With hands and feet they climbed the tunnel. The higher they climbed the thinner the air in their lungs and the warmer the ground under their probing fingers. There was nothing at all to see and nothing to hear but the incessant susurration of the water curtaining from above and echoing from below. For how long they climbed none could say, and in that long dark they finally understood the true nature of the world. That only the veneer of its skin knows light and then only for the glimmer of its existence, the somebillion-year winking in the impossibly infinite lifetime of everything. That for the great mass of world’s interior, as with the vacuous expanse of creation, there was and is only ever darkness. That beneath the surface there is no light. Like a living thing all its machinations turn in darkness and all their effects are born therein, and for the way humans decry the dark it should be known that nothing made in the world's black bowels ever ends in murder or maiming or betrayal or oppression. That those things are only and ever made in places known to daylight.
Orc looked up. Far above in the indefinite dark he saw a narrow crescent of light. As if the zygote of some third moon was gestating there. As if the blade of a [scythe] hot from the forge had been laid across their path. The crescent grew as he climbed and he saw it was a sliver of light caught by the ceiling like yellow lamplight cast from the door to the [brigadier]'s study. When he reached the exit whence came the light he pulled himself through and he turned to hand up the [bosun] behind him. They stood in a sloping chamber through which passed a square cut flume. Its water seemed to flow uphill past his feet and pour into the tunnel they had just climbed. Orc couldn't make sense of its wrongness. But he [knew] the way ahead was right.
He turned to the [bosun]. "I can feel it now. Follow me."
He led them past a metal panel in the ceiling that glowed. He bent and dipped his hand in the flume and he flicked drops of water at the metal. They sizzled instantly to steam. At the end of the chamber stood a dwarfsized archway. Bracing his hand on its keystone he leaned into a seething abyss. From a thousand feet below a crimson radiation assaulted his face like the summer sun. He squinted against it and saw the dark slag in it and the way it slid against itself. The walls rising out of it were of some other mineral. Hardened and resilient. Shaped by some forgotten art. He saw architectures flying from their facets that buttressed hard-angled houses and he saw red banners of anodized metal with geometric sigils hanging from their eaves. From between two houses emerged the bald profile of a massive stonecut dwarf. Its underlit nostrils and angered brow burned red by the magmic light and its flowing mustaches braced its weight to the wall and Orc saw molten rock pouring from its open mouth in sheets and strings that clung together as they fell in a superheated column, as if it expelled the collected anger and rage and hate of all dwarves past. His head began to swim in the swelter and he stepped back from the archway and allowed the [feeling] of the [orcstone] to draw him on.
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They walked a corridor under a hundred more glowing panels past a hundred doorless doorways to a hundred cells. Each was filled with objects of different sizes and shapes and functions. In one he saw a smooth metal crown resting on a concrete pedestal. A modest red ruby glinted in its setting at the brow. He laid his fingertips on it and it seemed to burst into flame yet the metal remained cool. It was too heavy to move and for a maddened moment he believed it must be alloyed somehow with the weight of all its wearers' decisions and judgements and doubts.
He looked back the way they had come and up the way they were going. The [bosun] followed his gaze.
"I've read of this place," he said.
The part of him that [knew] what was ahead was desperate to move on. But in the next cell his eye caught a strange reflection. He stopped and turned to it and stood looking at a vision of himself and of the [bosun] behind him set in the far wall. He took a step toward the vision and saw its fault, for when he stepped with his right foot the Orc caught in the wall stepped with its right. Where he carried the [Skyshard] in his left hand so too did the unmirrored Orc. He held out his right hand toward the other Orc as if to shake it in the human fashion, and as he did so too did the other.
"What is this?" he said at the same time as his twin, and he heard his own voice from two places at once.
He saw the other [bosun] peer over the other Orc's shoulder and knew his [bosun] must also be doing. As he took another step forward to touch the image the unmistakable report of gunfire cracked down the corridor and clapped about the cell. He and his other jumped at the sound and the other Orc turned and pushed his way past the other [bosun] as Orc watched. The other [bosun] stood staring at him with his loose jaw hanging there. Then his [bosun]'s cold and dry hand clasped around his wrist and drug him into the corridor. The gun cracked again, and they sprinted toward a doorway at the corridor's terminus.
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> +1 [Awareness]: When you die you go all to pieces and some of you winds up in bird bellies and some in the dirt and some in the air. Ain’t nobody sayin otherwise about that. So where do you think all of you came from before you was born? Fowl and turnips and them gasps and wails of birthin--they's all you now... (8/10)