Volume 01 - Chapter 5: For Whom the Tales Are Told (Part 02)

The path is barely wide enough to traverse. Me and Wolf are forced to duck lest a stalactite impale our skulls. Unlike the rest of the mine, no pickaxes, hammers, or empty ore veins are in sight. Spare the wooden beams, there’s no evidence this shaft was ever in use. No doubt as to why. We’ve reached a—

“Dead end. Figures.” Wolf groans, placing a hand on the bumpy wall.

“A…what?” Mizuka pales.

“I warned you.”

“What else were we to do?!”

“Stop yelling. That obnoxious voice of yours is twice as loud in here.”

“E-Excuse me?!”

“I said shut up.” Wolf covers her ears.

“H-Hold on.” I shimmy between them. “Let’s look around instead of pointing fingers. We might’ve missed something.”

They both snort a ‘hmph’ and set to searching. Koishi still clinging to me, I do the same. There is little to search given this shaft is neither wide nor extends more than a minute of walking. But I do find something.

From a beam hangs a filthy, fraying belt of cloth. Pushing it aside reveals a small alcove—a cave within the cave. Having to crawl on my knees to enter, I find there is but room for one, maybe two people. Koishi asserts the latter by forcing herself inside. We’re too close for my sanity, but my curiosity regarding this secret base overrides my less-than-pure emotions.

It is rounded, a smooth dome of tawny red rock over our heads. More belts of cloth serve as wallpaper. At our feet are the typical signs of this space once being inhabited. The shredded remnants of a blanket and pillow, chipped clay mugs and plates, a bone-dry lamp, and a…book?

Leather-bound and secured shut with a string, it is the least decayed of what remains. Opening it reveals it to be journal given the inconsistent, handwritten text. Many pages are missing, shredded paper near the spine suggesting they were torn out in a hurry.

What remains are a handful of pages with faded, mostly illegible ink. That said, many lines are readable, just not to me or Koishi. Like Marigold’s book, this too is written in another, likely ancient, language.

“Found something,” I say, as we squeeze out of the alcove.

“A way out?” Mizuka dashes close with bright eyes.

“…Sorry. Just this.” I hand her the journal.

She smacks me with it. “We don’t have time for you to play archaeologist. What is this?”

I tell her of the alcove.

“That explains why this shaft appears unused. Someone as lazy as you carved it out to serve as a hiding place.”

“Maybe he wrote about a way out of here,” says Wolf, peering over Mizuka’s shoulder.

“Did he?” She asks me.

“I can’t read it.”

“Does your uselessness know no bounds?”

“I-It’s written in Sabigo.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Then it may be of some use after all.” She flips through its brittle pages with a gentle hand. “This is indeed an ancient language, but not Sabigo. It was likely penned a few centuries since my last awakening. I can read it, however. Here goes…”

A devil haunts these mines. Every night, as we return to work after supper, the baying begins. Echoing through these tunnels for hours at a time is the weeping of some foul beast. We all thought ourselves mad at first, long hours without sunlight giving many nightmares. The first week, it proved a mere annoyance. But on the night of the full moon, one of our own vanished. Had he fallen down a sinkhole or been crushed by a collapsing tunnel, we’d have found evidence, many lives being lost in such ways. Yet there was none. The beast was to blame. This much, everyone but the foreman was sure. And he wouldn’t allow us to depart this unholy realm until every vein ran dry.

I saw her for the first time. A woman in the mines. The night after the second full moon, after the second disappearance, I saw her barefoot figure scurrying down a dried-up shaft. Giving chase, I reached the end but found no sign of her. No woman has ever come close to these mines, much less entered. The stress of working with that devil on the loose must be driving me to delusion.

Again, she revealed herself to me. Me alone. The others claim to have seen nothing. As the devil’s screeching ceases, she appears. Flying down dead tunnels, peeking at me from behind mine carts, her fluttering dress dyed amber in lamplight. Unlike the others, I have no wife, no loving embrace to anticipate when our work is finally done. If only I could—

I caught her. Blocking off an adjacent tunnel in advance, I chased her until she had nowhere left to run. She fell to the floor, hiding her face from the light of my lantern. I sat far from her and asked her who she was, among other questions. Yet she made not one answer. We sat in silence for hours. Fearing the others might think me dead, I made my move. Yet as I reached out to take her hand, she pushed me away with immense force and faded into the darkness.

She watches me now. Not bothering to hide. I talk to her from afar. About my work and the lives of the others; my past is too boring to be worth discussing. She makes no sign of understanding or interest, yet stays until I finish. She is not beautiful—covered in dust, long hair matted, her dress in tatters—yet I find myself enamored. She must be real. Were I mad, surely my mind would produce someone open to my advances.

We held hands today. After months of my continuing to talk to her from afar, she sneaked up on me and leaned against my back. I panicked, thinking it the devil, but no. It was my angel wearing a smile. What produced this sudden change, I neither know nor care. She remains voiceless, but her presence is enough.

Half-moon. And yet, another of us is gone without a trace. After the second death, we didn’t dare work on any night with a full moon, but what are we to do now? The foreman refuses to let us leave. The beast has gone, he claims. Indeed, the nightly weeping ceased some time ago, but the devil remains. All know. It lurks where the lamplight doesn’t reach. From now on, we must never be alone. So says the others, but I must be alone—with her.

We have a home. Down a small, abandoned shaft, I carved a space just for us. The others are suspicious of my frequent disappearances, so I only visit her after they’ve gone to bed. They mustn’t find her. She finally speaks to me here, telling me she has no name, that she’s afraid of people, of humankind, as if she didn’t belong to the race herself. Yet she must be. She’s too warm and gentle to be anything else.

So many…corpses…ten gone in one night…this cannot be…we must leave this place. But I cannot leave. I’ll never leave my angel. She’s been crying all night. She too must fear the devil. That must be why she’s always on the move, running away from the beast. So she can hide here without traversing the shaft, I carve another, smaller tunnel in our home for her alone.

Blood trickled down my neck from where he bit me—the devil. Binding me from behind, he dragged me screaming deep within the mines. Yet I still live. Bite marks and scratches alike cover my bloodied body, but I was spared the same wretched fate as my comrades. There are but half of us remaining. Why? Why only me? The others have more to live for than I. It must be for her. I must go to her, save her from the beast.

How could I’ve known? The wispy arms around my neck. The hot tongue dragging across my cheek. The warm lips pressed to mine. They didn’t belong to my angel, but the devil—for they are one and the same. So she tells me with an ocean of tears. My legs beg me to run, but my heart keeps me still.

Full moon. The others are on strike. I alone enter the mines. I do not fear the beast. She promised never to harm me again. Yet this applies to me alone. When I find her, she’s on her hands and knees, head to the ground, face drenched in blood as she feasts on the foreman. Limbs picked clean, ribcage cracked open, the reek of death making bile dance in my throat that can produce no words, not even a scream. Yet I remain—with her.

She spoke for a long time today. About herself. About the beast living inside of her. She is not human, not fully; a byproduct of some mad alchemist’s failed experiment—half-man, half-monster, and cursed by immortality. Yet her monster side doesn’t have full control. Rather, it has little, only the sinister light of the full moon causing it to surface. Hence why she hides far from humankind lest she have prey upon which to feed. We’re to blame for disturbing her. Had we never come, she’d have no cause to fight the beast lurking in the corners of her mind.

With the foreman dead, the others return home, but I remain. No one awaits me there, but here. She speaks of herself again. Of how she lived a life on the run. Of how no matter where she went, others would soon discover her peculiarities: never aging, disappearing at random, the permanent hunger in her scarlet gaze. She was like them, but not. She saw them as the same, but not one treated her the same way. No matter how hard she tried to play the part of human, her monster side always got the better of her. Countless times was she driven from her home or outright hunted by humans. So, she began to hate. To become the monster everyone treated her as. She found a cave to call home and began to do what all monsters do—destroy the lives of humans. For centuries, she stole, destroyed, and murdered, just as the humans expected her to do. But this was too much for her human side. So, she gave that up too and decided to cut herself off from everyone and everything here in these mines. I’m the first to ever treat her—

It’s done. I must depart. My role in her life is over. I love her, but we can have no future together. So she tells me. Tells me to leave before she makes me leave. Farewell, my—

“That’s all,” mutters Mizuka. “The rest is too faded to read.”

“I-It’s too sad.” Koishi sniffles, rubbing her eyes.

Wolf remains quiet, her expression a mix of absolute horror and crippling melancholy.

“Obviously, this is related to the Downer, but we’ve no time to dwell on it. Let’s find this secret tunnel he made for her.” Mizuka tells me to reenter the alcove.

Inside, I tear down belts of cloth until discovering a half-circle tunnel. A tight fit for all but the average female and smaller, but manageable. Not that we have any alternatives. I pop back out and tell them as much. Mizuka insists I take the lead despite my protests. She would but doesn’t want me looking up her or Koishi’s skirt, or so she claims.

“Let’s bail already,” says Wolf, still pale.

Agreeing, I crawl back into the secret base and continue on my knees into the tunnel. Where it goes, well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.