The City of Gears

"Efficiency is the god of the mountain. If a gear does not turn, it is replaced. If a worker does not dig, he is discarded. The machine must never stop." —Decrees of King Aurum, Tablet IV

The Pack - The High Passes

The ground did not stop shaking.

Zalim had cut down the first wave of Elementals with terrifying ease, his black blade shearing through stone as if it were parchment. But as the echoes of the falling giants faded, a deeper, more resonant thrumming began in the roots of the mountains.

"More," Aga growled, wiping stone-dust from his face. He pressed his ear to the canyon wall. "Deep. And many."

"They are tracking us," Gaidan rasped, mounting his horse with a grimace of pain. "The Sanguine didn't just send scouts. They woke the whole damn range."

For two days, the Pack did not sleep. They ran.

The journey to Glimmerdeep became a harrowing game of cat and mouse, played against the landscape itself. Boulders shifted when they shouldn't. Landslides triggered with suspicious precision. The very path seemed to writhe beneath their hooves, trying to buck them off into the ravines.

Aga led them with a frantic, predator's focus. He kept them off the main road, guiding the horses up goat paths and through dry riverbeds, trying to mask their scent and their vibration.

But the thrumming followed. A relentless, grinding heartbeat in the stone.

"They are herding us," Zalim observed on the second night, watching a ridge-line crumble into dust a mile back. "They are pushing us toward the capital."

"Why?" Faren wheezed, clinging to his saddle.

"Because that is where the mouth is," Aga said.

Elara - The Ridge of Glimmerdeep

They crested the final ridge at dawn, their horses blown and foaming. The pursuit had stopped at the valley's edge, as if the wild Elementals feared what lay below.

Elara adjusted the focal lenses of her spectacles, squinting against the stinging, acrid wind.

"By the Arcana," she whispered.

Glimmerdeep did not welcome visitors; it processed them.

The Dwarven capital wasn't hidden underground, as the storybooks claimed. It was carved into the canyon walls, a vertical metropolis of iron, brass, and stone that stretched a mile high. Massive pipes, thick as redwood trees, snaked across the cliff face, venting rhythmic pulses of black smog that blotted out the sun.

It was a marvel of engineering. It was a cathedral of industry.

And to Elara’s eyes, it looked like a cancer.

"Thermal output is... staggering," she whispered, checking the brass gauge on her wrist. The glass was cracked, but the needle was vibrating against the red. "The ambient temperature here is twenty degrees higher than the ridgeline. The mountain is running a fever."

"It's loud," Faren muttered, covering his ears.

He was right. The air thrummed with a low, constant vibration—the grinding of a million gears, the hammer-fall of the deep forges. It was a heartbeat of metal and steam.

"It sounds like money," Gaidan grunted. "And war."

They stopped their horses at the edge of the shadow cast by the Great Gate. It was a slab of iron fifty feet tall, sealed tight. The road leading to it was empty, save for the abandoned carts of traders who had been turned away.

"Quarantine," Zalim observed, his voice cutting through the industrial roar. "That is what the runners said. A plague of 'Stone-Lung'."

Elara raised her scanning device, aiming it at the battlements flanking the gate. She could see the guards—dwarves in heavy, gold-plated armor, standing rigid at their posts.

"Magnification," she commanded, twisting the bezel on her lens.

The view zoomed in. She studied the guards. They weren't moving. They weren't scanning the road. They were staring straight ahead, their eyes fixed on nothing.

"Readings are anomalous," Elara said, her mind racing. "Pupil dilation is fixed. Respiration is shallow, rhythmic. They aren't alert. They're... cycling."

"Sleeping?" Aga asked, reigning his massive war-horse next to hers.

"No," Elara said. "Sedated. Or entranced. They are performing the function of guarding without the cognitive processing."

"Puppets," Zalim translated.

A deep tremor shook the ground behind them. Aga turned. On the ridge they had just descended, dust was rising. The Elementals had stopped waiting. They were coming down the slope.

"We are caught between the hammer and the anvil," Gaidan said, drawing his dagger. "We can't fight a mountain, and we can't knock on that gate."

"We need a side door," Aga stated. He looked at the sheer cliff walls, the iron gate, the sleeping guards. "And we need it now."

"Smugglers' routes?" Faren suggested, panic rising in his voice.

Aga shook his head. "The rock here is dead. No game trails. No roots." He pointed to the massive pipes spewing smoke high above them. "But the mountain breathes."

Elara followed his finger. He was pointing to a jagged fissure in the canyon wall, several hundred feet up, obscured by a cloud of venting soot. A rusted maintenance catwalk dangled precariously near it.

"That is an exhaust vent," Elara analyzed. "Likely for the primary slag furnaces. The heat would be lethal."

"Not if the fires are banked," Aga said. He sniffed the air. "The smoke is grey, not black. They aren't smelting iron right now. They are burning... something else."

"What?" Faren asked nervously as the ground shook again.

"Old bones," Aga said grimly. "We climb. Now."

The Chimney

The climb was an exercise in misery.

They had abandoned the horses in a box canyon, praying the Elementals would lose the scent, and hiked up a goat path to reach the maintenance catwalk. Now, they were inside the "Chimney"—a slanted, circular shaft of smooth stone, ten feet wide, slick with centuries of accumulated soot and grease.

It was hot. A suffocating, dry heat that sucked the moisture from their skin.

Aga took the lead. He uncoiled the heavy rope from his pack, securing one end around his waist. He moved with a surprising grace for a man of his size, hauling himself up the dark throat of the mountain using his hunting knife and a pry-bar to find purchase in the stone seams.

When he reached a sturdy iron stanchion twenty feet up, he braced his legs against the walls.

"Send him up," Aga called down, his voice echoing in the shaft.

Down below, Zalim helped secure the loop of the rope around Gaidan’s chest, under his good arm. The soldier’s face was pale, beads of sweat cutting through the soot on his forehead.

"I can climb," Gaidan muttered, his pride stinging more than his broken bone.

"With one arm, you are cargo," Zalim said simply, checking the knot. "Do not wiggle, for you are the most precious of cargo."

Gaidan scowled, looking up at the rope as it went taut. "This is undignified. Being hoisted like a sack of turnips. This is a ride for the scholar. Or a Senator."

"I would happily trade places, Sergeant!" Faren squeaked from below, eyeing the darkness nervously.

"Quiet," Gaidan snapped. "Just... don't look."

Aga heaved. With a grunt of exertion, he hauled Gaidan up the shaft. The soldier dangled, his boots scraping against the stone, his face burning with a mixture of shame and fever. He used his legs to push off the wall, trying to maintain some semblance of military bearing while spinning slowly in the air.

"Almost there, 'Senator'," Aga grunted from above, a hint of amusement in his voice.

When Gaidan finally reached the stanchion, he scrambled onto the ledge, unhooking the rope with aggressive speed. "Never speak of this," he hissed.

"Noted," Aga said, dropping the rope for Elara.

This process—climb, brace, haul—repeated for an agonizing hour.

Elara came next, her mind retreating into cold logic to combat the claustrophobia. Incline: 65 degrees. Air quality: 40% particulate matter. She focused on her boots. Step. Lock. Pull.

Faren brought up the rear, wheezing, his scholar's lungs struggling with the bad air. Zalim didn't use the rope. The desert warrior wasn't climbing so much as flowing up the wall. He moved like a spider, finding handholds that shouldn't exist, his black scimitar strapped to his back, silent as the grave.

"How much further?" Faren gasped.

"Until the heat becomes unbearable," Aga called back, lowering the rope for Gaidan again. "Then we turn left."

"Left?" Elara asked, wiping grease from her spectacles. "The schematics of a standard dwarven ventilation system suggest—"

"I don't know about schematics," Aga growled, hauling the soldier up another ten feet. "I know the breeze. The air is pulling from the side up ahead. Fresh air."

Ten minutes later, Aga stopped. He was bracing himself against a rusted iron grate set into the side of the shaft.

"Here," he grunted. He jammed the pry-bar into the grate. Muscles bunched in his back. With a screech of tearing metal that set Elara’s teeth on edge, the grate popped free.

Cool, metallic air rushed into the shaft.

"Sanctuary," Faren wept, scrambling toward the opening.

They tumbled through the hole, landing on a metal gantry high above the floor of a massive cavern.

Elara dusted the soot from her robes and stood up. She adjusted her spectacles and looked down.

Her breath caught in her throat.

They were in the Foundry District. But it wasn't a foundry anymore.

The cavern stretched for miles, lit by the harsh, reddish glow of magma rivers channeled through iron troughs. Thousands of gears, some the size of houses, turned in the ceiling, driving pistons that hammered the earth.

But it was the floor that terrified her.

Thousands of dwarves and gnomes were working. They moved in perfect, terrifying unison. They swung pickaxes, pushed ore carts, and operated bellows with a mechanical, jerky rhythm.

They were silent. No songs. No talking. Just the clang of metal on stone.

And walking among them, stark against the grey and gold of the dwarves, were figures in crimson robes.

The Sanguine.

They held whips not of mundane leather, but swathed in red energy, dripping black ichor— harvested from the lashers.

"It's not a quarantine," Elara whispered, the horror of the logic settling in. "It's a labor camp."

"Look at the center," Zalim said softly, stepping up beside her.

Elara looked. In the center of the cavern, where the Great Forge should have been, the Sanguine had built something new.

It was a tower of black iron and glass, pulsating with a sick, violet light. Massive cables ran from the tower into the ground, like hypodermic needles driven into the flesh of the world.

"That is not dwarven tech," Faren rasped, leaning heavily on the railing as he caught his breath.

"No," Elara said, her mind reeling at the implications. "It's a siphon. An Etheric extractor on an industrial scale."

"They aren't just mining gold," Aga said, his eyes fixed on the tower.

"They are mining for a King," Elara realized. "They are planning on bleeding the Stone King dry."

The City of Gears had been turned into a vampire. And they were standing in its mouth with its fangs bared.