I awaken in cold and utter darkness. I try to scramble to my feet, a nightmare about being chased through the tunnels by a many-legged beast fresh in my memory, but a sharp pain in my leg forces me to lie back down.

I feel lighter. My armor has been removed, and all I have on are some plain nightclothes. A sheet is over me. It has a cold, leathery texture, but is thin and soft. I feel sore all over, and worse than that, there is a kind of soreness inside me. My breathing is labored, my heartbeat too. My skin feels loose on my bones. I feel my face, and am shocked to discover that my beard, once short and neat, is nearly to my waist. The hair feels brittle.

I feel old. Terribly old. How long exactly was I wandering the tunnels?

“Hey!” I croak. My voice sounds old too. “Hey, is anyone there? Hello?”

There is no answer. A groan escapes my lips, then a sense of weakness takes hold of me and I sink back into sleep. When I wake again, I am surprised to see the room lit by a single flickering candle. A dwarf is sitting at my bedside, though it’s still too dark to make out his features clearly.

“Morning,” I say.

He frowns, as if he doesn’t understand the word.

“Greetings.”

“Greetings,” he replies, and smiles broadly. “How do you feel?”

“Terrible.”

“No surprise. The bzathletic you fought cut your leg deep. You lost a lot of blood.”

“That insect thing? You found its body, then?”

“Yes, when we investigated the roof. We need to thank you, actually. We had no idea a cave ran so close to the roof of our forges. If you hadn’t broken through, it would have come down later in more devastating fashion, I’m sure.”

“I’m glad I could be of assistance.”

“It’s no trouble.”

His accent is strange and quite difficult for me to understand. His short ah he nearly pronounces like a long uh, and his z is closer to an s or th. I have traveled far, it seems.

“How long have I been down here?” I ask.

“Pardon?”

“How long? How many days, hours?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“I mean to say, how much time has passed between when I fell into your forges, and now.”

“Ah!” he says. “Time. Time. That is the dwarvish word for it. The scholar keeps on trying to explain what I think you’re trying to.”

“Explain? What is there to explain?”

“I mean, the distance... Not along the tunnels, or one length of the fortress to the other, but more abstract... Ah, like there are days on the surface. With the sun, and all that.”

“You mean you’ve never seen the sun?” I ask, and immediately feel stupid.

“Of course not,” he laughs.

“Where am I? How deep?”

He smiles. Now my eyes have adjusted to the candlelight, I see that he is an older dwarf, with wise eyes, but he is not wrinkled. He has the look of internal energy that comes from a well-crafted amulet of unaging. He reminds me a little of Wharoth in that respect, though he smiles a lot more. He is one of those rare dwarves that seems to emanate an aura of kindness and friendliness.

“You are in the fortress of Gholaz-Dwoth, to give its runic name. The fortress of the deep darkness.”

“I am from the realm of the late Runethane Thanerzak.”

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“Ah, the famous dragonslayer.”

I flinch a little at the mention of dragons. “And you are?”

“My name is Nthazes. Runeknight of the fourth degree.”

I reach out and shake his hand. “My name is Zathar. Of the fifth degree... I think, at least.”

“You think? Your armor is certainly of that rank, though terribly rusted. Time... You have been down in the tunnels for a long stretch of it, I think.”

“I think so too.” I make a tentative attempt to sit up, and manage to swing my legs off the bed. The pain has diminished somewhat. “Could we maybe get something to eat and drink?”

“Of course,” Nthazes says, still smiling. “Shall I bring some up, or would you like to meet the rest of us? There's a few downstairs right now."

"I'd be glad to meet you all."

"Then I‘ll lead you to the dining hall.”

----------------------------------------

Nthazes walks me out of my room slowly and down a hallway. There are no candles here, although he doesn’t seem to mind the lack of light. He walks confidently and does not stumble even once when he takes me down the stairs. The same cannot be said for me—my left thigh has started to ache terribly again and I limp clutching at the wall.

A few turns later and we enter a large room. There are lights here, lanterns affixed to the walls, but inside each is only the tiniest of flames. Apart from those tiny yellow sparks, I can see nothing.

Nthazes sits me down on a hard chair. Around me I sense the presence of other dwarves, and can hear them munching on their food.

“Our injured friend,” Nthazes announces to them. “A runeknight of the fifth degree from Runethane Thanerzak’s realm.”

“Welcome, fellow dwarf,” someone says formally. “It has been a while since one of us came down from so far up.”

“I’m glad to have found you,” I respond.

“Shame about the forge though,” says another. “I told the Runethane that we should map the tunnels above more carefully, but he only cares about what’s below.”

“Below is why we are here,” another dwarf reminds him.

“Still, never hurts to be prudent,” says a different dwarf, or maybe the one from before? In the darkness I cannot tell who is who.

“Excuse me,” I whisper to Nthazes. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t see anything.”

“Oh, of course," he laughs. "You aren't used to being down here. Like our human friend."

"Bring him and his light down," someone suggests. "He'll be up in his rooms."

"Very well," Nthazes laughs. "One moment."

"Have him turn the brightness down a bit this time!" another calls after him. "I don't want to be blinded."

In the meantime, I'm offered some food. It’s a trencher of papery bread, on top of which is something chewy and slightly slimy, tasting of fish. I eat it up gladly and only ask what it is after I’m finished.

“Bthaeloth,” says one of the dwarves. “Foraging party grabbed it. Still mostly fresh.”

“It’s not bad,” I say, and I’m being honest here: it’s much better than worms and beetles, even if it isn’t exactly succulent roasted pork.

I accept a glass of beer—one thing common to both above and below, it seems—and am halfway through it when Nzathes returns in a brilliant glow of yellow light, a halo like the sun.

“Turn that down!” someone snaps. “I told you not to blind us all!”

“All right, all right,” comes a gruff voice, and the halo diminishes in size.

I nearly gasp in surprise. Behind Nthazes, clutching a lantern in one hand, stands a tall, thin creature. He looks a little like a dwarf, I suppose, but stretched out until he’s nearly the height of a troll. His beard is short and white, contrasting with his dark bronze face. A human! The meaning of the dwarves’ words from before only just now registers. There is a human living down here.

“This is the scholar,” Nthazes says, gesturing to him. “He is researching the deep darkness at the pleasure of Runethane Yurok.”

“How do you do?” the scholar says to me. His voice is hoarse, and his face lined. He must be old for a human. “I am Jaemes, from the Kingdom of Hyvaen, not that you’ve heard of it.”

“I’m doing all right,” I answer.

“It’s nice to see a normal dwarf,” he continues as he places his lantern on the table and sits awkwardly on one of the chairs. They are far too small for him. “Not like these strange fellows. Not one of them has seen the sun, can you believe it?”

“I only ever saw it indirectly.”

“Oh, yes, the famous sky-mirror,” Nthazes says. “What does it look like?”

“I... I can’t say I ever paid that much attention to it. It did lighten things up a bit, though.”

“I’ll bet it did,” says Jaemes. “Could do with something like that down here.”

“You do nothing but complain,” snorts the dwarf that I think first spoke when I came down. “Anyway, now that our guest can see us, we’ll introduce ourselves. My name is Commander Cathez, of the second degree.”

“Fjalar, of the sixth.”

“Galar, also of the sixth.”

“Hastar, of the fifth.”

Now I can see them all properly, I am taken aback by how different they look to the dwarves I’m used to. Their beards are all very blonde, for one, and their skin is extremely pale. All dwarves’ have pale skin, at least to my knowledge, due to our lives out of sunlight, but these five have such white skin that I worry they might crisp up and burn just from the light of Jaemes’s lantern.

“Is this your guildhall?” I ask.

“No,” Jaemes answers. “They don’t have guilds like normal dwarves down here. This is a purely military installation.”

“He asked us, not you,” Cathez says sternly. He is the toughest looking of them: his white face is marred by several ragged pink scars. “But yes, we have no guilds down here. We are the smallest realm I can think of, but we have a job to do and are proud of it.”

“A job? What job?” I ask.

“We are guards,” Nthazes says proudly. “We guard the tunnels above.”

“Guard them from what?”

“The deep darkness.”