Everything is dark and I can hear nothing but muffled grinding sounds. Weights are pressing down on every part of me. I can feel metal against my skin where my armor has been badly dented, and there seem to be dozens of these dents. Blood is running up my forehead from a pain in my jaw—I must be tipped backwards, and I think the cut is from where part of my helmet has been ripped and forced inward, gashing my cheek.

Panic rises in me. I struggle but can barely move my limbs. I take a breath to try and calm myself down, and choke on thick dust. I convulse, and some of the weight shifts from me.

Still wracked with coughs, I attempt to pull my arms in toward my chest. Some of the rocks come off, to be replaced with more. One pins my left hand, but little by little I manage to draw my right arm in. I grasp with it at the rubble on my chest and push up with all my might. The weight shifts and I hear something roll. Grunting, I push even harder. The stones pinning me shift some more and I manage to nearly sit up.

The blood on my face changes direction.

I start to draw my knees up, and feel and hear more stones tumbling. The sound seems quiet—my runic ears must be damaged. I think I can hear other dwarves struggling to my left and right.

With painstaking effort I manage to curl up into sitting position. Gravel falls from my armor and bounces away. Every inch of my body feels bruised, and my muscles feel heavy. A high pitched note is ringing in my left ear.

I feel a sudden urge of panic; grope around the rocks surrounding me, and my hand comes around something thin and circular—Heartseeker’s shaft. I pull hard, wincing as the aluminum protests loudly. It comes free with a horrible scraping sound. I run my hands along it and am dismayed to feel that it’s bent.

“Fu—!”

The dust clogging the back of my throat sends me into another coughing fit. Noise is still ringing in my ear.

I recover and notice a white glow through the dust to my left and I stumble over the rubble toward it. Something clutches at my heel and I jump away, fearing a beast, but see a gauntlet. I pull away the stone covering the fallen dwarf’s chest and pull him out. He mumbles something at me, then groans loudly.

I see that his shoulder plate is bent completely out of shape.

“Better take that off,” I advise him, then hurry toward the light, which I suspect might be Barock’s mace.

It is. Our leader lies a few yards away from it. He’s cleared most of the debris from his body, but his leg is still pinned by a massive shard of rock. As I get closer, I begin to hear his cries of pain.

“Ah, shit! Get this off me! Zathar, that you? Get this damn thing off me!”

I kneel down, place Heartseeker beside me, and work my palms underneath the rock to try and heave it up. It moves about a centimeter before I’m forced to lay it back down.

“Back up!” Barock yells. “Bring it back up!”

“It’s too fucking heavy!”

“Let me help!” Another dwarf adds his strength to my own and we manage to keep the rock up long enough for Barock to extract his leg.

He attempts to stand, swears violently and sits back down. “Broken.”

“I’ll get you your mace,” I tell him, and do so.

“Thanks. Help the others now, will you?”

More of us are struggling from the rubble—I see about a dozen. The white jelly is nowhere to be seen through the dust, and neither are the other squads, for the worst part of the rockfall, a row of boulders at least twelve feet high, has split us from them. The roar of the battle is much quieter, and this probably isn’t an illusion caused by my damaged ears. Nothing is attacking us.

Someone shouts in pain and I rush over to help him. His hand is sticking out of the rubble, grasping at the dusty gray light. I pull stones out from around his arm while someone else drags him up, and finally out. It’s Notok. He attempts to stand up, but his armor is so rent and dented that his legs won’t straighten.

“Oh, shit. Where’s my shield? Someone get me my shield!”

“It’s probably still buried,” I tell him.

“Shit!” He looks around wildly. “What if...”

“The battle seems to have stopped,” says another dwarf, limping over to us. It’s Jarick; the light shining from his mace illuminates Notok’s wide-eyed look of terror.

“What?” Notok says.

“It seems to have stopped... I can still hear something, but it’s kind of far away.”

“Your ears are just bent out of shape. They’ll be back before we know it. Shit!”

“Calm down,” he says. “Is everyone out yet?”

I look around. About a dozen are free, with a few more still being dragged out. Not all are from squad four; some are also from squad six who were positioned next to us. A few faces from our squad are missing; some of us are still buried, probably unconscious, maybe suffocating.

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“Barock!” I call. “What should we do?”

“I... Shit... Jathez, Khotak, Nthazek; try and climb over those boulders and see what’s going on the other side. The rest, dig around if you’re able. See if you can drag out anyone else.”

One of the fourth degrees uses his mace of light to illuminate the rubble and see if there are any more limbs sticking out the stone. There is nothing obvious. We start work shifting some of the more massive rocks.

“Hey, look!” Notok shouts. “Over there, there’s someone moving!”

We turn to where he’s pointing: right up where the cavern wall was, something is shifting and struggling under a deep slope of rubble. Fjalar—he was one of the first out the rubble—steps forward:

“Who’s that? Can you hear us?”

“Don’t give up!” Barock bellows. “Keep digging yourself out! You lot, hurry up and help him.”

We hurry forward, me in the lead. I put Heartseeker down and use both hands to start scraping away the rocks covering him. I pull down a big flat one, and see the gleam of pale armor plates.

“Keep pushing!” I yell. “You’re nearly out.”

The stones under me shift violently and I skid down the slope and fall over—my gripping boots are no use when what they’re standing on is sliding around. Jarick pulls me up and we both start to make our way back to—

“Stop!” someone yells. “You two—”

Four blades of bone burst from the rubble, sending rocks flying at us with the force of siege-artillery. One hits me square in my left shoulder and I’m sent spinning through the air to crash land at the foot of the slope. Jarick is less lucky. The stone that clanged off his helmet just stunned him, didn't throw him, and he is unable to defend himself as the dithyok’s two upper limbs slash down. The blades slice through his battered armor like knives through steak. Blood that glints like rubies in the light of his mace spatters out.

I yell in panic and scramble back as the dithyok half charges, half falls down the slope toward us. One of its legs and part of its torso has been crushed, but it doesn’t seem to feel the pain. It slashes at us with all four of its arms.

I duck under its lower right arm, roll forward. Heartseeker is lying just below Jarick’s mutilated corpse. I scramble as fast as I can up the treacherous slope while the dwarves behind me scream and the dithyok hisses. I hear a rapid exchange of blows. The shifting of the rubble brings Heartseeker sliding down to me; I pick it up and charge the dithyok from behind. All the momentum of my downward movement plus the speed granted by my gauntlets goes into my blow.

The bend in Heartseeker’s shaft makes it ineffective. Its blade glances off the dithyok’s armor plating. Desperately I try to bring myself to a halt, but both my boots and the uneven surface conspire to make me lose control completely. I crash into the dithyok shoulder-first; it falls down.

“Good one Zathar!” someone yells. I roll off the beast and out the way of a dozen brutal stabs.

It writhes and twists, strikes out weakly, lets out a rattling gasp and dies. I lie beside it for a few moments, panting. The ringing in my ears is louder, and the dust above me seems to be twisting and spiraling into a kind of whirlpool tinged with red at the edges.

“...get him up! Quick, get his armor off!”

I snap out of it and crawl to my feet. I open my mouth to tell them that I’m fine, but it’s not me they’re crowding over.

Two dwarves lie spreadeagled a few paces away from the dead dithyok. One is completely still; the other is moaning and weakly, deliriously trying to stand. His armor is covered in red muck—blood and dust.

“Get his armor off! Someone get some bandages!”

“We don’t have any!”

“Use his shirt! Cut it into strips!”

It’s Fjalar. The dithyok has slashed him what looks like two dozen times: his dented armor offered no protection against its blades. He at least got one good strike in—his spear juts from the center of the monster’s maw.

“The leg plate’s stuck! Zathar, help me!”

I start pulling at the clasping mechanism, but it’s been bent shut. I get a rock and smash as hard as I can. It breaks off with a ping and we free his leg. There’s a deep stab wound in it. Bright crimson is pumping out.

“Bandage, bandage!” the dwarf beside me shouts.

“I told you, we don’t have any! Use his trousers!”

I use a shard of rock to cut strips from the bloody fabric clinging to his leg. A thicker one I use as a bandage; the dwarf beside me ties a thinner one tightly around his thigh as a tourniquet. The bleeding slows a little, but he’s still losing a lot of blood.

“Get some healing chains!” Barock shouts as he tries to stumble over to us. “Where’s Jarick’s pack?”

“No idea!” I shout. “I think it's still buried!”

“Shit!”

“What’s going on at the other side of the rubble? Is anyone there?”

I realize that maybe, instead of the rubble falling to cut us off from the other squads, it might just have crushed them all entirely, and now we’re the only lucky survivors.

“Nothing—”

“Oi!” comes a shout from the top of the boulders “We found them— Shit, who is that?”

“Just in time!” Barock screams. “Get us some healing chains, now! Fjalar’s injured!”

“Bad?”

“Yes!”

“We need more strips, Zathar!” shouts the dwarf beside me. “Hurry up!”

I pull off the rest of his trousers and start slashing them to pieces. His body is coated completely in blood with barely a patch of skin showing. Brighter red lines show where the wounds are, which we wrap tightly. All the while he’s struggling and gasping with adrenaline-borne vigor, trying to push us away, as if he thinks he’s still in the fight.

“Stop struggling!” I shout when he nearly kicks me, then contorts his face in pain. “We’re trying to fucking save you!”

“I...” he says. “I...”

“Save your strength!” a dwarf trying to bandage his wrist tells him. “The healing chains are nearly here. Just hang on!”

“Shit, will they even be enough?” someone mutters under their breath.

“They’re here!”

A runeknight jumps down from the top of a boulder and sprints for us. In his hand is a bundle of thin chains, which he tosses. Hurriedly we bind Fjalar, still struggling, with them.

His breathing evens slightly, and he shuts his eyes.

“Shit, he’s in a bad state,” says the runeknight. “Some of you better stay here with the other injured.”

“What’s going on?” I ask. “What the hell happened?”

“We’ve got to the almergris!”

“What about the other squads? Were they all right?”

His expression becomes somber. “Not so much.”