The mine closed around them the moment they passed the gate. The air changed first, turning thick and wet, carrying smoke that clung to the back of the throat. Every breath tasted of ash and iron. Torches threw weak light that trembled with every step, shadows folding over themselves as if the stone was trying to hide what it contained.
Scarnax moved at the front, shoulders squared, jaw set. He had been in holds and chains before, but this was different. This place did not float. It did not move. It pressed. He kept his eyes forward because when he looked too long at the walls, it felt like they were leaning in.
They entered a vast chamber carved rough and low. Hundreds of bodies lay packed together on the stone floor. Men, women and children pressed into one another for warmth, limbs tangled, ribs rising and falling in shallow rhythm. Some were awake, eyes glassy and unfocused. Others muttered in their sleep, fingers twitching as if still working the rock. Water dripped from the ceiling and ran between them, soaking rags and skin alike.
Junia stopped without realizing it. Her breath caught. She knelt beside a girl no older than twelve, barefoot, knees drawn to her chest. The child did not flinch, did not react. Junia reached out, then pulled her hand back. There was nothing she could do here. She knew it. That knowledge hurt more than anything she saw.
An overseer strode through the chamber, boots splashing through pooled water. He kicked a man aside to clear a path, cursed when the body did not move fast enough. Amaxia watched him pass, memorizing his face, his voice, the way he did not even look down. Her smile, when she forced it later, would be sharp enough to cut.
They moved on.
The tunnel narrowed, then opened again onto a shaft that dropped straight down into blackness. Two guards dragged a slave forward. The man was coughing, red flecking his lips, legs useless beneath him. He looked at the crew as he passed. There was no plea in his eyes. Only tired recognition.
One guard joked about how long it would take before he hit bottom. The other laughed and let go with the casualness with which one might throw away a cracked jar.
The scream echoed and echoed, stretching into something thin and animal. It went on far longer than felt possible. Shaedra gripped her bow so hard her fingers ached. She stared into the shaft long after the sound ended in a dull, distant thud. Somewhere deep below, stone answered stone.
No one spoke. The guards did not even slow their patrol.
Further in, heat rolled through the tunnels in suffocating waves. Smoke hung thick as slaves worked at a collapsed section of wall. The roof had caved in, crushing those closest. Hands protruded from the rubble. A foot twisted at an impossible angle jutted from beneath a slab of stone. The slaves pried ore loose anyway, stacking it with shaking arms.
One man sobbed openly as he worked. Another kept glancing up at the cracked ceiling, flinching at every creak. When dust fell, panic rippled through them, a collective intake of breath. No one ran. They knew what happened to those who did.
An overseer stalked behind them, whip loose, shouting that iron did not wait. When a stone shifted and someone screamed, the overseer laughed and told them to dig faster before the rest came down.
Amaxia’s jaw tightened. She took a step forward before Scarnax’s hand closed on her arm. Not yet. They both knew it. That knowledge burned.
In a narrower passage, carts ground along grooves worn into the stone. Children pushed them. Barefoot. Skin cracked and bleeding. The carts were too heavy. They leaned their whole weight into the wood, ribs visible, teeth clenched. One child stumbled and fell. The cart rolled back and trapped his leg. He screamed.
A guard struck another child across the mouth for stopping. Blood sprayed. The cart was dragged free. The boy pulled himself up and limped back into place without looking at anyone.
Junia turned away, swallowing bile. Her hands shook. She pressed them together until they stopped.
They kept moving. Deeper. Left. Right. Down. The tunnels twisted without logic, following ore wherever it led. Old passages intersected new ones. The crew passed chambers where fire had cracked the rock, walls blackened and still warm, smoke lingering like a living thing. Every step felt borrowed.
Overseers gossiped as they passed, complaining about shifts and smoke, arguing about rations. One mentioned a troublesome forest man who had caused problems weeks ago, then gone quiet. Another shrugged and said Deepwound ate everyone eventually.
Ayesha filed the words away. Shaedra lifted her head, heart hammering.
By the time they found him, the crew was exhausted, lungs burning, nerves stretched thin. Morthen Briarbound lay against a wall in a low chamber, barely conscious. His body was thin as a stick. His hands were bleeding, fingers swollen and stiff. His eyes struggled to focus when they knelt beside him.
Junia touched his shoulder and felt how light he was. She murmured his name. It took a long moment before he reacted.
He tried to stand and failed.
In that moment, the mine felt smaller. Closer. Like it knew what they were about to do and was already tightening its grip.
From there on, there was no pretending. No half measures. Either they left him to be swallowed like the rest, or they carried him back through the gate and faced whatever waited on the other side.
The mine breathed around them, patient and hungry.
Senare, på skeppet:
Morthen lay wrapped in blankets in the dim light below deck, the smell of salt and clean wood still strange to him. Junia’s hands moved with practiced care, washing blood from skin that had not known gentleness in a long time. Each touch made him flinch, not from pain, but from disbelief.
When he finally spoke, it was not at first to tell them where the Waverider went. That came easily enough, delivered in a flat voice, like a fact long rehearsed. The destination. Only after that did his breath hitch.
“I told them,” he said.
The words were quiet. Almost lost beneath the creak of the hull.
Scarnax stiffened where he stood, hands curling into fists at his sides. Amaxia’s gaze hardened, jaw set like stone. Junia froze, one hand still resting on Morthen’s shoulder, her mind racing through treatments she could not give and wounds she could not undo.
Shaedra took a single step back, as if struck. Her breath left her in a sharp, broken gasp. For a moment it looked like her legs would give out, like she might fold where she stood. She caught herself on the edge of the table, knuckles white, eyes unfocused. The room seemed to tilt around her, memories crashing together, smoke in the trees, empty glades, names she had stopped saying aloud.
“They hurt me,” Morthen continued, staring at the bulkhead, not at any of them. “I held as long as I could. I thought I had nothing left to give.” His voice cracked then, thin and raw. “But they kept asking. And I knew the paths. I knew where the villages would go when the forest closed.”
His chest hitched. He shook, the sound that came out of him somewhere between a sob and a laugh, broken and helpless. “I didn’t know when. I didn’t know how soon. I thought maybe… maybe they would move again before it mattered.”
No one spoke.
Shaedra slid down until she was sitting on the deck, back against the wall, staring at nothing. Her hands trembled in her lap. Whether what burned in her chest was compassion, grief, rage or something colder was impossible to tell. She did not look at Morthen. She did not look at anyone.
Junia’s eyes burned. She swallowed hard, fighting the urge to pull him close, to promise something she was not sure she could give. Amaxia turned away, pacing once, then stopping herself, shoulders tight. Scarnax looked at the floor, as if measuring weight and balance and finding none of it fair.
Morthen finally looked up at them, eyes red and hollow. “I just wanted the pain to stop,” he said, not pleading, not justifying. Just stating it, like another wound.
The room felt too small. The ship creaked softly around them, steady and indifferent.
They stood there, the truth hanging between them, Shaedra on the floor, Morthen on the cot, and for the first time since leaving the mine, there was no obvious next step.
Not: Informationen han gav under tortyr gjorde att två byar raidades och invånarna förslavades och hamnade i gruvorna, inklusive hans egen by.
