a speed that made his stomach relocate to somewhere near his collarbones. The cage held twelve. The other eleven were miners — eight Kobolds, two Humans, one Minotaur — wearing the reinforced leather and iron helmets of deep-shaft workers and carrying the tools of their trade: picks, chisels, sample hammers, and the bioluminescent lanterns that the Athenaeum's alchemists had developed specifically for underground work.
