Shaft Seven

The moment he stepped into the tunnel, Avii immediately knew where he was. To him, it felt as though he had been there just yesterday, venturing through the very same worksite. With a glance, he even found the scuff mark he himself had left in the stone, a secret marker the miner used to track how far along the other shifts got in his downtime.

Moving his gaze to the distant signage, he could still see the boxes that he knew to be full of spare equipment. He also knew that the occasional arcanzcore charge could be found there at the bottom of the chests. That was, so long as the forgetful Technical Specialists remembered to replenish them before clocking out.

It was there that he saw them lying on the ground. Dust covering their darkened forms. A pair of MULEs, long since left idle.

Without hesitation, Avii raced over to the bodies and examined them. He rolled the suits over, eying the damage done by the flash of light he had long since seen. The force of the detonation, orders of magnitude less inside the mountain than out, had still been enough to throw the armours against the dense walls. The force of the blow had cracked open the MULEs’ metal casing like the shell of a nut struck by a hammer. Inside the split suit, the bodies of Maldainians he had worked with had been reduced to the same dust that choked out the sky.

Reaching down, he rubbed a hand over the collar, his suit brushing away the cremated remains of his friends enough to see the branding. In the same spot where he had put out a thousand cigarettes on his suit, he saw their names.

“Reggie.” He whispered, remembering the boy’s smile and his eagerness to earn enough money one day to leave the mines and become a jeweller.

“Cait.” He continued, reading the second one aloud while remembering the operator with fiery red hair and a tough-as-nails attitude.

“Are those…” Ostave began, hesitating as he searched for the right thing to say. “Maldainians?”

“More,” Avii replied as he stood and gave the suits a final glance before beginning to search the crates. “They were my friends.”

“Avii…I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. They’ve been gone a long time. At least their death was quick.”

Avii set to work searching the crates, finding various tools like pickaxes and shovels properly stored away. Then, with a flick of his thumb across the rune set into the bottommost drawer of the final box, he watched as magic transferred from his suit to the container. With a dull click, the latch released and the reinforced drawer slid open. Revealing a smirk, he withdrew a trio of arcanzcores bound together into a single, footlong cylinder. A mining charge.

“Bless you, Jamie,” Avii remarked, taking the ancient explosive and hooking it to his chest. “At least you did something right before you met your end. Rest in peace, you bloody ass.”

“Avii, are those more of your people?” Ostave suddenly asked, shifting on the back of the suit to reach an arm out. “Over there?

With a quick shift of his head, Avii expected to find more of his friends from the second shift, but what he found was the opposite. The armour, though bulky and reinforced, was not that of a Maldainian MULE. He could see the arms were lined with familiar thick metal rods and the bodies had not been turned to dust. Instead, they were charred, burnt down to the bone, but still there.

“No,” Avii responded quietly. “Those are Koviks.”

Kneeling before the bodies, Avii touched their badly burnt armour. What he found was that the scorched metal had long since cooled, but, as he flipped over the first, it became more apparent what had transpired before their arrival. Dents marked the cuirass, the heat from the strikes so intense that they melted deep into the metal. As Avii wondered whether the damage had been caused by fire, lightning, or something else, he ultimately knew the answer was the same.

“Is that—” Ostave began only to have Avii cut him off.

“Golems.”

“Here? In this place now?”

“I don’t know. These Koviks are long since dead. But we should be careful.”

At this, Avii felt icy needles race down his spine in the moments before the faintest cackle reached his ears. He turned his head with a start, staring towards a trio of diverging tunnels. The sound had come from the one on the right, farthest away from where they had emerged. Away from where the witch would have been.

“Did you hear that?” Avii asked, squinting his eyes to better see through the darkness before him.

“Hear what?”

The cackle returned as the witch’s voice once more guided him down the right path.

“That,” Avii answered, turning to meet Ostave’s confused stare. "Do you hear it?"

“I—” Ostave thought for a moment, looking to Avii and then at the tunnels before them. “Avii, I don’t hear anything.”

With a nod, Avii suddenly understood. Understood without any additional information that what he was looking for would be down that tunnel. Down the path that the witch led him. Towards his destiny. His purpose. His fate.

From his kneeling position, Avii reached over his shoulder and removed Ostave from his back. Setting the orc down gently near the charred armour, he reached over and checked the arcanzcores left in the suits. With a faint yellow glow meeting his gaze, he knew that they still worked. And, though their life was nearly at an end, the suits appeared to function as well. Function at least well enough for the purpose Avii had for them.

“Ostave—”

“No.” The knight responded firmly. “I know what you’re going to say. I won’t allow you to do this alone.”

“It’s better if I do. I can move faster than them. You’ll only slow me down.”

“But what if they get you? What if I could have helped?”

“What I want is for you to get into this armour here and follow that central path there. That’ll take you to the elevator topside. Then head north. That’s left from the mountain entrance. If the golems still move and you survive to make it home, save as many as you can. Go east into the Sea of Regrets where there are island chains aplenty. Survive as long as you can. You and your family.”

“Avii—”

But the man didn’t wait to debate the discussion. Instead, he turned and followed the laughter. Even as Ostave shouted after him, he ignored the words. Ignored the emotions. He needed to move quickly. Because if he knew Ostave, the moment he crawled into the broken armour, he would be coming after Avii. Racing towards suicide at the hands of the golems. Golems that, very well, may not show interest in the Maldainian.

Eventually Ostave’s shouts faded into the distance, leaving only the clanks of heavy footfalls. But just as Avii grew used to the sound of his racing MULE and the sight of the darkness before him, something appeared. In the distance, a faint red glow became brighter with every rushed step until, finally, he came to a blasted end of a tunnel.

It was apparent that someone had once decided to blow their way through the wall in pursuit of treasure. Searching the area before moving on, Avii investigated the scorch marks. That was when he realized the excavation had been done long ago. Realized that it was likely the very day that the detonation had occurred. And while he couldn’t be certain, he wondered if what he was about to find was the very culprit of his nation’s demise.

Slowly moving forward, Avii watched as the blasted cave walls gave way to tiled floors. Over the course of a few steps, he was transported from the roughly hewn stone of the mines into a grand, ancient hallway. The space stood twenty feet tall and half as wide. Its walls were made of a finely crafted marble. But the longer Avii looked through the red light of the space, the more he realized it was in no way such a mundane material. Instead, what he had stumbled upon was a masterwork of the same ore that Maldainian artisans had added to create the MULEs' armour. An iron nearly impossible to work yet crafted into every surface as though it were clay meant to be easily sculpted.

Reaching out, Avii placed a hand on the metal and admired its fine quality. Its inlaid runework and polished surface. Though he had seen remnants of the ancient city within the mountain before, never had he discovered such a pristine site. One so well crafted that it stood up to the test of time.

And as he became lost in thought, a grumble drew him back. It was a familiar groan. Low and rumbling. One that didn’t come from a man, but from a machine. From a golem.

Then, with a turn of his head, Avii saw it approaching from his side. One of the towering golems he had seen in his flight from the prison camp, though this one did not seem aggressive. Instead, it lumbered forward, seemingly unaware of Avii’s presence. Approaching him, it reached the space directly before where he stood and came to a stop. But it did not attack. Instead, with a gentle shift of its body, it marched around him, continuing down the long hallway before disappearing around a corner.

Avii’s racing heart began to calm as he released the breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Grabbing at the breast of his armour, he looked down the length of the hall in the direction the machine had come. Within a few seconds, another golem stepped out from a concealed room and marched forward in the same relaxed manner as the previous. It moved ahead at a slow pace, stepping around Avii’s idle form before disappearing around the same corner. And so, this repeated, as every minute another passed by until Avii felt comfortable enough to follow them towards their destination.

That was where he saw it. A round room bathed in an ominous red light. The curved walls of the space were surrounded by golems that looked Avii’s way as he entered. Near where they stood, armoured bodies littered the floor. Dozens of them. Some were wearing Maldainian MULEs, while others appeared to be Kovika in design. The bodies were all in different states of decay, with some turned to dust, others burnt to a crisp, and a single skeleton in a Maldainian MULE, clutching a piece of parchment.

At this sight, Avii shifted his gaze back to the golems that stood guard over the space, but they did little more than watch his movements. That, and the runic symbol at the center of the room. Avii stared at it next. A labyrinth tile that glowed brightly, eager to accept the golems that marched toward it. He watched as, with every minute, another golem stepped atop the rune before disappearing to somewhere else in the world.

And though it glowed bright, the tile was not the source of the light that illuminated the space. Instead, it came from behind a table of familiar-looking runes. Symbols he had seen in his vision. But before the knot could settle in his gut, the source of the light caught his eye. It came from a curved plane of glass that overlooked a grand cavern, its walls covered with white structures made red by what bubbled at the bottom. Less than a thousand feet below, a lake of magma churned angrily, only to be calmed near the center of the basin where a spire protruded from the molten core like a spear driven into the earth.

“They found it,” Avii whispered, his heart racing as he drew close enough to place his gauntlet to the glass. “They found the core of the lost city.”