They found themselves standing outside the mine entrance once more early the next morning. Casek held a makeshift torch in his hand, crafted from greenwood harvested on the outskirts of the town, one end soaked with the rest of Raelynn’s pine resin. They’d had enough to make four, and Casek had a second hanging from a belt loop at his waist.

  Even knowing he would have light, the darkness ahead of them loomed, overbearing. He could still feel the mass of Shadowspawn that filled the mines, a teeming swarm of hungry enemies that would surely descend upon them en masse as soon as they were discovered.

  Worse was knowing the form the stronger Shadow creatures had taken. Drau in the shape of spiders was enough to turn Casek’s stomach—Bel’gor that big made him want to run for the hills.

  Try to remember how much you’ve grown, Casek. The Drau we fought in the woods with Raelynn would fall to you now, far easier than it did back then. The Drau down here will do the same.

  It’s not really the Drau I’m worried about.

  The Bel’gor are why we have Raelynn.

  And if more than one comes at a time?

  Tauph hesitated. We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. Hopefully, we won’t.

  And that was exactly Casek’s problem with their task. Too much rode on their luck holding out. Raelynn was a capable fighter, and far stronger than he, but could she fight multiple Bel’gor? Two had been enough to defeat her before.

  Of course, there was also the fact that these enemies were oversized spiders to add to the swirling pit of unease in his stomach. He would have to fight past his fear of arachnids.

  One look at Raelynn told him that any pleas to delay their plans any further would fall on deaf ears. She stared into the darkness; her face the picture of stony determination, jaw clenched and a hardness to her expression that made her seem carved of stone.

  Her eyes slid to him. “Are you ready for this?”

  “Nope,” he answered, voice dripping with false-cheer, before the smile slid from his face, and he allowed some of his own determination to show through. “Let’s go rescue your friend.”

  Raelynn nodded and lit her torch, striding into the darkness. Casek followed closely. He wouldn’t light his own torch until her first was spent, or it was clear they needed the light of both. No sense in wasting precious light when exploring a place like this, after all.

  The first section of the mine was by far the broadest tunnel; with well-crafted wooden struts lining the way down and panelled timber covering the walls, keeping out the soil from collapsing in on the tunnel. Carts and strangely hooked picks lay abandoned intermittently along the track they followed downward, along with a variety of other knick knacks left behind when somewhere like this was abandoned in a hurry.

  What really shocked Casek, though, was the condition of everything. The wooden structures here had held up to the degradation of time remarkably well, and even the rails here were coated far more thinly with rust. It was as though the place had been abandoned five hundred years later than it actually had.

  They pressed on deeper and deeper, the frigid bite of the air growing more severe the further they travelled. Soon, the wood panelling grew more sparse, before eventually, it disappeared entirely, revealing tool-marked pink stone that glowed softly in the torchlight. There was a salty tang in the air that stung at his eyes and lips, drying them out.

  The swarming mass of shades he’d sensed the previous day drew ever closer, their tainted presence growing stronger and fouler with every step, until Casek expected them to leap out of the darkness ahead at any moment.

  Soon enough, they did.

  Gibbering, gangly beasts tumbled from the mirk. In dribs and drabs at first, but soon they crashed against Casek and Raelynn in great waves of scything limbs and gnashing teeth. They poured out of the black, skittering along the walls and roof when there was no more room on the floor.

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  At this point, they were a minor inconvenience at best, blades cutting through them as easy as mist, but cleaving a path through them slowed progress down the mines to a crawl.

  The dissipated smoke flooded back into their blades. Raelynn seemed not to notice, but strength pulsed through his veins, the rapid influx of heady power setting his heart racing. He and Raelynn settled into an easy rhythm, dancing through the flood of enemies, a storm of flickering blades and acrid, black smoke.

  The Shades continued to hurl themselves at them, even whilst their numbers thinned, until only handfuls of the frenzied creatures hurled themselves upon their blades.

  “Back in the building I woke up in,” Casek grunted, running his sword across the gut of an especially bulbous Shade. “They got the message pretty quick when I started cutting them down.”

  “Something is driving them on,” Raelynn replied, eyes narrowing as a pair of shades leaped at her, forcing her to lash out with the short blade in her offhand and bisecting both with a single clean strike. “The stronger shadowspawn below are trying to wear us down by throwing the chaff at us.”

  The trickle of enemies soon faded to nothing, and once again the pair were left standing in the darkness, the sound of their heavy breathing the only indication there had been a fight at all. Raelynn relit her torch.

  “I didn’t know they were that organised.”

  “There’ are plenty of stories from the more experienced binders,” Raelynn said, crouching down in front of a shaft at the end of the tunnel they’d been walking down. “Bel’gor leading packs of Drau on hunts. Shades gathering close to more powerful shadows. Nothing confirmed beyond circumstantially, of course—people who try usually don’t end up coming back.”

  With no small amount of trepidation, Casek joined Raelynn beside the shaft, staring down into the impenetrable black below.

  “I have zero interest in climbing down into that hole,” Casek said bluntly, pointing towards the ladder-lined hole that would take them down to the next level of the mine. “So if you were to ask me where I thought Idris was, my money would be on down there.”

  “Sadly, I think you’re right,” Raelynn answered.

  She took a deep, steadying breath and without a moment’s further hesitation, she reached for the ladder and hauled herself down below. Casek swore softly, and hurried after her, fumbling his way down the rough iron steps and into the darkness. The salt tang on the air sharpened the further down the ladder they went, and each tremble and shake of the iron sent shivers of panic down Casek’s spine.

  Raelynn pressed on, undeterred, and it left Casek to do his best to keep pace, forcing himself after her. Whatever waited for them below would have to face them both together. Thoughts of shadowspawn drew his eyes momentarily to his wrist. All seven gems gleamed in the dark, the last dimmer by only a barely perceptible amount. He was close now.

  It was a blessed relief when Casek felt the kiss of stone beneath his boots, only made larger when Raelynn’s torch lit the cavern they’d descended into. It was far broader than the entrance tunnel, the pale pink saltrock hacked and hewn to a far greater degree than above. Tool marks marked every inch of the floor, walls and ceiling, every available scrap of rock that could be mined out without collapsing the place taken.

  Like above, wooden struts lined the walls, with support beams dug in above. But even seeing their relatively good condition did nothing to assuage the nagging ache in his belly that the roof could be moments from collapsing in on them.

  They pushed forward, and quickly, Casek wished they hadn’t. The floor became strangely sticky, holding onto their boots for just a moment as they tried to walk over it. He looked down, curious, and felt the colour drain from his face. A fine coating of pale white silk covered the floor, a whisper-thin matting that stretched out ahead of them into the darkness.

  It spread up the walls, reaching across the corners in intricate threaded patterns. Dotted throughout the white were the desiccated bodies of the unfortunate cave creatures who tried to walk across the coating of what was undoubtedly spider silk.

  “Raelynn,” he said, voice a harsh whisper, trying to get her attention. She wasn’t listening. Her attention had been stolen by something else up ahead. Casek followed her gaze, and his own eyes widened in awe as he saw what the flickering light of Raelynn’s torch had unearthed.

  The cavern ahead sparked pink and lilac as the firelight danced across the surface of a network of crystalline structures filling the entire width of the cavern. A gemstone web from floor to ceiling, that reached back as far as their light was able to travel.

  But it was not even this that had stolen his breath from him. It was the dark black shapes dotted throughout the structure like flies in a web.

  Humans. Hundreds and hundreds of people, a thousand years trapped by the shadowspawn that had ravaged their home. Casek stumbled forward to the closest figure, a blond-haired man clad in simple earth-tone clothes, his eyes frozen wide in the terror of his final free moments.

  Casek moved his hand up to press it against the crystal structure, and as he did, the man’s pupils shrunk to adjust for the closeness of his hand.

  “Gods,” he whispered, as the true horrors of what had been done to the world since he’d begun his long sleep sunk in. He looked up at the vastness of the crystal web, the sheer number of people here, not quite alive, and forbidden from dying. How many times and in how many places was this scene repeated? Entire populations of people trapped and grazed upon like cattle for entire millennia.

  The enormity of cruelty set the world spinning around him, and he dropped to his knees and reacted in the only way he could as the thought of being in this place, awake and aware, for a thousand years filled his mind.

  He vomited.