I don’t like going into caves, or tunnels, or dungeons. I hate cellars, I hate depths, I hate trenches, I hate dugouts, I hate crypts, I hate basements. If you can think of any other words for something made of stone and built too low for light to reach, then I can guarantee I fucking hate that, too.

  You pick up a lot of phobias in the Heroism business, a lot of irrational fears. This isn’t one of them. Being underground is about the quickest way to meet as many of the nastiest monsters this world has to offer. Believe me.

  One thing you could say about this particular descent was that it got warmer fast. Not hard, when the alternative is a frigid mountaintop, but I noticed a change within a minute. Everyone else seemed to notice it more, lacking my mildly superhuman resilience and having spent a lot more of their energy shivering than I had.

  The natural concern that arose was wondering where exactly all that heat came from, and we wouldn’t find out for quite a while. It was a damned long staircase we had to follow into the guts of the mountain, a mind-numbingly monotonous route that was made possible only by the fact that gravity aided us in walking it. Gruin, of course, seemed the most enthusiastic, and Morlo actually encouraged him taking the lead. I wasn’t sure whether that was to have him find the surest footing, as he claimed, or just to soak up the initial attacks should we be ambushed.

  Half a day passed and we reached the bottom of the staircase. It was warmer than ever, and wet. I had no idea where all the moisture was coming from but it clung to the air and fluids were wrestling, clotted everything up and made each breath heavy. Unnerved me, but I ignored it as Morlo spoke.

  “Everyone get ready. If you have armour, wear it. If you have weapons make sure they can be drawn out fast. We may be attacked up ahead, and this corridor seems the most defensible place to prepare for that in peace.”

  All of us hurried and did as he said in silence. My new set of plate armour didn’t look much different than the last, but I knew the two sets were incomparable. Thaumaturgically linked, what happened to one would happen to another. Happen at the same time.

  So it was twice as tough, and either one was among the finest pieces of craftsmanship you could hope to find. Part of me wanted to see how the steel would hold up against a bullet, the rest of me had a more reasonable opinion on the prospect of being shot.

  Everyone else was geared up too, though most were lacking in the training that made plate armour a suitable choice. Gruin was wearing heavy metal slabs even thicker than my own, practically rattling with every step he took, while the Arvharest trainees all made do with mail, cuirasses and helmets. Morlo wore nothing at all, and Vara, I thought, was too lightly armoured with nothing but thin chainmail.

  ++”Kyvaine thinks this was too light because he is a large man, and it apparently hasn’t occurred to him how heavy anything other than thin chainmail is when you’re walking for hundreds of miles as a woman half his size.”++

  It got hotter as we went, which was not the most pleasant sensation. In hindsight I shouldn’t have been feeling so victimised by it though, a normal man entering the kind of heat we were would’ve been cooked to death in his armour. You’ll hear stories of those crusaders collapsing from heatstroke in Tirkan, wearing only mail and helmets. Full plate, let me tell you, is a good deal worse.

  And that was the least of my concerns at the moment. As we went deeper, I was greeted with a great many new sights that were about fifty-fifty split between wonderful and terrible. The stonework of Grynkori hands is something humanity hadn’t matched then, hasn’t matched now, and, I am willing to bet, will not have matched in another hundred years. Another thousand. It’s not magical. This fact has been tested and proven a thousand times, and yet you need to repeat it to yourself every other second while staring at the stuff to really believe it.

  Statues made with so fine an attention to detail that you could make out pores and count the whiskers, arches that seemed too small by half to withstand the weight set above them but persisted anyway. Halls bigger than nature should have been willing to tolerate.

  “The trick is steel,” Gruin told me with an uncharacteristically soft voice. “Stone, you see, it can’t withstand tension. Make a long plane of it to support its own weight and it’ll snap like a twig underfoot. Steel. We run veins of steel through the rock and it can take force from any direction.” He looked around, eyes fogging with something. “I once worked on this very hall.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Gruin had only given me brief hints at his past before, all sparse and harder to draw out than blood from a stone. This was too intimate, and too sudden.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Fortunately, it also didn’t last too much longer. We continued through the fort beneath the stone and were bombarded by a great many more sights, all terrible and majestic in their own ways. All…sad. There were people here, a people who’d done things to humble any my own had yet to accomplish. Now they were gone. I felt more mortal then than I ever have before or since. So small.

  That smallness stuck with me right up until we finally took a break for the day and made camp, or the closest thing we could to one without having the option of a fire. Grynkori didn’t build with wood, nor, apparently, store it anywhere conveniently accessible to scavengers.

  It was more open inside the fort than atop the mountain, which is another testament to Grynkori architecture. It also meant that we were far more vulnerable to ambush sleeping there, so we set up a watch with much more care than we had the night before.

  Day came, or rather we finished sleeping and were ready to move again. There was no day or night down there, all the illumination came from great crystals that hummed and glowed high up in the ceilings, bathing everything in a sterile light that was steadier than any candle or torch.

  Too easy to sneak up in this sort of light. The shadows are too predictable, too reliable. They don’t move as they would in a flickering flame’s glare and a sentry needs to stay vigilant to be sure of seeing their surroundings at all times. Fortunately, we had Il’vanja among our sentries. Hard to match an aelf for vigilance.

  If her exhaustion was getting to her, she didn’t give it away. The aelf moved along as well as ever, not complaining, not even demonstrating a hint of discomfort with the twitches of her face or the weight of her breaths. A statue would’ve been louder.

  There were plenty of statues around to compare, too. I didn’t like them. Each one was a hiding place, or a vantage point for the enemy to scout our coming from well ahead and scarper away to report it long before we were within range to see them back. Was I growing paranoid?

  Grown. I’d already grown paranoid, past tense. That’d probably keep me alive though.

  It took another stop for what we decided was night before things started to go wrong. Before then we were sitting and talking, passing the time as our aches faded into sleep.

  “I’ve heard there was more than just Grynkori here,” Dubin prompted Morlo, “the Grynkori mentioned a Demon before.”

  Morlo rolled his eyes, seeming genuinely frustrated in a way I rarely saw from him.

  “There is no Demon, it’s just a fairy tale. A Demon tale! Demons are rare. They’re…” He trailed off, seeing, I guessed, how abruptly all eyes had come to fall upon him, and realising his mistake.

  “You know about Demons?” Vara asked, speaking with all the eager curiosity the rest of us felt.

  Morlo sighed, resigning himself.

  “Demons are old magic. Older than mankind’s civilisations. When we were laying the foundation of our earliest cities in the deserts—”

  —”our first cities were in deserts?” I asked.

  “Yes, now shut up,” he snapped, “when we were doing that, they were already eating our nightmares.”

  Eating our nightmares. It sounded like poetry, but he said it like a fact.

  “Demons are creatures of magic in the same way you or I are creatures of meat and bone. They’re made of the stuff. They know it as we never will. On this plane, in this world, their powers are limited, and yet even a middling specimen among their kind can bring an end to lesser kingdoms.”

  A chill ran through the group.

  “Is there no other way through here?” Chak asked.

  “There is no bloody Demon,” Morlo snapped, “now this is the last I’ll bloody say on the topic. You’re all acting like a bunch of children. Start concerning yourselves with the real dangers. There’s enough wretchlings for that.”

  He didn’t get any argument, though nobody was pleased with that end to the conversation. We rested again and continued moving when next we woke.

  This time, something went wrong. Not right away, it was a good few hours into our latest stretch of walking before any problems leapt out.

  Many problems, that was, leaping out from behind boulders and statues right ahead of us, even as more circled around in the open with shoddy little shields raised and barbed spears held outright. Wretchlings, just as Morlo had warned. And the name wretchling really goes a long way to describing them.

  Short things, shorter even than a Grynkori and not even as broad as a man. They have rounded pot bellies, fat and blunt faces, no hair, beady eyes. They’re ugly to look at, but plenty smarter than most give them credit for.

  And vicious. A rare example, in fact, of a species that’s just as dangerous as most human rumour would hold. Maybe even more so. It’s not in their nature to be this way though, the simple reason for so many wretchlings being so very hostile to any other form of sapient life is that the majority of them, for reasons I don’t quite understand, fall under an ideology that they refer to as ‘Fascism’.

  I won’t pretend to understand the core tenets of Fascism, but the basics of it are this; people who follow this strange religion are more like violent animals than anything else. You can’t really reason with them, and they’re even proud of the fact. Best to just kill them on sight, for everyone’s sake. This is a rare fight that I don’t feel so bad looking back on.

  We were outnumbered a dozen to one, then two dozen. The enemy had us surrounded and were closing in from both sides of a corridor.

  They probably thought the advantage was on their side.

  Unfortunately for them, they’d miscalculated. Morlo’s arms went out wide and I felt my skin throb as a wave of flames doused several rows of wretchlings, charring them to death in moments. The rest hesitated, and that was when we charged them. Their numerical advantage had already shrunk down to maybe fifteen on one, and the surprise made our attack devastating. Blades moved up and down, sidelong, like we were dicing meat. We were, I suppose. And we didn’t take long to do it. The wretchlings broke and ran, and we laughed in triumph.

  Then we heard the sounds of more closing in on us from down the corridor. A lot more.

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