Fay watched it all unfold with her mouth slightly open. Bafflement gave way to confusion, then to horror.
A few words from Radeon had bent the mine around him.
Men who had been swinging picks a moment ago now ran as if the ground had started to rot beneath their feet.
She began to count the bodies moving through the shafts. Hundreds. Then thousands.
Fay counted till the numbers slipped through her fingers and became a single rushing mass.
This was not an orderly evacuation. This was flight. The kind that only happened when people believed a disaster had already started.
Radeon was already sweating hard. Not from the number of people moving, but from what he saw as the tunnels cleared.
It was here. He would not mistake it for anything, even watered down to the thinnest trace.
The blight. The same wrongness that had once killed him.
The men had been mining around it for years, maybe decades, feeding it without knowing.
