The human was right. Being in utter darkness does play havoc with your sense of time. I experienced the phenomenon a little during my time with the river trolls, but at least they had a regular schedule of meals for me to judge the passing of days by. There is no such schedule here.

When I get hungry, I grope my way down to the meal-hall and eat. Sometimes there are others there, sometimes not. They have no words for ‘breakfast’, ‘lunch’, or ‘dinner’. A meal is a meal, and they take one whenever they are hungry. Somehow, or perhaps because of this, there are always enough on guard duty at the main tunnel to the darkness.

After each meal, I stumble back up to my bed to rest for who knows how many hours at a time. My shock at discovering the length of my journey has given me a slight fever, and after I lie down I writhe, coated with sweat in the darkness in half-sleep. Each time I wake, I hurry to light the candle at my bedside and stare down at my beard. It’s a compulsion: I am terrified that it will be suddenly be down to my knees and albino white, that I will have missed another ten years, or twenty or thirty.

Finally my fever breaks. A while after, my leg wound is fully healed.

One mealtime I catch Nthazes and ask where my armor and Heartseeker are being kept.

“Down in the forges,” he tells me. “If you’re feeling better, I’ll show you to them.”

“If it’s no trouble,” I reply. “I don’t want to distract you from your guard duties.”

“There’s enough runeknights down there at the moment. I won’t be missed.”

“You really don’t have a roster or anything?”

“What’s a roster?”

“Never mind. Let’s go.”

He leads me out of the barracks, although out is something of a relative term. There doesn’t seem to be any open cavern down here, just tunnels upon tunnels of absolute blackness. He seems to be able to find his way around easily enough, though.

Some way along one of these tunnels he stops.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he says. “I need to grab my ears.”

I frown. What does he mean by ‘ears’? I saw his ears clearly enough when I first woke up. He must mean some kind of armor, but he is already equipped in his full panoply, or at least he sounds like it, making a metallic rustle with each step.

“Sorry about that,” he says when he returns.

“No trouble.”

We continue on until we come to a door, though I can only tell that’s why we stopped when I hear the click of him opening it. A square of dim orange appears, outlining his silhouette, and now I understand what he meant by his ‘ears’.

From either side of his titanium helm sprout great metal protrusions, each a half-oval about eight inches long, cupped like a shell.

He leads me into the forging chamber. It’s a low, wide room, with large pits arrayed in a grid formation across it. In each of these forging pits I can see a fiery glow, and from several sparks are spraying out and the sound of hammer on metal is emanating. We skirt around them and make our way to the back of the room where dozens of massive chests sit with just enough space between each to walk.

We arrive at the storage chest where my equipment is being kept, he bends down to open the lock, and I squat down opposite him to get a look at the ears from the front. Inside each is an intricate whorl of thin metal pieces, runed exquisitely and studded with diamonds at appropriate points of power concentration.

“What are those ‘ears’, exactly?” I ask Nthazes as he works the lock.

“These?” he says, tapping one. “So we can see things properly.”

“See?”

“In a manner of speaking. You’ll understand once you’ve forged your own pair.”

“You’ve been finding your way around just fine without them until now. Do you need them for forging?”

“I know the barracks like the back of my hairy hand,” he laughs. “I don’t need them there. But for forging, yes, they help. I suppose you just use sight when you forge up there?”

“Feeling too.”

“Ah, you’re crippling yourself then. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you.”

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“I take it you use the ears when you’re guarding too.”

“Yes. You can’t see the darkness coming, but you can hear it. Or rather, with these you can see the silence. And of course when we’re foraging up above we use them to hunt.”

“Maybe if I’d had some I wouldn’t have wasted those ten years blundering around.”

“I wouldn’t call it a waste,” he says as the lock finally clicks open. “I think you’ll enjoy life down here. It’s a good life. No petty squabbles between dwarves. Though it isn’t half dangerous, of course... Here’s your armor.”

He lifts open the chest, which is about as long as I am tall and a bit wider. My armor is laid out in it in full. I groan in despair. The ambient glow here is a little too dim for me, but even in the low light I can see how badly the metal is rusted. Not a single part remains fully reflective, and at the joints the steel is flaking away like burned paper. Even the abyssal salamander runes are coated with greenish slime, and the power that once emanated from them so grandly is now but a whimper.

“I’m amazed you managed to kill that big bzathletic in that,” Nthazes says. “You must be quite the fighter.”

I’m too depressed to reply. I pick up one of the gauntlets to examine more closely, and a big chunk of rust breaks off and shatters into dust on the stone floor.

“It’s not a totally lost cause,” Nthazes says. “The runes just need the mold scraped from them. And the metal under the runes isn’t so rusted. You can salvage those bits and remake the rest with titanium. Though the welding process is likely to be tricky. You probably ought to practice on some scrap metal first.”

“Titanium... I’ve never forged with it before. Never been able to afford it.”

“It’s fairly cheap down here. There’s a mine of it a few miles up, and Runeking Ulrike gives us a tax rebate on it.”

“Your Runethane is one of his subjects then? Like Thanerzak was?”

“Yes, though I don’t know much about politics.”

“Neither do I.”

“Really?” says Nthazes, sounding surprised. “I thought you dwarves from above were all very political.”

“Not really.”

“You fight each other a lot though, right? For power?”

“The Runethanes had their war, and I suppose we followed along. I was just dragged along, really.”

“Huh. I heard it was a real nest of rats up there. Guilds competing for influence and whatnot.”

“There’s a bit of that, yes,” I say, feeling vaguely offended. “But mostly we just get on with our forging.”

“Sorry,” he laughs. “Maybe not all the stereotypes are accurate.”

“No. Though you’re right that there’s a lot of fighting between dwarves. A lot of nastiness, in fact. There’s none of that down here?”

“We can’t afford to waste our energy on squabbles. Not with the deep darkness clawing at us.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

“It is,” he says solemnly. “I’ll get your weapon for you now. You’ll be pleased to know it’s in a better state than your armor.”

He wanders off to leave me staring down at my rusted armor. I run a finger along the breastplate, and reddish dust coats my hand. I sigh. It took me months to make this armor—though I suppose months are nothing compared to ten years. Even so, the amount of difficulty and danger I had to go through to get the materials was extreme.

Well, I ought to look on the bright side. Once I'm done repairing the suit with titanium, it’ll be better than ever. If I manage to master forging with that notoriously fickle metal, that is. I’ve heard it’s three times harder to work than steel.

“Here’s your weapon,” Nthazes says.

I hurry to stand up and take Heartseeker from him, and breath a sigh of relief. Its haft isn’t falling apart like steel might have, but has just gone a whitish color. And the black blade is entirely free from corrosion. The runes too are whole—its so-so performance against the insect-thing must have been due to the creature’s relative lack of blood rather than damage to the weapon.

“What’s the haft made from?” Nthazes asks, peering curiously at it.

“Aluminum.”

“Oh! I’ve never seen it before.”

“Really?”

“We don’t get it down here. I’ve heard it’s very hard to smelt. Light and strong, though.”

“Yes, very light. Though most dwarves prefer other metals.”

“And the runes on your armor, what are they made of?”

“Abyssal salamander.”

He grins widely. “Amazing! I’ve never seen one.”

“You don’t get salamanders down here?”

“No. Nothing with four legs, unfortunately.”

“Really?”

“Occasionally the Runethane will import some pigs for a feast after we beat back a particularly difficult incursion, but other than that, no. Just things with lots of legs or none at all.”

“And you’ve never left here?”

“No. I would like to, though. Go and travel to the upper realms. Maybe even the surface! Have you ever been to the surface?”

“No. But I saw the sun and moon through the mirrors.”

“Amazing! It must be fascinating, living in the upper caves.” His stares upwards at the ceiling and his eyes glaze over. “We don’t even have many books about them down here.”

“I’ll be happy to tell you anything you want to know, if you can keep on showing me around down here, and maybe teach me a bit about forging titanium.”

He grabs my hand and shakes it firmly. “Of course. Just promise me one other thing—if the Runethane gives me permission, I’d like to travel upward with you when you leave.”

“I thought you said you liked it down here?” I say, surprised. “No politicking and rivalries.”

“Oh, I do like it. But at least once in my life I’d like to see how you really live up in the upper caves. Explore the wider world.”

“Okay,” I say, nodding. “Just...” I wonder what his reaction will be when he finds out about my dealings with the black dragon, either by my telling him or from someone else. “Well, going upward is still a while away yet. I have a lot to do down here.”

“Of course, of course. In the meantime, let’s find something you can use to start scrubbing the rust away.”