I gritted my teeth.

The smart thing to do would be to just complete the Beastgate and tell Edgar. He was an occultist, false or otherwise, and could crush the revenant in a second.

But… I couldn’t leave people enslaved, even if it was only for a few more weeks. It just wasn’t right. I had to try, at the very least. While there was a chance the revenant could use its stone on me, I knew that Kene and Dusk would come for me.

I had to try.

Not to mention, no matter how slim the odds were, there was always the chance that in the weeks it took to complete the trial, the revenant might unearth whatever it was it was digging for.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

The coblynau patted my side with one tiny hand after I agreed.

“Thank you. I need to return to my work soon. I’ve had to forgo my usual rest period to speak to you, and I need to get some in before the chains recall me. Follow me back to the village.”

With that, the old man turned and began walking down the tunnel. His stride was small and short, so even taking the time to rebuild my backpack, fill it with my potions, and throw my best attempt at a veil over my spirit, I was able to catch up with him without too much difficulty.

“Do you want me to carry you?” I asked Deep-thing. “My companion – the nature spirit I spoke about – is used to riding on my shoulder.”

“Bah!” the coblynau said, shaking his head. “I’ve got some pride. I can walk just fine.”

I shrugged and kept following him, barely needing to take one step for every ten of his. We made slow and steady progress down the tunnel, which grew steeper for some time before it came to a flat stop in a massive, dug out cavern.

The cavern spanned a space easily the size of one of the generic fields that Ed and my high school had used to accommodate every possible sport, and at the center was a hole large enough to fit a house that kept descending further down and down. A winding corkscrew path that was only a foot wide circled its way down the pit, and at the edge I could see tiny steps cut out for small folk to make their way down. Several of them were making their way up or down the steps, and I spotted a group of five of them working on carrying a large chunk of what looked like slightly glimmering stone up the steps. I could see translucent chains around their feet, made out of forged mental and telluric mana, and when I glanced at Deep-thing, I was able to spot the ethereal chains around his feet too.

Cut every few dozen feet into the hole was a cavity of varying depths, and several of the ones near the top of the chasm had been filled with houses built from stone, mud, and metal. One of them had a forge puffing away, another had what looked like a town hall, while others were obviously residences for the small folk.

I kept walking until I was near the edge of the pit and glanced down, struck with the desire to ask the coblynau for a pickaxe and walk down to the bottom. I shoved off the impulse to take a better look.

The pit circled down far.

Really far.

Past the first fifty or so feet, the coblynau residences became scarce. By two hundred feet down, they were gone entirely, and without their small lights and glowstones to serve as illumination, I wasn’t able to see the bottom of the pit. I spotted tiny pricks of light down at what I assumed was the bottom, which I thought might be the lights on the miner’s helmets, but I couldn’t be certain.

I could have used my Vampiric Senses and Surveyor’s Eye spell, but not without dropping my veil, and I didn’t want to risk alerting the revenant.

Most disturbing of all, at least to me, was the fact that the glowing purple magic of the mountain that I’d grown used to being around me at all times… wasn’t in the pit. The entire pit was dark, as if it were ordinary stone.

“This is our village,” Deep-thing said with some pride, puffing his tiny chest out.

“It’s a beautiful village,” I complimented. “Well. Save for the thing at the bottom of the pit.”

“Yes,” Deep-thing said falteringly, then smiled. “That’s what you’re here to help with, though.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “I’m going to drop my veil now, to see if I can get a sense of how strong he is. Do you all need to evacuate?”

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“We can’t,” Deep-thing said with a grim smile, and I felt my heart tug, but only nodded to him.

I cautiously lowered my veil and spread my mana senses out over the cavern.

Naturally, I could feel the power of the coblynau, a heady, earthy, mineral power. It reinforced the entire structure, keeping the stone from collapsing, and doing something in the soil, though I wasn’t entirely sure what.

But hanging over their magic was an oppressive energy that spun through the cavern, a mix of mental and telluric mana. It ran most strongly along the chains that were on each of the coblynau, but it still flooded the air, and even tapped at my own mind, though not too harshly.

That had to be the power of the loyalty-lazuli. It was like the power of an arcanist, that was true, but there was something… else. I had expected for mineral magic to operate like plant magic, but instead of a power that was being fed into the mineral to create an effect, a self defense mechanism to stop the plant from being eaten, or a trait that had been constructed and bred by humans, it was more like the stable power of a generative core. Like when I took my spatial anchor or captured moment to a permanent state that was capable of supporting itself.

After a moment of consideration, I realized that I shouldn’t have been so surprised. After all, my lightening-stone that I had on my necklace just… worked. It didn’t need me to feed telluric mana into it in order to work. It was stable and capable of producing the effect without expending its energy.

I shook my head. The differences between a mineral mage and plant mage were interesting, but also not exactly the most relevant right now.

Underneath the power of the loyalty-lazuli, I could feel another source of power. It was faint, emanating from the very bottom of the pit and barely wafting its way up to me, but I could still make it out.

The magic was oily, stained with death and cruelty. There wasn’t anything wrong with death magic – I’d be more than happy to have a chat or a meal with a ghost – but this felt… Gross.

It wasn’t a part of the natural cycle of life and death.

It wasn’t the echo of what had once been.

It was a perversion, a twisting of the natural order, the obsession of someone so driven to seek power and wealth that they were willing to die in the pursuit.

I tried to probe at the grossness with my mana senses to get a feel of how strong it was, and was left more confused than anything.

The revenant was weak, barely having stepped into first gate.

The revenant was strong, at the very peak of fourth gate, seeking the path to fifth.

The mana flickered around, the density changing moment to moment, and I wondered if the decayed power of the shade and ghost was partly to blame here. The shade was a copy of the magical matrix, but it wasn’t a soul, it had no way to replenish its power on its own.

If the revenant had been digging for years, it may be running low on power.

On the other hand, it had definitely been absorbing power from the items it dug up, but it couldn’t have been enough to properly sustain itself.

I licked my lips.

I could do this, I was sure of it.

Relatively sure of it, at least.

“If I destroy the stone first,” I said carefully, “can you evacuate the pit?”

I did have my offensive potions, which were easily my strongest tools, but my firebombs would catch innocents in the blast, and I couldn’t accept that.

“Yes,” the coblynau said. “But I don’t know how the king will react.”

I nodded my assent, suddenly really wishing Ed were here. His Analyze Earth spell would have let him figure out the fracture points on the stone, and he could have used his other spell to break it.

“Can you tell me where to hit the stone?” I asked Deep-thing, who shook his head. I grimaced. I hadn’t expected he’d be able to, but it had been worth asking.

“Alright,” I told Deep-thing. “I’m going to start thinking of solutions to this. You go get your rest, okay?”

As the old coblynau stomped away, I put my pack down and double checked my pockets to make sure I knew exactly where my potions were. Once I was confident my stock wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire, and that I had my combat potions, I moved back to the edge of the pit and stared down, this time tapping into my magic.

With my spells running through me, I could see that the pit went down for over a thousand feet, and the cavities in the walls from mining kept growing larger and larger, the spellcraft straining to keep the entire place from falling in on itself.

There were indeed at least a dozen of the small folk mining away with a combination of magic and their pickaxes. There had to be spells running through the pickaxes, because they were capable of tearing through stone at a prodigious rate.

The revenant was… Gross.

It had mostly decayed into a skeleton, but there were still ragged strips of what had once been flesh hanging off of it, a grayish-black color. A few of the strips still had writhing maggots within them.

I felt my stomach churn slightly at the grossness, but kept looking over the corpse.

It held a pickaxe in one hand, made entirely of a silvery metal. It wasn’t silver, and it reminded me slightly of one of the metals that Kerbos was made of, with the glimmering specks of sunlight running through it. Socketed on either side of the head of the pickaxe was what I assumed to be two of the mage’s minerals. One was a ruddy red, the color of rust, that I might have mistaken for a spot of decay if it weren’t for the burning desolation mana it emitted, while the other was a polished black stone that looked like obsidian or onyx or jet that emitted lunar mana.

Around the head of the skeleton, where there were still a few greasy gray hairs, there was a large crown. It seemed to be made of ordinary material, since I could feel no mana coming off of it, but I thought that the entire thing might be made of gold.

I didn’t consider myself a greedy person, but the thought of that much gold was enough to make me salivate.

I shook myself and kept looking for the stone, creeping around the edge of the pit. Finally, I spotted a necklace slotted with a bright blue stone that glowed with mental mana. For all of the trouble that the stone had caused these people, it was small, only about the size of my pinkie fingernail, but the power it gave off was strong.

I bit my lip as I studied the gemstone, trying to devise some sort of plan.