Narrator: Priorin

  The engineering post smelled of old oil, wet stone, and… an endless, weathered patience. If that feeling had a physical scent, it would be just like this—something dusty and immovable. I asked about iron rations, but the duty dwarf looked at me as if I’d asked for his right kidney or, even more improbable, a reason to smile.

  "No provisions," he grunted, not looking up from blueprints that were already crumbling into grey dust at the edges. "The Bastion is no inn, Leonin. There’s a war on. In war, you eat orders and wash them down with hope."

  He carelessly tossed a scroll onto the table—a mess of arrows, crude scribbles, and a thick charcoal cross marking the spot where the missing scouts were last seen.

  "They were hard to hear, but they screamed for a long time," he added finally. There was no sympathy in his voice, only the cold acknowledgement of a broken mechanism.

  He nodded toward the dark, cold-breathing maw of an archway. Above it hung a plaque with Dwarven script. I’m not well-versed in their tongue, but my gut felt the translation: "Enter at your own risk and our repair." Given how the fortress creaked in its joints, the "repair" part caused me far more concern than the primal fear of the dark.

  The chill from the floor slabs rose to my knees the moment we crossed the line of light. At first, the passage was narrow, forcing me to duck, but it soon opened into a Veritable subterranean avenue. The ceiling was ribbed like the skeleton of a beached titan; wide walls had niches carved every five paces. Once, supply trains thundered here. Judging by the layer of dust settling on our shoulders like a grey shroud, the army had left a long time ago.

  We barely needed light. My eyes caught the stray photons even in this tomb-like shadow, turning the world into grey contours and sharp angles. Gellia walked with certainty, her armored stride never faltering, her hand resting on the hilt of her sword as if it were an extension of her arm. Flint made do with the dim reflection from the walls he struck with barely perceptible snaps of his fingers—Krauser inside him was clearly nervous, and that nervousness escaped as sparks.

  Faurgar… he managed without unnecessary effects. Only occasionally did his palm flare with a thread of blue light, thin as a spiderweb—just enough not to trip over a loose slab.

  First, the silence reached us. Not the living silence of a forest before dawn, but a scorched one. As if the very life had been pumped out of this place along with the air.

  And then came the bodies.

  They lay along the walls in pairs, like neat marks on an architect’s ruler. Two on the right. Ten paces later—two on the left. Right again. The center of the tunnel remained virginal and clean, as if someone had carefully swept the road for a ceremonial procession. The dwarves' armor was intact, straps uncut, ration bags in place. No signs of struggle. No blood.

  I knelt by the nearest warrior. His face was calm, even relaxed. As if he had lain down for a minute to catch his breath—and forgotten how to breathe.

  "This wasn't a fight," I whispered, carefully turning his head. The skin was cold and hard. On the neck, just above the chainmail collar, was a tiny scarlet dot. A perfect circle, as if placed by the finest calligraphic needle. "They were taken by air. Or poison. Fast. So clean they didn't even realize they were dying. Like someone was just removing redundant scenery from the path."

  The further we delved into the mountain's womb, the thicker and heavier the air became. Carvings began to emerge on the dust-covered walls—delicate, restrained, quintessentially Dwarven. Bands, loops, geometric patterns—they stretched along the corridor like road ropes eternally fused into the stone.

  But there was something else. Over the skillful patterns ran deeper, jagged gashes. Darkened by time, with a poisonous green patina in the cracks. Scars. As if something massive, in rage or despair, had tried to tear the very flesh of the mountain.

  "See those?" Flint muttered, Krauser’s notes bleeding into his voice. "The lines are like rails for magic… and the deeper ones are nodes where it's all tied together."

  I ran my fingers over one such "scar." The stone was cold, but I felt a vibration beneath my skin—the ancient, time-seared pain of this place.

  At that moment, the nearest dead man spoke.

  The dwarf’s lips did not move. His eyes were filmed with dust. But the voice formed directly inside my head—heavy, level, like a sentence read before a firing line:

  "Defender… swear the oath… protect the folk of the mountain…"

  The voice addressed only me. Flint cursed quietly and recoiled toward the center of the tunnel. Gellia silently tightened her grip on her sword; her shield rose half a palm higher. Faurgar and Flint now held strictly to the center, away from the wall carvings, as if the stone might bite them.

  I straightened my back. My ears flattened against my mane, and an electric discharge ran down my spine.

  "I give no oaths to the unknown," I said, my bass rolling through the tunnel, drowning out the hum. "I am Priorin. And I owe no one anything. Name yourself, or I will silence you permanently. Old debts are paid to those who earned them. New oaths aren't taken 'just because'."

  An oath is not words; it is blood and time. I give them to those whose faces I have seen. Whose blood I have shared. Whose mistakes I understand. Not to a disembodied whisper from a wall that couldn't even be bothered to give a name.

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  The silence clicked—the sound of a thread being cut by a razor. The air ahead thickened, swirling into a vortex, and from the carvings themselves emerged the one pulling the strings.

  The Defender.

  It grew directly from the stone, heavy and massive as a granite boulder. Its chest was smeared with spectral light, and upon it flickered a rune resembling the Dwarven sign of The Pillar. Its blade was invisible in the mist, but in its hands, it gripped a greataxe forged of pure darkness and frost.

  "Defender, you are bound…" the hum vibrated through our bones. "To aid the mountain folk…"

  "I am bound to nothing," I repeated, shifting my grip on my axe. "And I certainly won't become someone else's free tool just because you all died. Name yourself, or I sentence you."

  The ancient spirit seemed to hesitate, faced with an audacity not in its script. Then, glacial cold blasted our faces, extinguishing the last sparks of warmth—and the wraith attacked.

  It struck fast, like a hammer on an anvil. We broke formation instinctively. Gellia and I hugged the right wall to meet the enemy head-on.

  But Flint… Flint didn't just move. He blurred.

  One moment the Hadozi was at my shoulder; the next, he was ten paces ahead, dead center in the tunnel. The heavy Boots of Milather on his feet didn't make a sound, as if gravity had suddenly decided this specific ginger was no longer of interest. He moved with a frightening, unnatural speed, outrunning his own shadow.

  "Shields to the wall!" I barked.

  Gellia lunged. Her sword hummed, but not with a usual battle ring—it was a low, vibrating drone that made my teeth ache. The blade seemed to resonate with whatever invisible force now surrounded Flint in his new boots. The spirit's axe slammed into her shield with a heavy crunch; frost instantly raced across the metal, turning steel into a sheet of ice.

  The wraith dove into the stone like water and "rolled out" on the left side of the tunnel. Faurgar’s eyes narrowed hungrily.

  "He moves along the carvings like rails!" he rasped. "But those scars… the nodes… he’s heavier there. His connection to the stone is denser. You can 'strip' him there!"

  Flint, catching the hint instantly, skated into the center and raised his wand.

  "Cloud of Daggers!" he whispered.

  In the air above one of the deepest scars, a shimmering, faceted box opened. Hundreds of invisible blades began shredding space at a frantic speed, biting into the stone. The "daggers" literally grew into the node of the carving, blocking the spirit's path.

  The spirit felt the trap. It lunged along the right wall, tore across the ceiling, but didn't dare enter the scar blocked by the whirlwind of blades.

  "Corner him!" I shouted. "Hit the scars! Not the lines—the nodes!"

  The shadow appeared exactly where I expected—at a fork-node, trying to slip past us. I wedged my shield into the space. The spectral axe, woven of darkness and cold, slashed across my ribs, passing through my mail as if through mist.

  The cold was so intense the floor vanished for a second, and darkness clawed at my eyes. My heart skipped a beat. And another.

  "Live!" came Faurgar’s dry, short voice. There was no magic in the word, only pure, concentrated will. A command.

  The word hit like a nail driven into a board. It literally pinned my escaping breath back to my lungs. The world returned with a jolt. My ribs burned with fire, but they held my weight.

  Damned convenient when the person next to you thinks of you as a resource, I thought, gasping for air. Even more convenient when that resource is yourself.

  The wraith bogged down in the stone of the "scar" for a second. I roared in pain and swung my axe at the spot.

  CLANG!

  My good steel bounced off the spectral node as if from a diamond anvil. No scratch on the stone, none on the ghost. Ordinary iron couldn't bite this ancient filth.

  Then Gellia struck.

  Her blade wasn't just humming now—it shone with a dull, heavy light, resonating with the power of the Boots on Flint’s feet. The two artifacts of Milather, brought together, amplified each other, demanding a reckoning.

  She struck the same spot, a cross-cut. There was no ring. Her sword entered the spectral flesh and the stone scar like a hot knife through butter. She literally sheared the very structure of the ancient curse, severing the spirit's bond with the mountain.

  The shadow contorted, making a sound like iron being wound onto a rusty bolt, and popped. A cloud of acrid dust and biting cold—that was all that remained.

  "Alive?" Faurgar’s voice sounded like the crack of a whip.

  "Something like that," Flint rasped. He was wiping blood from a split lip; his hands were still shaking. The Boots of Milather now looked like ordinary heavy footwear again, but I had seen him fly.

  "The carvings are their rails," Flint said, rubbing a sore shoulder. "But the scars on the stone are anchors. Nodes. That’s where they slow down. My Cloud of Daggers blocked a node, and the spirit had to take the long way around."

  I shifted my axe, feeling the dull throb of the recoil in my shoulder.

  "Then that’s how we move. I go first, find the nodes, catch the frost on my shield. Gellia, you’re the finisher—strike immediately. Your sword is a white-hot needle right now."

  I glanced at her blade. It was still vibrating quietly, responding to the Boots. There was a terrifying power in this link: as long as Flint was near in his artifacts, Gellia’s steel ceased to be just steel.

  I knelt before the fallen dwarf who had first spoken to me. I carefully removed the steel badge with the Rune of Support from his chest. The iron clinked heavy and cold as I dropped it into my bag. Too convenient for Faurgar to count people as a "resource" while holding only their cold symbols. But I felt the weight of every plate. These aren't just inventory; they are untold stories we are now duty-bound to bring to Mangratum.

  I gently closed the dwarf’s eyes.

  "We will carry your names," I whispered. "But we only take our own oaths. We’ve had enough of others'."

  We moved deeper into the dark. Faurgar marked the nodes with chalk. We reached the spot marked with the "X".

  "The niche is empty," I said dryly. "Judging by the dust, nothing has been here for two hundred years."

  "Then what killed the dwarves?" Faurgar asked.

  "The Defender," I pointed to the bodies. "They entered the node without knowing the rhythm of the mountain. The tunnel killed them itself, protecting something that is no longer here."

  The Command to Live. One of my favorite moments here is Faurgar’s "healing." He doesn't pray to a god; he issues a logical command to the "resource" (Priorin) to stop dying. It’s cold, it’s efficient, and it highlights the friction between him and the Leonin. Priorin resents being treated like an "asset," even if it saves his life.

  The Defender serves a dual purpose. It teaches the players (and the readers) the "rhythm" of the mountain—the importance of Nodes and Scars. In this world, magic flows like electricity through wires, and if you can "short-circuit" a node, you can stop a god-tier threat. The tragedy at the end—the empty niche—reinforces the theme of Arc 1: they are fighting and dying for ghosts and hollow promises.

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