The away team trekked through the bones of Karzurkul in complete silence. Only the ever-present rumble of the waterfall in the distance filled the air. Sound, as always, carried in the Deep, and their most dangerous predator had already proven itself unaffected by the auditory impediment represented by millions of litres of rushing water echoing across the immense cavern.

Talia comforted herself with the fact that at the very least, Calisto was relying on her psionics to keep the pace at a steady clip. With Dhustrun and Darkclaw taking joint command of the haven, there was less to be careful about around her magic. Though in fairness, if the battlemaster had been appointed to lead the excursion, Talia would have told him. She’d been planning on telling him anyway, but something had always seemed to get in the way.

As they reached an intersection, Talia tapped Calisto’s right shoulder with her prosthesis. A clear, simple way to give directions without drawing undue attention to the fact that the arcanist was the one making the navigational choices, seemingly without a map, and choosing turns ‘at random’.

Avoiding other creatures meant that the trip only lasted longer, but the delvemaster had deemed the extra precaution worth it. They weren’t on a hunt—at least, not for anything alive. Better to avoid combat where they could.

At least we don’t have to worry about the lifts.

Talia supposed she should have been angry at the revelation that Calisto had been hiding a way into the mid-quarter. Keeping it specifically away from her. But without the shroud of frustration and helplessness, she…understood.

If I’d known a week ago, I’d have gone ahead on my own, risks be damned.

It was better this way.

Though the wasted time is irksome. So much I could’ve been working on…

Talia bit back a sigh just thinking about it.

Watching the delvemaster brace herself for Talia’s ire had been amusing, however. The puzzlement in Calisto’s eyes had fed an unspoken vindictive glee. After Talia’s initial lack of reaction, the delvemaster had begun throwing in small, targeted probes throughout the rest of the planning session.

Each one only further stoked Talia’s smugness.

Eventually, the chronicler seemed to catch on to the fact that something had changed, but if she found it to be a problem, she never said.

Hopefully, whatever misgivings their leader had would wait until after their mission was complete. There was no way to know what Lazarus considered part of his healer’s oath, and what he felt went beyond the bounds of it. It was entirely possible that he’d confided his suspicions in the delvemaster.

But that’s an issue for another time.

Spreading out her mindsense like a shroud about three-hundred paces in any direction—what she could comfortably maintain without draining her Core—Talia turned her focus to the rest of the team and their surroundings.

The members of the original hunting team—minus Darkclaw—had all volunteered once more, raising themselves in her esteem through the simple act. Yasida also seemed to have come through on her promise of drumming up support; at least three of the five other volunteers had walked in with her, Kaina and Colum.

The other two were dwarves, red-haired, stocky and brown-eyed. Lored’s clanmates, it seemed.

The new additions were similarly unremarkable. Obscuring trinket cowls —most everyone had one now, for morbidly obvious reasons— black leather and the occasional half-plate chest piece, loaded up with packs, weapons and various supplies. A pair of axes —the dwarves— two bows —a man and a woman— and the ever improbable two-handed mace —a hulking man by the name of Bruce. The latter loomed in the darkness behind Talia, thoughts flat and calm like a puddle that had lain stagnant for a thousand years and would for a thousand more. A stark contrast to the flickering, fidgety light that was Silversweep, the beastkin consumed by whatever she saw in dark corners that kept her twitching with hypervigilance.

She’s almost as flighty as shiny boy.

Why the boy continued to volunteer eluded Talia. He was obviously terrified. All the tell-tale signs were there. The shaky hands, the on-edge-ness. The wide, jittering eyes. In some ways, he was like the inverted mirror of the Talia from a week ago. All trauma, but no drive to put it into. Although, he was more mysterious than she’d initially assumed, that much she could admit. His relationship with his ganger…chaperones was more befuddling than she’d first thought.

Before leaving, she’d handed the trio the promised wands —enchanted to blast out compressed air, designed specifically to look like a lance of force and only a bit weaker for it— not quite sure what she’d been expecting their reactions to be. Gratitude, maybe. Awe. Or perhaps curiosity.

Naked greed, certainly, had not been near the top of the list. Then the strangeness had occurred. Instead of snatching the implement of violence away, the women had looked to Colum. As if they needed the shiny boy’s permission.

Befuddling, truly. But unless it somehow came around to bite her, not particularly interesting or useful.

Pushing the odd interaction from her mind, Talia split her focus between her mindsense and her newest curiosity. The…dual-edged thought patterns around her sense had already become second nature after her encounter with the Matriarch, but with the crystal mind spell, they’d been honed even further. Holding her sense out extended as it currently was felt easier than breathing now, more of an afterthought.

Which was good, as it allowed Talia to take advantage of the lull in chellicoi density to focus on something much more interesting. If mildly concerning.

Her right arm.

Specifically, the channels in her arm. Both the worrisome, if entirely logical, absence of them, and their slow, slow regrowth. Out of her flesh and into metal.

Nothing Talia knew about magic, which admittedly wasn’t much, told her what to expect when amputating one of the limbs that contained a sixth of her magical circulatory system. Apparently, amputations and mages were an uncommon enough duo that the basic primer on magic thought it irrelevant to mention.

Probably because what happened was so obvious as to not need mentioning.

The channels got cut, just like the flesh. Talia had half been expecting them to just float in the open air. That they didn’t, implied that they were physical in some way. Or maybe that their metaphysical underpinnings relied on flesh and blood.

A theory that was completely undercut by the fact that she’d woken after her surgery to see the magical vein growing into her prosthesis. If she looked hard, she could even see the little nodules that she had long theorized to contain her regeneration talent. At its current rate, it would be fully grown in about a week, maybe less.

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Another point in the metaphysical category.

Maybe my channels rely on what I perceive to be me, rather than just the flesh that I inhabit?

Which brought up another interesting conundrum. Namely, was the prosthesis her? Or was it just an attachment to her physical form that mimicked her? Magically speaking, of course.

The question would have likely been easier to answer if she’d gone with standard protocol for artificial limbs. Which, of course, she hadn’t.

Ordinarily, to her knowledge, a replacement limb contained a substance simply referred to as ‘nerve analog’. An expensive concoction whose formula remained sealed within the halls of the Healer’s College. The substance, moulded into a gel-like putty and glued onto severed nerves, was in constant contact with a series of arrays whose secrets and component runes were poorly understood, but whose purpose had survived the passage of time: they interpreted and transmitted intent from the brain.

Talia had bypassed that. A gamble really, but one weighted in her favour. Nerve analog took expensive reagents —that they didn’t have— to make, and time —that she wasn’t willing to wait— to cure. So instead, she’d simply taken the part of her shield bracer’s enchantment and copied it wholesale onto the socket that slotted into her stump. After scouring the vambrace, she was ninety-five percent sure the convoluted runeform corresponded to the thought interface function the ancient artefact had.

The result had paid off more than she could have ever anticipated. Where nerve analog would have faithfully recreated touch and sensation, the thought interface left something to be desired. It was mostly reduced down to…pressure. A weight in the back of her mind that she was still getting used to.

The trade-off though, was more than worth it.

The barest hint of intent was all it took for her fingers to blur, the digits responding faster than she could even process. The tests she’d done on the engraver runes were even more promising. Not only did she no longer need a whole host of arcanists’ tools, human frailty no longer hindered her; every thought was converted to smooth and precise action—

Rumbbleeeee—grooaann

Alarm pulsed across her mindsense as the tremor hit. She stumbled back as the earth rocked, pebbles and dust falling around her, pinging off of the metal buildings like the Under’s own symphony of percussive beats. A meaty palm landed on her shoulder, steadying her before she could succumb to her still fledgeling sense of balance.

Then it stopped.

Even with quakes being a staple of life in the Deep, there was always, always a split-instant of pause. A sort of animalistic terror born of the realization that your world was threatening to collapse atop you. Buildings creaked and groaned, loose rubble clattered to empty streets—and then the collective instant of fear passed.

They were in the open.

Even children knew that the first quake was always the most forgiving. By the time the second hit, those who valued their lives had a solid roof over their heads.

Unfortunately, a quick look around showed they were out of luck. The buildings on the wide thoroughfare were sealed, their metal doors pressed flush into grooves in the walls, the arcanic controls long dead or damaged.

‘Shelter; move’ came the command.

And move they did.

The single-file line clumped up naturally as they rushed down the street looking for a sheltered alcove, an open door —anything— to get under and wait out the quake. To no avail.

If the gods existed, it seemed they were displeased.

Fuck it.

Rushing forward, translucent shield upraised, her gait thrown off by the unfamiliar weight of both her monstrous sword and her arm, Talia overcame Calisto in the lead. When she was sure they could all see her, she skidded to a stop in front of a shut door. The ground groaned anew under the beginnings of the second tremor.

Options flickered through her mind at dizzying speeds until she just settled on simple brute force.

Mana sluiced from the shortened channel growing from her stump and straight into her arm, flooding runescripts with its primal power. It was a testament to the strength of her concealment enchantment that it remained dim and quiet.

Fingers sharpened to points sank into the metal door like warm clay. Letting the metal solidify, Talia braced herself and wrenched.

Screeeeeeechh

Ruumbble

Her shield rippled into visibility as a chunk of rock impacted it and shattered into pieces, showering the incoming delvers with shards of pulverized granite. To their credit, most barely flinched, streaming past her into the offered shelter as the world tilted around them, threatening to rock them from their feet.

Lored was the last one in. The dwarf tapped her shoulder to signal as much before ducking into the doorway.

The true tremor hit right as she slipped in after him, sending her stumbling into the wall. Talia let her momentum take her to the floor wincing as the adrenalin left her in a rush. Her stump throbbed painfully.

Tsssss—dammit that hurts. Note to self, my shoulder is still flesh and blood.

Apparently, the tensile enchantments and her frictionless elbow joint gave her enough strength to damage herself. Something she’d suspected but hadn’t really considered before ripping the sealed room open.

Silversweep and Bruce came down the stairs, stowing their weapons and flashing the all-clear handsign to an expectant Calisto.

Rummmbleee—CRASH!

Dust fell like brightcap spores —thick and cloying— as the building shook under the impact of falling rock.

No wonder the city is covered in rubble, with no one to clean up the aftermath for hundreds of years.

As the second tremor died down, the group settled into their respective corners, signing to each other as they made themselves comfortable. General practice was to wait until a few hours had passed between shocks before leaving shelters.

While many still got injured in aftershocks that returned days to weeks later, no one, be they delver or simple citizen of Karzgorad, was going to wait that long inside.

Quakes were terrifying, yes, and of course, deadly on occasion, but spending your life worrying about them was like worrying about the grey wasting —either it happened, or it didn’t. Such were the facts of life in the Under.

Things were done to mitigate the damage, but in the end, either you were lucky, or you weren’t.

As the final shakes of the second tremor passed, Talia invested her energy into considering how she could have better leveraged her strength.

If pull from the elbow, rather than the shoulder, I can probably avoid wrenching it like that. Hells, I could have cut the door open—no, would’ve been too slow. Could I have activated the scripts? No, too risky.

Imbuing mana into Karzurkul’s ubiquitous web of enchantments was a fool’s errand. There was no way of knowing which runescripts were still intact and functional without dedicated examination. She’d be more likely to blow up both herself and the runework she was targeting.

Not to mention runerot, which…

Never thought I’d ever see that on such a large scale.

The blackened crust coated half of the city’s runes, consuming its bounds like a metallic plague of black tar.

Black tar…

Something tickled the back of her mind at her choice of words, but the adrenalin comedown and her throbbing shoulder prevented her from putting the inkling of an idea together.

The deterioration was a natural consequence of runic that had once had mana coursing through it, then been left to sit too long without being recharged. It accumulated from the edge of a rune inward, forming blockages and patches that acted much like mithril would—

Talia’s head jerked up as someone tapped her left pauldron.

She recognized Grif’s battle-worn and scuff-marked armour and made a questioning hand sign. Even with his face hidden by his cowl, the concern in his posture was impossible to miss.

Following his pointing finger, Talia finally noticed the steady stream of blood running down the scales of her prosthesis from under the opposite pauldron.

Well, shit. Lazarus did say to watch out about putting weight on it.

Holding in a sigh and putting aside her thoughts yet again, Talia reached into her bag and pulled out her first aid kit, then proceeded to awkwardly unbuckle her pauldron. Immediately, Grif flashed the handsign equivalent of a growl in her face, gently prying away her shaking, adrenalin-soaked digits and taking over the task.

Without looking, she felt the rest of the group turn to stare.

Can’t fault them for admiring good work, I suppose.

Pulling off the shoulder piece with deliberate care, Grif took the proferred unguent and began smearing it against the exposed cuts on her stump, where metal peaked up from beneath the skin.

When the task was completed, he handed her a bottle of what smelled suspiciously like delver moonshine and began re-wrapping the healing wound. Talia hissed as he pulled the bandage tight, but allowed the man to do his work.

‘Tight, bandage, splash of booze,’ he signed, drawing a rueful smile from her. He had no idea how far she'd taken that premise.

Not a hypocrite then, at least there’s that.

When he was done, he favoured her with what she assumed —but couldn’t confirm— was a smile, shaking slightly as another tremor hit.

Injury taken care of, Talia pulled out a rag and began wiping away the blood before sitting back to wait, just like the rest of the group.

Luck on their side, they’d be back on their way in a few hours.