The entrance to the ancient realm of the Deep Delvers did not open with grand archways of polished marble or gilded gates.
Ten leagues south of Mount Dread-Crown, hidden within the shadow of a sheer, jagged basalt gorge known as the Devil’s Throat, was a fissure in the living rock eighty paces wide. The mountain wind did not enter the yawning darkness; it died upon the threshold, choked by a stale, mineral-dense draft that tasted of powdered iron, dry sulfur, and the cold, breathless stillness of subterranean stone that had not seen sunlight in four centuries.
Outside the chasm, the sun of high summer beat warm against the gray cliffs.
Gideon dismounted from his soot-black war-stallion, his heavy riding boots sinking into the loose shale.
He had stripped away the ceremonial velvet of the coronation. Today, the Sovereign King was clad in the stripped-down, lethal battle-rig of a subterranean hunter: heavy boiled leather reinforced with dark star-iron plates over his shoulders and shins, his two five-foot claymores sheathed across his back, and a short-handled boarding axe tucked into his wide weapon-belt. Across his massive chest, the silver-red covenant marks hummed with steady, watchful heat.
Beside him, Lyra stepped down from her mare.
She wore her dark leather combat leathers lined with soft hare-fur, her twin star-iron daggers strapped to her thighs, and her sovereign circlet resting light against her dark, braided hair. Her small hands were gloved in supple wolf-hide, her hazel-grey eye sharp, her left eye burning with that quiet violet flame that pierced the shadows of the chasm like a lantern.
Behind them stood a strike force of only ten: Commander Varis, Lady Talia, and eight veteran Void-dancers clad in silent leather and star-iron mail, carrying heavy dwarven-style crossbows fitted with phosphorus-tipped bolts.
"No dragons below this threshold," Gideon said, glancing back toward the ridge where Cinder and the Abyssal Drake circled on broad, protective wings.
"The shafts are too narrow," Lyra agreed softly, her gaze fixed on the black mouth of the cave. "If Cinder vents his fire in the deep tunnels, the draft will consume the oxygen within half a league in ten breaths. He must hold the sky."
With a soft whistle through her teeth, Lyra sent a mental command through their bond.
High above, Cinder let out a low, acknowledging rumble, banking wide to take up a watchful perch atop the highest crag of the Devil's Throat, his crimson eyes scanning the valleys below for any disturbance.
"Varis, establish the picket line at the throat," Gideon ordered, turning to the scarred commander. "If anything with more than two legs or made of glass tries to crawl out of this crack, you bury it in oil and light the fuse."
"Understood, Alpha," Varis replied crisply, bringing her fist to her breastplate before detailing four scouts to haul the barrels of dwarven pitch into position along the narrow approach.
Gideon drew his right claymore, its five-foot star-iron blade reflecting the gray daylight, and took Lyra’s hand in his left.
"Stay within reach of my blade, little bird," he rumbled low, his thumb stroking her knuckles. "If these halls are as deep as Conlan’s stories, you don't want to lose your footing."
"I have the Weave, Gideon," Lyra replied with a faint, fierce smile. "The stone knows my blood."
Together, they stepped across the threshold into the lightless deep.
The transition from the summer day to the subterranean darkness was absolute.
Within twenty paces, the sound of the wind and the warmth of the sun vanished, replaced by an acoustic emptiness so dense it pressed against their eardrums. The air was bone-dry and freezing, cold enough to set their breath pluming in pale clouds before their faces.
Lyra raised her left hand.
She did not strike a torch; she wove a small, floating orb of sovereign violet starlight that hovered three paces before them, casting long, sharp shadows across the ancient dwarven masonry.
The hall was colossal.
The shaft sloped downward at a steady thirty-degree angle, fifty paces wide and thirty paces high, carved from the living black basalt of the mountain roots with machine-like, geometric precision. The walls were lined with colossal relief carvings depicting ancient dwarven legions battling chitinous horrors of the deep mantle, their runic inscriptions worn smooth by centuries of dry drafts.
For two hours, they descended in silence, winding deeper into the bowels of the Frost-Spire Range.
Every half-league, the tunnel branched into labyrinthine side-passages: abandoned smithies with colossal cold anvils of meteoric iron, empty barracks where iron bunks lay covered in thick layers of undisturbed dust, and deep ventilation shafts that dropped thousands of feet into whistling abysses.
At the three-league mark, the nature of the stonework changed.
The clean, geometric angles of the dwarven chisels were gone.
Ahead of them, the basalt tunnel opened into an immense cavern—a subterranean vault spanning half a league across, its ceiling lost in the darkness two hundred feet above.
Running through the center of the cavern floor was a jagged, violent trench eighty paces wide, where the bedrock had been pulverized into fine, black gravel.
The walls of the cavern were not stone.
They were coated in a weeping, vitrified crust of translucent purple quartz that crackled with faint, erratic arcs of ultraviolet static. The same unnatural, metallic smell of ozone, crushed minerals, and cosmic frost that had choked the summit of Mount Dread-Crown hung heavy in the air.
At the center of the trench lay the wreck.
It was a fragment of the fallen moon-citadel—a colossal, wedge-shaped keel of petrified moon-rock two hundred paces long, buried half-deep in the pulverized basalt.
The hull was cracked open like a split walnut, venting clouds of pale violet mist.
And crawling over the broken hull, like silver ants over a dead carcass, were hundreds of figures.
They were not the graceful Pale Celestials of the surface, nor were they the nine-foot Void-Reapers of the barrows.
They were grotesque, quadrupedal constructs forged from twisted scrap-metal, broken star-glass, and petrified moon-stone. They moved with erratic, jerky spasms upon four elongated limbs of jagged iron, their torso-less frames supporting massive, multi-faceted eyes of milky quartz that glowed with sick, pulsating purple light.
The Void-Scavengers.
Dozens of them were busy cutting into the ancient dwarven star-iron veins in the cavern walls with high-frequency acoustic beams, while others hauled heavy chunks of raw ore into the smoking breach of the citadel’s hull.
From deep inside the shattered fortress came a rhythmic, subterranean thrum—a heavy, mechanical heartbeat that was growing stronger with every ton of iron fed into its belly:
THUMP.
THUMP.
THUMP.
"They aren't just repairing their keel, Lyra," Gideon growled in her ear, his massive hand tightening like an iron band around her waist, pulling her into the deep shadow of an overhanging dwarven pillar.
His amber-gold eyes burned with lethal recognition as he watched the purple light pulse through the wreck.
"They're building an incubator."