La’Var, a true hunter and a professional goblin, had a chest tucked away beneath his bed. It contained a truly staggering quantity of liquor bottles and all the other, less important hunting supplies: bows, arrows, traps, bait and lanterns. The hunter began packing his backpack and instructed Adria to do the same before he could tell her what he saw beneath the floors of the dining hall.

"What?! You dragged me up here and now won't even tell me?"

"I will tell you... Later, though."

"Why!?"

La'Var did not answer. Adria didn't push it further. Arguing with a hunter and a goblin at the same time was foolish, and so she turned on her heel and headed for the exit. There was movement in the darkness of the hallways. Not witless. Spirits. A chair whizzed by Adria’s head. She gasped, and and in fear of her sudden bout of hysteria, the chair stopped. Grunting, Adria pointed it a warning and hurried towards her quarters. Torches came ablaze and faded away and the walls laughed at her . Finally, she snatched the handle of her door… and ripped it out.

This unusual sight pushed her a step back and induced her into a state of gawking at her hand.

The door flung open. The unkind wood slammed into Adria’s shoulder, and she stumbled. Before Adria found her balance, the door began closing, but she slipped through into her room anyways.

In her quarters, the possession was even more intense. Adria ignored it and started packing her bags.

“Rooms!”

The door opened and La’Var stood at the entrance, a lantern under his jaw, shining a light that made his face into the face of a ghost.

Adria jumped.

Everything that was happening… she was this close to punching the hunter on his curly nose.

“Poor ol’ La’Var saw rooms down there. Lots and lots of rooms and even more tunnels. Most were empty as my stomach ‘cause I think the priests, at the end of the First Age, dug them out as shelter in case of an attack. An attack of the blasphemes,” La’Var said. “Then there were catacombs and chestrooms. Those were more interesting. But all those places had one thing in common…”

La’Var paused and looked at a wine bottle floating in from the corridor. It remained silent--not even a bubble popped inside--but it must’ve surely been uncomfortable under the hunter’s devious look of contemplation. He decided against popping it open and continued.

“You can hunt me like a boar if those tunnels and catacombs aren’t the most haunted things I’ve seen in my life. Out of all the gnarly, nasty and downright evil things I’ve seen… You get the point.”

“What was going on down there?”

“I’d rather you see it for yourself.” La’Var put on the backpack and headed for the dining hall. “We’re looking in the right place.”

On the way out, Adria snatched a torch.

La’Var began opening the tile in the floor along the back wall of the dining hall while pints, plates and chairs floated around, bumping into one another. Even though no one apart from the pair was in the hall, footfalls sounded. Surely another phenomenon of the haunting.

The entrance of the inn slammed. At the same time, the hunter ripped out the heavy slap and dropped it. The hall rocked.

Darkness, which Adria’s torch fought and lost against, lingered in the fresh pit below. She took to La’Var and the hunter nodded and she took one last breath. A musty scent traveled up her nose.

Adria jumped in.

A cloud of dust kicked up and cobwebs tied around her hair. Whew, from up there it looked like a far longer fall, she thought, getting the strings out of her head.

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“I’m not dead just so you know,” she said, stepping out of the way. “You can come down now.”

A meter in front of her, La’Var’s backpack thumped on the ground. The hunter slid down a rope after it, keeping eye contact with Adria. She frowned. He grinned.

“Listen, you’re a light little goblin. You fall easy. I fall hard -- everything above a horse's height is a serious threat to my life,” he said. “And… Do you see a way out of here?”

Adria shook her head.

“Well, that rope just made one. Don’t want to repeat my mistake from earlier today.”

“That’s why you looked like that when you ran up to the bell tower.” Adria grinned. “Lead the way.”

La’Var pointed and they walked. On the ground, there was a trail of his footsteps in the dust. Darkness swallowed all other sights and they were, in essence, traveling deep into nothingness.

“I can’t see anything more haunted than the dining hall.”

“Cause we can’t see anything at all.” La’Var laughed. “A few more minutes. Patience. And keep your ears up. Spirits don’t ever shut up .”

The passages winded and sloped down, bringing them ever deeper into the womb of the planet. The air dampened. Cooled. Adria rubbed her arms for some warmth and at the same time remembered the streets inside Black Ice Mountain, where there was no sky and, more often than not, light lost against the darkness. There, the cold didn’t make one shiver -- it gave frostbite to the soul.

“I feel like I’m coming home.”

“You ran from your home. Eventually, everything is bound to remind you of it. Doesn’t matter that it’s the north, you’re gonna miss it, remember only the good. Goblins… We’re no different than the four-legs roaming our woods…”

“I don’t remember anything good about it! I can swear on the Twenty Gods that I don’t miss it.”

“If the rest of the north is like giant hunting in the Frosowater Mountains, I get you!” The hunter laughed. “But… The bad’s what you miss, isn’t it? All that suffering must’ve become pretty comforting.”

Adria opened her mouth to protest, yet stayed quiet. Maybe the hunter had a point.

Within the cold walls, whispers sounded all around them, some closer, some farther away. And through tiny gaps in the walls, green and blue, and red lights glowed out, followed by growls and shouts. Goosebumps covered Adria. She had to remind herself, a bunch of times, that these oddities couldn’t hurt her.

She couldn’t bear the sounds and the sights despite all her efforts.

“Yeah, there was something good in the north,” she snapped, letting the words flow to deafen the noises of the spirits. “Sure, there were crooks and thieves who would steal all you had while you slept in the streets, but there were so many people who had been broken, whose eyes had lost all of their colors, yet they did all they could to help you. But I saw that kind of folk for the last time when I was fifteen. The last time I was around normal people…” she tapered off.

“Was ending up here worth it?”

“Getting to live the life that I want to, in a place that I love, experiencing little adventures every day? Yes, I’d say it was absolutely worth it,” Adria said. “It isn’t like I imagined it. It still gets hard, but I don’t have to take part in absolute, pure evil.”

“What, exactly, did you go through up there?”

Adria closed her eyes, shook her head.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Hunter’s pact.” La’Var put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll never hear about it from me ever again.”

Abruptly, the spiral into the core of the planet ended with an open steel gate. As the two passed it, dozens of lights emerged from the darkness. Lanterns. Like an army of cultists had arisen from the dead. La’Var lit torches scattered all over the dungeon, revealing that it was a room of mirrors. Hundreds of seats stood around a circle in the middle. Within the circle, strange symbols had been engraved. Adria recognized only the crosses of the twenty gods among them.

“I bet you didn’t expect to find a ritual ground here,” La’Var said. “If I remember, sometime in the middle of the Second Age, a band of cultists found a new home in the church. Must’ve used this place for their rituals and other culty doings.”

Adria grinned momentarily then her face turned to a face of absolute fear.

The reflections in all of the mirrors began shifting.

In some, La’Var backstabbed Adria, in some she strangled him, in some she was taking off her clothes, in some… The Liar was creeping up from the dark corners of the room.

All of the mirrors began releasing sounds: screams, moans, cackles.

The sudden load of sounds and sights was too much for Adria.

She spun on her heel and ran in the opposite direction from La’Var. The hunter’s eyes widened. He chased after her. And he was faster. After a moment, she realized she had no chance of getting away from this madness and from the hunter and dashed for the mirrors.

One by one, Adria began smashing them. To stop the terrible noises. The awful sights.

La’Var grabbed her by the shoulders.

Tears spilled from her eyes.

“No, no, no,” she muttered, putting her hands on her ears. “Make it stop.”

The hunter pulled her hands away and whispered.

“The spirits are playing with you and you’re letting them win. And the only way for you to win is not to play. Don’t acknowledge them. Get back on your feet and follow me. We are going deeper, where it will get worse… Where the catacombs begin.”