The pace was slow compared to Torvald’s last few weeks, and their route was a lot more circuitous. That, and instead of guiding them back the way the paladin had come down, Ruzinia’s guiding light sent the group only deeper into the bowels of the earth. They hiked down meandering passages, through hastily abandoned mushroom farms and past empty villages, stopping to rest two or three times a day – it was difficult to tell time exactly.

  Then, a few days into their journey, signs of civilization disappeared, replaced by winding, rounded tunnels that wormed through the rock almost organically, as though carved by an enormous creature from another age. The change surprised Torvald at first, but on reflection, it made sense. Like anyone else, the Duergar would have built their settlements around trade routes, access to natural resources and defensibility. Regions that didn't offer the right sort of balance would be shunned, like the wildlands that made up most of northwestern Besermark. That, and the sheer amount of territory contained in a three-dimensional space like the Igneous Dominion had to be far more than even the numerous Duergar could settle.

  Despite the lack of people and structures, though, there were plenty of signs of non-Duergar life. The floor was covered in a thin sort of soil, which on closer inspection turned out to be a mixture of animal droppings, fungi, and the decayed remains of whatever creatures had stalked, crawled and flown through this underworld over the course of eons. Torvald made out tiny bits of carapace, insect wings, and what had to be a recently shed bit of snake skin.

  Wherever a light crystal stuck out of the wall or enough bioluminescent fungi grew to light up the surrounding area, delicate little plants and grasses sprouted. Torvald had seen some of this kind of ecosystem on his way down, but there seemed to be more life here than there had been closer to the surface. That seemed strange to him on an intuitive level, but he supposed he had no way to know what exactly made some areas of the Depths more or less fertile than others.

  His Duergar charges seemed unimpressed by it all, so he supposed it had to be normal here. Then again, they seemed pretty incurious sorts, unfazed by much of anything. They marched wherever he or Yebidiah pointed, heads down in grim resignation. When the old man instructed them to eat a glowing slime mold growing in an otherwise empty cavern, only the children had balked. Even now, days later, no one had even asked where they were going.

  Torvald knew a lot of different sorts of people, and many of them weren’t humans. These were the first he’d met who truly felt alien, though. When he asked Yebidiah about it, the priest just shrugged and waved a hand dismissively.

  “Oh, if you want a real culture shock, you should meet some lizardmen. People are the way they are, and discipline is the greatest strength of the Duergar. There’s no sense in overthinking it.”

  The paladin hummed skeptically, but was interrupted by a flare of light and Ruzinia’s voice, which whispered in his ear.

  “The old masters stir. Hope dies below. It dies, and no one calls.”

  Someone bumped into Torvald from behind and he stumbled, catching himself against a rock that jutted out of the wall. He’d stopped when Ruzinia spoke, and one of the Duergar hadn’t noticed in time. The gray dwarf mumbled something that sounded vaguely like it might have been an apology and stepped around him.

  In front of him a glyph burned, illuminating a rough tunnel that he would have otherwise missed that plunged down at a steep angle.

  “Are you alright?” Yebidiah asked. “Did you hit your head?”

  Torvald blinked at him. “What? No.” He pointed at the glyph. “Do you not see that?”

  The old man’s eyebrows rose and, a moment later, he smiled. “Ah, she’s sending you away? That’s great news!”

  Torvald knew he only meant that their charges were now probably out of harm’s way – or maybe that they’d been wrong about why he was still with the group in the first place – but he couldn’t stop himself from raising an eyebrow at his colleague anyway.

  “She says ‘the old masters’ are down there. Does that mean anything to you? She doesn’t seem to think very highly of them.”

  Yebidiah shook his head. “No. Could be anything, really” Then he patted Torvald on the shoulder and turned away. “There are more mysteries in the world than the likes of us can uncover, much less make sense of. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You are a strong hand guided by a divine will – what more do you need?”

  Torvald grunted in grudging agreement. He supposed, when he put it like that, it was true. He didn't much like mysteries, though. Maybe he'd been hanging out with Bernt too much. The mage was obsessed with untangling the unknown, and Torvald realized that he'd grown to appreciate his friend's fervor for knowledge.

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  The Duergar continued to file past him, following Yebidiah on. He checked to make sure his runed Duergar sword was loose in its mismatched sheath and ducked down into the tunnel.

  ***

  The tunnel was a rough, natural passage much like many of the others he’d climbed through on his initial descent. It was claustrophobic at a few points, and got uncomfortably steep after a few minutes. Only a few moments later, he arrived at a dead end, terminating in a crack just wide enough for a man to fit through. Ruzinia’s encouraging sigil hung over it, providing just enough light to show Torvald that there weren’t any footholds on the way down.

  Of course there wouldn't be. Sighing, he climbed down into the crack and let himself dangle by his hands before carefully letting himself drop down into darkness.

  It was a longer way to the bottom than he anticipated. He landed so hard his knees folded underneath him and he crashed awkwardly onto his side. Groaning, he rubbed at a bruised hip and picked himself up. He limped in a little circle, cursing himself for not tucking and rolling properly. His knees ached, but there weren’t any broken bones, at least.

  The room he’d landed in – and it was a room – was dimly illuminated only by Ruzinia’s guiding light. It was a small, circular chamber with a low entrance on one side and the remains of a strange, fibrous cocoon almost large enough to hold a human on the other. Whatever had come out of it was long gone, and the thing looked like it might disintegrate if he breathed on it. The walls were carved with images of dwarves fighting a battle against giant spiders. There were tall humanoids as well, eerie-looking skeletal people with long, flowing hair. Torvald guessed they might be a highly stylized representation of dark elves, but he couldn’t be sure. The Duergar were arrayed in large blocks around another sort of creature – something tall and thin that walked on four legs and wore a strange sort of spiky armor.

  “Are they their gods?” Torvald murmured, running a finger over the carvings. “The old masters?”

  Ruzinia’s light, hanging over the door on the other side of the chamber, pulsed more brightly for a moment, urging him on. He turned to go grudgingly. When he stepped out of the chamber into the corridor, though, he was rewarded with an answer.

  “They are parasites – monsters. They were hunted nearly to extinction, but they are cunning and long-lived. They see their chance. Hurry now.”

  Taking the cryptic explanation for the best he was going to get, Torvald pushed on, turning a corner to find bright, white light shining toward him from the end of the passage. Slowing down, he drew his sword partly out of its sheath and stepped carefully out into a much larger, oval hall. Bright, freshly enchanted light crystals illuminated a room packed to the brim with people. Hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand Duergar stood shoulder to shoulder in perfect silence, all facing a raised dais on Torvald’s right.

  He raised his sword instantly, taking a step back into the tunnel before he realized that none of them had reacted to his entrance. Taking a slow breath, stepped into the room again more carefully, lokoing around the still room. He peered at their faces. They looked… wrong. With their empty expressions, they looked almost bored – or they would have if the nearest Duergar man didn’t have a vein visibly pulsing in his forehead as a bead of sweat trickled down his face.

  The others showed similar signs of stress. An armored Duergar soldier stood staring blankly at nothing, arms hanging slack by his side except for the white-knuckled grip he kept on his broken spear. An old woman absently gnawed at a bleeding lip.

  “They do not call me,” Ruzinia said, “but they are mine.”

  Torvald didn’t know what to make of that, but he reached out to touch the shoulder of the first man. He didn’t seem to notice. Then, just as he took a breath to speak, a soft, wet squelch echoed revoltingly through the room from the direction of the dais. He stepped back and raised his sword again, heart pounding. What in all the gods’ names was that?

  The sound came again, and this time he thought he saw something moving up there.

  Trying not to make any noise, the paladin approached, keeping his back to the wall as he moved around the crowd. The Duergar weren’t the enemy here, and Ruzinia would protect him regardless, but that didn’t mean he had to be stupid.

  The crowd stopped abruptly a few steps in front of the raised platform, leaving only a short line of Duergar that were apparently waiting to climb up and a handful more who stood in a small clump at one of the corners.

  When he finally got a clear look, bile rose in Torvald’s throat.

  A strange insectile creature – one whose shape matched the strange carvings he’d just seen – squatted on four legs over a prone, twitching Duergar man. It was tall and thin, with bulbous, multi-faceted eyes that protruded from the top of its disturbing frame on stalks. Light glimmering off its dark carapace in mesmerizing green, blue and red patterns. There was no distinct head, or anything like a face, just plates of chitin armor interrupted by many small, vestigial-looking limbs on its front that thickened into something more utilitarian further down.

  The thing gripped the unfortunate dwarf’s head in the horrific, many-limbed grip of what Torvald fervently hoped were its mouth parts and made a repulsive shuddering motion before finally letting go, rising to its full height. It carefully stepped away from its victim and eyed the next Duergar, a middle-aged woman who was already making her way up onto the dais.

  Behind the creature, the Duergar man sat up.

  Blood trickled down his cheeks into his beard, pouring from the ruined remains of his eyes. The paladin looked on in slack-jawed horror until as he stood up with odd, jerking motions, turned, and shambled over to the corner of the dais, where he joined the small cluster of other Duergar who were waiting there, ruined faces staring at nothing as blood pooled under their feet.

  This… whatever this was, was going to do this to all of them, eventually.

  Light flared over the creature’s head, resolving into a glyph he couldn’t read – not that it mattered. He knew what it meant. Leaping forward, Torvald raised his sword high as Ruzinia’s voice rang in his ears.

  “Kill it!”