Brynhangron
Wyrna shuffled slowly through the tunnel, stooped beneath the ceiling. Pick on her belt and pack on her back she plodded through pitch blackness with not a speck of light to be seen. Instead she listened, feeling the tunnel air pull faintly at her plaits or tickle her rugged face, and followed the faint scent of water. You didn't need to see down in the Dark if you listened.
Some things, they didn't like the light, she mused.
As she moved in near total silence, her shuffling footsteps irregular, she caught a wiff of pungent spice and acid gone bad.
Got them all riled up, hope whoever did it is okay. The denizens down here were a tempersome lot, and not worth poking for much of anything. Which meant most folks got in trouble when they didn't pay attention and tripped into the wrong hole accidentally. A slightly stronger sniff didn't find any sign of Dawi blood so... they were probably okay. She sighed silently and shifted course onto a detour, turning into a thin cleft she had to tip toe sideways through and pull herself along into the depths. She'd get where she was going either way.
Far, far above Wyrna's head, through miles of stone the lights and bustle of Kraka Drakk's newest and least populated outskirts spread out through the Dark, growing and following the roots of the mountains as her people explored their underground world. Hers was down here, beyond any Deeps, in the winding, twisting, treacherous and confusing unknown beyond any mapped and explored tunnel. Here there were many things to find; gold, gems, silver, iron, mayhaps gromril if she was lucky. Pretty baubles and shiny things to wonder over.
Stranger things too. The odd bit of fungus that tried to stick thorns through your flesh to drink your blood, mobile pools of watery slime-mold that wanted to eat your ore, strange half-alive will o' wisps and silvery shadows that danced on the edge of camp light to lead you astray. Many odd things in her time, and she didn't mind it. At her age it was old hat.
So down and down Wyrna went. She knew this part well, experience whispering her path to her as her hands and booted feet tapped gently across the stone.
Through the cleft, it widens quickly into an echoing gallery that after two thousand paces became a series of tiers or great steps near half the height of a dwarf, the ceiling growing further away with every step...
Down, climbing and clinging to rock as she went, a faint white light growing below her. After three hundred and seven of these tiered steps, the last deepens and the space expands into something like the bowl of a pipe and here she finds her first goal; a pool of water, fed by a bubbling source beneath, cupped in a mix of grey and white marbled stone. In the bottom of the hip deep pool, there grew the tubers and filaments of a relatively harmless species of fungus. They shimmered with that faint white glow, a tiny hint of other colors visible as it was bent by the water, and glimmered off her snow white hair and round craggy face. Beyond the pool there rose a wall and within that wall were many tunnels, most of which she had gone down by now. She kept one eye on those dark mouths as she gently sat on the bank of the pool and from her pack pulled out a little round rune light set in a bronze frame; made by that Glimmermaker lass when she'd only just come back from her Journey.
Carefully prodding the runes on its surface she slowly brought the lantern to a glow which matched the pool in brightness and faint glimmering colors. Several things down here in this part of the tunnels would avoid her with this on her back, and not sneak up on her, and keeping it very low like this let her see if she would be approaching any of the predators which liked to use light lures like this one. Setting it on a hook on her back, the light throwing her shadow dancing across the diamond like pool, she made her way into one of the last few tunnels she had left to explore in this region. Down again, this tunnel shifting from white and grey, to a reddish iron seam she had already mapped, down further and further into slate and then obsidian.
This was the new section. A place of strange sharp edged reflections off volcanic glass, round worm-like tunnels, and treacherous flooring. She proceeded cautiously, nose working for any hint of heat or ash or water or rotten eggs. She had no desire to run into a geyser or something unpleasant like that. Her mail may be runed to resist harm and cushioned by cloth for silence, but no, just no. Geyser's were nasty business.
And so she worked her way through the web of tunnels of black rock slowly. She had provisions for several weeks, both water and food, and could survive down here off the wildlife, lichen, fungi, and the safer waters for longer still if she wished. And sometimes she did. Her longest stint had been three years, a few centuries ago. And what with the sky going insane up above a similar escapade sounded rather tempting. Ugh.
Why couldn't the world just be endless stone? No sun or crazy moons or mad storms... she paused, musing.
Would mean no stars though, and that'd be a damned shame.
As she thought Wyrna was making practiced steps across the stone, the tunnel slowly widening around her as she listened to the stone's echoes and felt the way it shifted beneath her feet. While she walked and listened, she sometimes took her runed pick and made Klinkarhun marks on the dark walls.
Carving one more rune, she continued down the gently slopping tunnel. The floor was almost smooth, rising slightly in the middle. She didn't quite like the way it sounded as she shuffled along. It was while she was turning, following the curve of the tunnel as it spiraled that she felt the stone shift and heard a minute sound.
Crack.
Wyrna huffed in annoyance and leapt back as the floor shifted beneath her, first falling a handspan before catching, then shattering like glass into dust as a huge cleft ran through it and the entire thing dropped into a pit. Her hands were jammed into handholds on either wall, leaving her suspended awkwardly.
"Grungni's bloody beard...," She grumbled, spitting out a glob of dusty phlegm.
That is a really ruddy great hole, she thought. Pulling herself back along the tunnel until she judged the ground secure, she dropped with a rattling thump and looked at the tunnel ahead dubiously. An aborted shallow spiral, a jagged archway of volcanic stone opening up into the sheer drop of what must be an old lava tube. Now with a bunch of rubble in the bottom.
"Hmm...," she hummed, thinking.
What to do...
After a minute or so thinking about how she wanted to go down there, she noticed a tiny flicker. She sniffed. She sniffed again, slightly deeper.
Crystal?
"Feh..., fine then." She muttered as she left her light behind and gingerly crawled forward to peer over the edge of the pit into the mysteries below.
What she saw was a smooth basalt tube plunging a good twenty feet straight down, with the expected pile of rubble and dust settling down at the bottom. The walls all craggy and sharp with broken stone. And there, if she leaned out just a bit, she could see the tiny glimmer below her and a bit to the right. Another cave. Retreating from the edge Wyrna went back down the tunnel, looking for a solid piece of stone she could hammer a line stake into, pulling out some climbing rope as she went.
After about twenty minutes of work finding a good spot and setting her rappelling line properly Wyrna was satisfied, and gripping the rope firmly, she began to descend down into the pit with her light bobbing slightly on her back as she went. The greater light revealed things she had not seen from the entrance above; the lines of quartz and shimmering crystals in the basalt, out of place against the dark rock, in hair thin lines.
They twined and wove all around her as she went down, creating distracting flickers and odd pretty sparks in the corners of her vision. As she descended the bottom came into clearer view, emerging from the dark half-lit murk of dust and shadows, and revealed itself as a spiky mess of axeblade like and spikes. She cursed slightly, hanging a foot or so off the top of the rubble pile which had partially jammed the tunnel she wanted to get into.
The damn thing was about a third full, making a tight fit for the small dwarf woman. Setting herself down gently and gripping the wall tightly she shimmied into the tunnel, bending and squeezing to the tunnel as her tough boots ground against the rubble. With a huff and a grunt she stepped off the scree and onto the floor of a thin knife-like tunnel through the rock. All around her the stones were lined with those quartz and crystal seams. Walls, ceilings, floors, it all shimmered and shone in the light of her lamp.
Hair like cracks and lines which grew thicker as she went, becoming as thick as her wrist, then her arm and then her head. The stone eventually transitioned to limestone as pieces of crystal jut out into the tunnel, crystals that she had to weave or contort around. That reflected glimmer grew brighter and brighter as she went. Soon it was nearly as bright as daylight, the crystals so dense a maze her progress slowed to a crawl, before she wiggled her way through between three dwarf sized crystals of clear quartz and emerged into a much larger space.
She stood on a ledge of basalt jutting out into an enormous near spherical cavern like a giant geode. All along the bottom was a forest of quartz crystals, many several times the height of a dwarf. Far above the ceiling was dark, obscured by distance and the faint light, where tiny lights flickered. Crisscrossing the cavern were several paths and patches of the limestone and other stones the quartz emerged from. A moment of examination showed her the path down from this ledge, and taking her lamp off her pack to hold it up in front of her she stepped down into this crystal wonder.
Careful of the sharp edges of the crystal, she watched in wonder as the light shifted and danced above her, painted gold and red and yellow and blue and more as the light of her rune lamp refracted and broke through the crystal prisms that surrounded her. A maze of light and shadow. The sound of water dripping echoed through this place endlessly, a harmony with no players or singers. Wyrna marveled at all of it, twisting her lamp this way and that as she watched the shadows play. It was almost overwhelming to her, a woman more than eight hundred years old.
Humbling too, this place which seemed almost bigger than a Khazid-town. After about an hour of exploration and careful way marking she found the crystals starting to get shorter and shorter as they followed the angle of the slope, the trail which she followed winding through them like a snake as it led her down into the center of this space. Skidding down a small slope to reach a clearing, her eyes widened at what she found. It was a water polished and damp expanse of stone with crystals looming close overhead like trees. In the center was a small bundle of five small quartz crystals arranged like logs in a campfire. Water dripped onto them from somewhere high above, the entire mass no larger than her. Walking closer she watched the lights shift around and within the thing, faint rainbows appearing in the slightly misty, wet air and playing across her clothing and hair.
Coming around it she noted several openings into the hollow space between the crystal spars.
What if I put it..., She wondered, mind rapidly going over what she had seen. Holding up her lamp, she prodded one of the runes and made the light rise to its greatest intensity. Then she very gently wiggled her hand and the lamp into the hollow space. As her hand moved down the shadows danced and shifted, swelling for a moment to make her seem a giant, at another painting her with waves of rainbow light, before finally settling with a clink of stone on metal. The light all around her rippled, bouncing from one crystal to another over and over and over until it faded far away to the ceiling. So high above, lights came into being and twinkled, winking like the stars far above.
The forest of crystal flickered with beautiful rainbow waves of light, and the stars beneath the ground twinkled far above. In the middle of it all, one elderly dwarven woman wrapped in shifting shades of shadow and light standing beside a glowing, bonfire-like crystal.
"Huh," Wyrna murmured in awe.
Just a dwarf finding some cool stuff underground to work on my environmental writing.
