I step forward, bones clicking against stone. The sound echoes in the hush following Veradin's decree. Dwarven warriors watch me, their visors concealing faces, but their white-knuckled grips on weapons speak volumes. I am not trusted. Not welcome.

  But I am needed.

  The elder dwarf's steel-ringed beard dangles across arm as he points toward the descending tunnel.

  His fingers curl like a smith's hammer striking hot metal. "The old mining shaft leads to the great crack," he says, voice rough as unpolished stone. "That's where it started. That's where they still crawl."

  None dare name what they are.

  I turn toward the sealed gates where medics carried Eimhar beyond my reach. His life pulses within the bone shard lodged in his chest, but distance already weakens our connection. The dwarven healers will tend him as they see fit, whether they respect my intervention or not.

  Remove my bone fragment carelessly, he dies. Leave it untouched, he may live.

  It lies beyond my power now.

  I face the waiting tunnel, leaving Maha Marr's gates behind.

  The darkness ahead feels absolute, a thing of age and malice.

  The tunnel slopes downward, each step carrying me deeper into earth. Dwarven-hewn walls give way to cruder cuts, as if the ancient miners lost patience or precision. Black veins spider through stone, ore corrupted by something that seeped up from below.

  Rune-etched lanterns dot the passage at uneven intervals. Their light gutters, starved from neglect. Blue-white glows that once guided dwarven work crews now barely pierce the gloom.

  I move without sound, each step placed with deliberate care. The path carries only the weight of silence. At the tunnel's mouth, dwarven warriors cluster in their steam-driven armor. None go first, though they follow.

  "You go first." The words scrape against stone. "See if the dark takes you."

  I do not acknowledge them. Their fear means nothing to my purpose.

  The tunnel bends sharp left, and there, a crack splits the floor of stone. The fissure drops away into absolute black.

  Beyond that void, something exists.

  Not a presence that watches or waits. Simply a wrongness that is. It permeates the rock itself, taints the very air with a corruption that has no smell, no taste, yet fills every memory of sense.

  Dwarven script marks the walls, growing sparser the deeper I descend. Warnings in runes untouched by fire or claw.

  The last I pass reads:

  HERE LIES THE SEALED KINGDOM. THE DARK BELOW IS NOT OURS. GO NO FURTHER.

  This deep beneath the earth, something stirs that was never meant to touch the world of light and air.

  I move forward.

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  Dwarven warriors who had followed behind retreat, their steam-driven armor clanking against stone. None follow me into this depth. Their fear speaks volumes, they who carved kingdoms beneath mountains now huddle in their last refuge, afraid of what lurks below.

  For this reason I can see why he burns.

  I keep going through the crack.

  Ancient scaffolding groans beneath my weight. Weathered wood crumbles to powder, sending me dropping through layers of abandoned mining works. I land without sound on uneven stone, the fall meaningless to one who cannot break.

  The tunnel before me twists downward, its walls widening until they vanish entirely into darkness. I stand at the precipice of a vast cavern, bones sensing the void ahead. The gloom here devours what little light filters down from above. Another step forward and there is nothing beneath my foot.

  I fall.

  I move forward.

  The last echoes of dwarven voices fade far above, consumed by stone. Aeternus hungers as I descend deeper into tunnels untouched by mortal feet for ages.

  A presence weighs upon these depths, heavy as smoke, clinging to walls, pressing against stone and bone alike. This is something lost to time before gods split light from dark.

  I hear nothing but my own movement.

  The ground cracks beneath me. Small fractures spread, remnants of old earthquakes or something shifting in the deep. I step lightly, adjusting my stance. I feel the space beyond the rock, the vast hollowness waiting below.

  Then I see it.

  Another crack, greater.

  A great nothing, where light does not dare gather.

  At its edges, dwarven scaffolding clings like brittle bones, half-collapsed into the void. Rusted pulleys hang from thick ropes, remnants of old mining lifts. Long severed.

  Here, the last dwarves once stood, before they fled. Before they left Brannug to his burning sacrifice.

  And here, something else remains.

  The stone hums beneath my feet. A vibration, too steady to be natural, too rhythmic to be mere shifting earth.

  A pulse, deep below. Not a heartbeat, not breat, something else, something worse.

  The deeper dark is not empty.

  I scan the ruins of the mining lifts. The largest remains half-intact, its wooden beams brittle, but its frame still anchored to the tunnel's ledge. Chains dangle into the abyss, vanishing into black. The mechanism is long dead, rust locking its gears in place.

  I step forward, testing the chain with a bone-clawed hand.

  It groans but holds. Not strong enough for a dwarf, not for their war-machines.

  But I am not burdened by weight as the living are.

  I grasp the chain, shifting my skeletal form for the descent.

  Rib-legs tighten. Limbs adjust. Claws dig into links, securing my grip.

  Then I step off the edge.

  The chasm swallows me.

  Darkness rises. The last flickers of runic light from the dwarven tunnels vanish above me. I descend hand over hand, the chain rattling under my grip, sending echoes spiraling downward.

  The pulse grows stronger.

  Then, movement.

  Below.

  A faint glow stirs in the abyss, something shifting in the deep.

  Shapes flicker against the black. Tall. Withered. Watching.

  I fall faster.

  My feet find purchase on ancient stone. The chain sways above, disappearing into darkness that even my hollow gaze cannot pierce.

  Around me spreads the bones of a forgotten city.

  These are not the clean-hewn halls of dwarven make.

  No mortal hands shaped these monuments. Broken columns thrust upward, resembling nothing that bones remember. They bear no mark of chisel or saw - as if they grew from the bedrock itself.

  Dust lies thick here, undisturbed.

  My claws leave the first tracks these stones have felt since he burned. The ruins extend beyond my sight. Half-buried structures hint at things that would corrupt mortal minds.

  But I am not mortal.

  At the plateau's heart looms an obsidian gate, its surface split by a jagged crack. Ancient glyphs cover its face, not dwarven runes, not human script, but something older. They hold meaning without meaning.

  The dwarves did not build this place. They discovered it. And in their wisdom in their fear, they buried it.

  No echo answers my movement. Each step falls silent, sound swallowed by the hungry dark.

  I scan the ruins.

  Aeternus ready. Then I hear it, a scraping noise against stone, deliberate and slow.

  Not the random settling of ancient rock.

  Something else shares this buried kingdom. Something that has waited in the sealed dark.

  I sense its attention now, watching from the shadows between broken pillars.

  I tighten my grip.

  A gust of air rushes through the ruins, though no wind should exist in this sealed abyss.

  Dust stirs. Pebbles shift against ancient stone.

  Then, eyes.

  Pale orbs shine in gloom, unblinking, set deep in elongated skulls that belong to no race I know.

  They emerge.