Volume 1, Chapter 33: Nothing Good Ever Starts With Stairs Down (Patreon)

My Daimon let me know that we had in fact found what was mine beneath Frogflower, because just beyond the bend—where Bri had arrived first—there was a descent leading farther down into something that looked like a literal mining tunnel.

Just below the rocky ledge where all of us had gathered stood a hand-powered mine cart on tracks that looked practically identical to the kind I’d once seen in old westerns. Tiny blue sparks occasionally skipped between the rails for no apparent reason, racing a few feet before vanishing, and the cart itself rocked ever so slightly despite nobody touching it, as though impatient for passengers.

Set into the walls, however, were veins of a strange crystal that at first glance resembled diamond. In some places, they jutted out into the open in formations both small and large—clusters of translucent needles, crooked crystalline flowers, and fist-sized growths, all reflecting Bri’s fiery glow, because she could not contain her curiosity and flew downward already. Some chimed faintly when the air moved through the tunnel, producing delicate and yet mismatched notes.

Some of the crystals had been shattered, and broken fragments lay scattered across the ground beside abandoned mining equipment like pickaxes, buckets, and shovels. A few shards hovered a finger’s width above the dirt instead of resting on it, slowly rotating in place. When we moved along the stairs—all of us silently taking in the view—one particularly small fragment appeared determined to follow my boot whenever I moved, scraping along behind me until I stopped looking at it.

When I bent down to reach for it and pick it up—while I was still on the stone steps—I nearly lost my balance and went face-first onto the ground because Sophie hadn’t noticed me stop and kneed me in the back. Fortunately, once she realized what had happened and stopped, I managed to steady myself leaning against the staff I planted against the stone and grabbing the crystal before it rolled away. I then straightened up and raised my catch to take a closer look.

“My apologies. I didn’t see you stop,” Sophie whispered at the same time.

In my hand, the crystal looked more like an uneven shard of glass than anything valuable. It didn’t move at all, either, or display any mysterious properties. So I slipped it into my pocket and, finally making my way down, began examining the rest of the tunnel.

Inside some of the crystals—especially the veins still embedded in the walls—something like fast-moving, illuminated yellow gas flowed through them. It rushed along branching channels, sometimes splitting, sometimes merging again, occasionally pooling inside larger formations before darting onward. Wherever it passed, the crystal brightened from within.

The result was that entire sections of the tunnel slowly flared and faded at uneven intervals. Not quite rhythmically enough to be a heartbeat, but close enough that my imagination supplied one anyway. It gave the uncomfortable—and admittedly rather beautiful—impression that the cave was breathing around us.

[Event Achievement Points earned: 3. Total Points Earned: 10. Source: “Mine and mine. As it turns out, something that can look exactly the same while representing one concept—say, a written word—can mean something entirely different when translated into another concept, such as observed reality. In any case, you managed to reach this bizarre mine. Let’s hope it doesn’t end with you being buried alive, but merely with your already-dead body getting buried. One can dream, right?”]

“Awesome, um, I got another three little points!” Bri shouted, admiring her reflection in an unusually large crystal. Once all of us had made it down, all the whimsical phenomena we had seen from above quieted, as though the mere act of being observed had made them shy.

“Same here,” Eli replied, and the rest of us murmured to confirm that we had shared in the achievement.

“Tell me, if you can—besides the points, do you also get, how should I put it, commentary?” I asked, rolling my shoulders.

“Of course, mhm!” Bri exclaimed. “I love them. They’re so nice!”

“Nice?” Nicky asked. “Mine just said, wait a second… ‘You found the mine beneath Frogflower. It might be worth asking yourself what comes next, planning your actions, and preparing for the nightmares that will inevitably show up here.’ Something along those lines. That’s how my soul interprets it.”

“Interesting. Truly. My Anima interprets my message quite differently: ‘Where the plain leads, through the mark of civilization, to wounds carved into the earth, the planet weeps crystal tears, hoping for salvation from cruelty carried by mortal hands. The duty of a righteous man is to free not only himself, but all that has been oppressed.’” The lion gave us his version as he placed one massive paw against a crystal just as that glowing gas passed through it.

“So each of us gets personalized messages.” Nicky tapped her chin, looking around. “Maybe the Anima interprets the Daimon’s messages according to our personalities?”

“Probably,” I replied, letting my staff rest against the wall as I picked up a crowbar that had been abandoned on the ground and noticed a shard beside it that also contained some of that self-luminous gas. I kicked it aside so no one else would notice it, then slung the tool over my shoulder and turned back to the others. “So? What do you say? Hi-ho, hi-ho, off to work we go, dwarves?”

“Eh. Lame joke,” Eli replied, while the others completely missed the cultural reference and turned away from me again to look around the tunnel.

In the meantime, I quickly bent down, picked up the shimmering stone, and slipped it discreetly into my pants pocket.

“Are we actually meant to use that?” Sophie asked, walking up to the device, which had stopped swaying once we reached the same level. She stretched out a hand toward it, and the thing suddenly jolted upward, spun toward us, and revealed a jaw made of rusted steel fragments. It snapped like the jaws of a wild dog, trying to bite off the hand she had reached out with.

Sophie’s reaction, however, was quick enough that she kept the limb and only fell onto her backside, while Khufu’Ri lunged at the suddenly much more animated device, grabbed it by the edges of its sides, and held it far enough from himself that the teeth jutting out from its iron plate couldn’t reach him.

But the wheels drove along the tracks with such force that they were actually pushing the lion backward despite him bracing against them.

Wanting to help, I darted in from the side and brought the pickaxe I was already holding down with all my strength, shaking the cart hard enough that two of the wheels lost contact with the rail.

Eli crouched beside it instead of following us immediately. He touched the rail with two fingers, then the wooden sleeper beneath it. “What are you doing?” Nicky asked.

“Trying to figure out whether the rails are activating it or just supplying something it needs.”

“Can your magic tell?”

“Only what forces are going where.” He stood, wiped his fingers against his trousers and he circled around to help Khufu. “But those rails are under tension even with nothing sitting on them! Don't assume anything down here is inert because it isn't moving.”

“But its mouth disappeared when it left the rails!” Nicky shouted and a moment later, appeared on my side as well. “Don’t touch it. I want to know whether putting it back restores the effect.” She added, physically pushing me aside.

When the cart landed back on the tracks and resumed its best effort to carve a hole in lion’s chest, she thrust her right hand forward with her palm aimed at the device, while holding her arm near the elbow with her left hand. Her skin instantly bulged outward, like a wave beginning at her elbow and the rippling motion traveled down her forearm to her hand. It coalesced in the middle of her palm and from there launched in the form of a ball of fat shot like a cannonball. It flew straight into the cart, completely knocking it off the tracks.

The instant it lost contact with the rails, its jaw vanished again, and from its interior spilled chunks of bone, skin, muscle, and what looked like some half-chewed organs. Judging by the shape of one skull that rolled across the stone floor—and by the lower teeth on it, which resembled oversized tusks—it had probably belonged to some unlucky orc.

“It might simply have informed us we weren’t welcome,” Sophie whispered, staring at everything that had just happened.

“You’re not hurt, are you?” One narrow tongue of Bri’s flame reached toward Sophie.

“Not even a scratch,” the lion replied, wiping his forehead with his wrist.

“Um, mhm. I was asking Sophie.”

“I’m unhurt.”

“Stop fussing over each other,” Nicky added, kicking the skull aside, pinching her nose between her thumb and forefinger, and waving her other hand in front of her face. “It reeks in here now. Let’s keep moving.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Bri flashed bright enough to throw everyone’s shadows halfway up the wall.

“On what basis did you choose that passage?” Sophie asked, unaware of my companion’s genius.

“I don’t, um, know. I’m going this way because it was closer. If it’s the wrong way, we’ll come back and take the other one, right?”

“Not much of a method, but preferable to splitting the group,” she replied, now enlightened.

Meanwhile, I pulled out my drawing apparatus, one of the drawing pads I had bought earlier, wedged my staff between my back and the backpack I had slung over my shoulders again, and opened the strange sketchbook to the first page. Using the stringpen, played from the thickest string to the thinnest, with the cymbal set to fine-pen mode, I began drawing simple black lines to serve as a map of our route.

Eli looked over the lines I was drawing, then toward the timber supports. “You handle where we've been. I'll handle whether the ceiling intends to follow us there.”

“Do that,” I replied. His presence was a bit unnerving. He seemed to have an agenda of his own and I could not shook off that feeling around him.

“That is sensible. I should have thought to map the route,” Sophie said, moving closer and looking over my shoulder.

At the same time, she pulled a waterskin from the small bag she carried, poured a little water into her cupped hand, and sprinkled it over the bands of flowers woven into her outfit. While she watered them, she turned two blossoms that had twisted sideways until every flower faced outward again.

Bri and Khufu’Ri, as befitted the daughter of an Egyptian goddess and a half-lion, half-man, walked together at the front of the group through the tunnel, which so far ran straight and sloped gently downward.

Every so often, the ceiling was reinforced with wooden beams forming columns and horizontal supports laid across them. Rails stretched along the ground, while all around us the walls were threaded with those crystalline veins, occasionally lighting our way.

We walked for a good fifteen minutes before the path forked, and guided by sounds coming from one of the branches, we headed in that direction. It was the rhythmic striking of metal against stone, suggesting that some kind of mining work was still going on there.

The closer we got to the sounds, though, the more cautiously we approached. Bri drifted to the back of our little procession toward me, settling into the open cage at the top of my staff and warming me from above.

Khufu’Ri’s ears snapped toward the bend seconds before anyone else reacted. His nose moved once. He peered around. “Quiet,” the lion said, turning toward us with his index and middle fingers pressed to his enormous lips before moving closer to the wall where the tunnel bent sharply to the right.

After peeking around the corner, he turned back to us with his brow furrowed.

“The tools are digging without the hand to guide them,” he said, prompting every one of us to move closer and judge the condition of our companion’s eyesight for ourselves.

When I took a look down the curving corridor, I saw a fairly large chamber carved into the earth. Along its walls, frogs whose heads and torsos had been replaced by pickaxes—with thick, slimy handles but very real metallic pick heads—were hopping up and down, striking the stone every time they came back down.

At the center of that natural chamber was a small pool, surrounded by stalactites joined to stalagmites. Those natural rock formations, shaped by mineral drips, were studded with the same pale, almost translucent crystals. The columns, however, were not dense enough to prevent access to the water.

The pool itself was fairly large and literally billowed with steam, spreading its mist throughout the chamber, because an enormous toad was splashing around in it. Only the lower parts of its legs and a bit of its belly managed to stay submerged, and it did everything it could to splash the rest of its body with water, waving its huge front limbs and rubbing the blackened, metallic skin of its head with them.

Its pulsing throat was the strangest part of the whole display, because it was clearly split by vertical openings from which heat poured out, and it looked entirely like a metal smelting furnace. Yet despite its unmistakably iron-like appearance, it stretched and contracted with every croak, throwing off sparks that fell into the pool and heated the water, creating even more steam.

Behind the membrane covering its eyes were round, almost empty eye sockets, each containing a single large burning candle. Those candles moved on little legs of wax, swaying from one side to the other whenever the creature used them to watch the frogs working around it—or so I assumed.

I observed the smaller frogs instead of the toad for several moments. They weren’t striking randomly. Their blows overlapped in a repeating rhythm, and whenever the toad gave one of its deeper croaks, several changed position at almost exactly the same time.