Corvis Eralith
No one dared to interrupt my descent toward the Pits of Vildorial. The lesson I had delivered to Water Baron Boor had worked its intended purpose: fear.
The other crime lords of Lower Vildorial had seen what happened to one of their own, had witnessed a child—a mere boy—stand up to a man who had terrorized this level for decades, and they had retreated into the shadows, licking their wounds and calculating their next moves.
For now, at least, they would not dare to seek a fight with a Throneholder candidate who had managed to survive the harsh competition until now.
The Darffest week was a time of celebration, not bloodshed, and they knew that any attack on me would draw the attention of the Greysunders—attention that could expose their entire criminal enterprise to the ever-detatched royal attention.
"You haven't killed that Boor," Gilbert said as we walked the lowest levels of the Anvilrun. His voice was flat, but I could hear the question beneath it, the unspoken doubt that lingered in his mind.
Here, Vildorial's main artery—the road that started hundreds of meters above in front of Lodenhold—was almost unrecognizable.
The rich barn-red color of the bricks was faded to a pale cinnabar, dirtied with dust, ash, and soot. The walls were stained with years of neglect, the mortar crumbling, the stones cracked and uneven.
It was a place that had been forgotten by the city above, abandoned to rot and decay.
"No, I haven't," I replied, more to myself than to him. "Boor will be mocked by the other Water Barons, and soon he will become just like the people he has been terrorizing. Criminals like them simply work that way; they are scavengers, ready to prey on whatever they perceive as weak and undefended, too afraid of confronting someone their size. By sparing him, I have made him a symbol of weakness. His power is gone."
"Yeah, it makes sense," Gilbert replied, but there was a grudging respect in his voice that hadn't been there before.
After a while, the Anvilrun stopped, blocked by countless tons of debris that sealed the way forward. The rubble rose like a wall, a monument to the earthquake that had destroyed the Pits decades ago.
"Is this the end of Lower Vildorial?" I asked, looking upward. Lodenhold was almost invisible, but it was still there, a distant point of excessive luxury in a sky that insulted the people who struggled in the depths below.
"Yes," Gilbert said. "Once, there were the headquarters of the Goldminers Guild here, signaling the start of the Pits, but the building collapsed with the earthquake that sealed the Pits away."
"The Goldminers Guild? Here?" I asked, turning to him. The name was unfamiliar, I never heard of it.
"Yes, if Lower Vildorial has always been ruled by the Water Barons, the Pits were ruled by the Guilds and Companies that mined in the rich deposits beneath. They were the ones who controlled the wealth of that level, who decided who lived and who died."
I nodded, filing the information away. "I think we need to wait for help from the Unraveler's Company, then."
"That's the first thing you say I agree with since we left the Cogs," Gilbert said, a rare smirk crossing his face.
—
Help from the Company arrived a few hours later, a group of seasoned Unravelers I had seen in both Burim and Zestier's respective headquarters showing up near the collapsed zone.
They carried supplies—tools, food, water, and the equipment needed to dig through the debris that blocked our way.
"You came fast," I said, greeting the much-liked group of Unravelers. "Perfect, let's head to the Pits."
"Making a tunnel to connect us will be difficult," the leading Unraveler said, a dwarf who looked like a seasoned miner with calloused hands and a strong build made to endure the extreme conditions of Darv's mines. "But not impossible. Alright, boys! Time to get to work!"
The party of Unravelers, who I suspected were actually just miners that went to the dungeons explored by the Company to mine the minerals, started to move in perfect unison.
Their movements were practiced, efficient, a dance of labor that spoke of years of experience. They began digging a tunnel through the rocks, stones, and debris that sealed off the Pits of Vildorial.
"You need help?" I asked the Unraveler's leader.
"We are professionals, Young Warend," the miner replied, his voice gruff but not unkind. "Give us some time, and we will reach the Pits."
"I have to ask..." I said, hesitating. "Isn't there already a way to reach them? The people in there can't be completely shut off."
"Oh, there surely are," the Unraveler replied, pausing in his work. "But they are hidden, secret. Only the Powders know about them. They don't want the people from above—us Vildoriallans—to return."
"Some Powders see the earthquake as a miracle more than the tragedy it was," another Unraveler explained, his voice carrying a note of sadness. "At least they are free now."
"Powders? Who are they?" I asked, the word foreign on my tongue.
"It's the term used for the inhabitants of the Pits," Gilbert whispered to my ear. "Because they don't own nothing, or something like that. I am not entirely sure."
Powders. The people of the Pits were even called a slur, a label designed to strip them of their dignity, to reduce them to nothing more than the dust they lived in.
"Hopefully they won't see us as invaders," I sighed. "Is that why no one ever tried to reconnect the Pits? The Powders refused it?" I asked, the question carrying a weight I hadn't expected.
"That and because no one gives a damn about that place," the lead Unraveler explained as he took his tools. His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, but I could hear the anger beneath it. "It's easier to forget them than to help them."
Then a voice called from behind us.
"I may know a way to let you reach the Pits with no need to struggle," Water Baron Marko Felsen—the other one I had seen alongside Pelieterk Boor in that Rolleykeg match—walked toward us, alone.
The old Water Baron was a serious-looking dwarf with severe eyes, his face etched with lines of worry and exhaustion.
He had long, unbraided black hair—unusual both in length and style for a dwarf—while his beard was kept short, just a few centimeters despite his age. He wore a long fur coat that covered his body whole, its dark fabric blending into the shadows.
He walked toward me with his hat pressed against his sternum in what looked like a universal sign of peace. The gesture was humble, almost pleading, and it caught me off guard.
"Finn Warend," he greeted me while the Unravelers tensed up, ready to fight as they kept their hands tight on their pickaxes. I raised a hand to calm them down. "I would like to offer you my help."
The voice of the Water Baron was calm, completely different from the screeching of Boor. It was measured, deliberate, the voice of a man who had learned to choose his words carefully.
"Your help? I think I declared war to the likes of you," I said. "Lord Felsen."
"Yes, I have heard your threat," Lord Felsen said, not downplaying my threat as some sort of childish tantrum. "But I have not come here, alone, to waste both our times. I will let you into the Pits through a tunnel used by their inhabitants to smuggle food and resources. In exchange, I want something."
Yes, of course he wanted something, I sighed inwardly. "Money?" I asked, but the Water Baron shook his head as he opened his fur coat, revealing his missing right arm. The stump was cleanly healed, a scar that spoke of a wound inflicted long ago.
"I want the same thing you did with your foot, Finn Warend," Marko Felsen said. "Do it, and I will give you access to the Pits."
That was... that was a very good trade-off. I had plenty of Servo-Limbs I had brought from Zestier to gift the people of Darv during the Darffest. But dealing with a Water Baron?
"What guarantees me that I can trust you, Lord Felsen?" I asked, keeping my voice steady. "You may have come here alone—I concede that it indeed makes me more willing to discuss with you, as I am doing it now. But I have no guarantees you actually want to see this deal done through."
"Amongst all of Lower Vildorial, I am the only one who has bought your Water Generators," Felsen said, surprising me slightly. That only meant he had more water; why would he tell me that? "And I have been using them to supply the Pits."
Supply the Pits? This man, this Water Baron, was using my invention to help the very people his peers exploited.
"While leaving the people of Lower Vildorial to thirst to death?" the leading Unraveler intervened. "Get away from our sight, Water Baron. Young Finn is being way too magnanimous with you."
"If you want to get to the Pits without being seen as the greedy Vildoriallans above, you need me," Marko Felsen said, his voice carrying a weight of certainty.
"What's your bond with the Pits?" I asked, my curiosity overriding my caution.
"I am simply someone who hates the tyranny of the City," the Water Baron said, quite ironically coming from him.
Was he a Powder once? I wondered. Elder Rahdeas had managed to become the richest and most influential non-noble dwarf of all Darv, no, of all Dicathen.
A similar story for a Water Baron made sense. A Powder turned crime lord instead of a Powder turned master merchant.
"We can work with it," I replied, shocking the Unravelers and Gilbert. "I don't wish any harm to come to the people of Vildorial nor the Pits. If what you say is true, Lord Felsen, then grant us a welcomed access to the Pits, and you shall receive a replacement for your lost arm." I paused, letting the weight of my words settle. "That's the deal."
Marko Felsen looked at me, his furrowed face expressionless. It wasn't truly ice-cold; it was more... defeated, apathetic. And yet I saw a twitch on the Water Baron's lips—acknowledgment, perhaps, or gratitude.
"Agreed, Finn Warend," Felsen said. "I will bring you to the tunnels used by the Pits' people."
—
"Hey," Gilbert whispered to my ear. "He is selling the Pits to you for an arm. For all he knows, you might give the knowledge of these smuggling tunnels to King Dawsid for advantages in the Throneholder competition."
Right, I thought as we walked through a narrow tunnel illuminated by a few old lanterns. Their light flickered, casting dancing shadows on the walls, and I could feel the weight of the earth pressing down on us from all sides.
"He remains a Water Baron," I said. "A criminal. He will always put himself first."
It wasn't unheard of criminals helping people too—that explained why he used my Water Generators to give water to the Pits. Perhaps he did so to keep his conscience at bay, or perhaps he did so just out of pride or self-gloating.
Either way, his motives didn't matter as much as the outcome.
We continued through the tunnel in silence, the sounds of the Darffest long gone when we entered the tunnel.
The darkness pressed in around us, broken only by the faint glow of the lanterns, and I could feel the weight of the earth pressing down on us like a physical force.
How distant were the Pits from Vildorial proper? I knew that they lay at the base of the cave housing Vildorial, or the once-base, before it crumbled during that earthquake decades ago.
Only thinking about that disaster—the chaos, the fear, the lives lost—sent a chill down my spine.
Once again, my mind wandered to the shores of the Alacryan invasion.
In the novel, Vildorial was conquered and kept as one of the greatest bastions of the Alacryan forces on Dicathian soil.
I wondered what had become of the Pits in that timeline. Were the people living there decimated by the Alacryans? Or did they die way earlier, during the chaos following the Greysunders' execution by the hands of Aldir Thyestes?
The only thing I knew was that I didn't want history to forget about this place. I didn't want it to repeat itself.
We emerged from the end of the tunnel, looking up at a large cave sealed from the rest of the world. The ceiling was a dark, jagged wound, the remains of the earthquake that had destroyed the Pits still visible. I stood in front of the other dwarves accompanying me as I stared at the scene in front of me.
The Pits of Vildorial were a dark, dark abyssal depth.
The aftermath of that crumbling was still as visible as if it had happened yesterday. Debris, fallen buildings, and crumbled mines dominated the scenery of what once was the lowest level of Darv's capital, but that now was its own separate hell.
And yet, against all odds, dwarven life managed to keep going. Bright fires burnt in many different points of the Pits, fighting against the encroaching darkness. They were beacons of hope in a sea of despair, and I felt a surge of admiration for the people who had kept them lit.
"I would have never guessed the situation to be so..." Gilbert started, his voice trailing off.
"Bad," I finished for him.
There were no Anvilrun here, no houses, no shops, no activities that hug the walls of the cavern and spiral downward, creating the peculiar vertical shape of Vildorial.
And, more striking than all of these, Lodenhold wasn't visible. Only a landslide covered the ceiling where once the rest of Vildorial was.
"I need to set up camp," I said, my voice firm. "This will be my rallying point for the Throneholder competition, and the starting point of my ascent—literally and figuratively."
I turned to the Unravelers and the Water Baron at my back.
"Take out everything you have brought and prepare to settle. Let's bring the joy of the Darffest to the Powders of the Pits."
From the improvised buildings, many other dwarves emerged, their faces emaciated and malnourished, their eyes wide with a mixture of fear and curiosity. They looked up at us, their gazes uncertain, and I knew that I had to prove myself to them. I raised my hands and waved, then empowered my vocal cords with mana and spoke.
"My name is Finn Warend," I greeted everyone. "I come here as an intermediary of Peace from the city above. I am a candidate for the position of Throneholder, to become the legitimate heir to the throne of Darv, and for that I came here today, in this occasion of celebration, to rejoice with you."
"My peers are in the upper levels of Vildorial, squandering their wealth to show the 'generosity of the Greysunders,'" I continued. "As for me, I want to really share with those who are in need. I want to share with the last of the last, with you who are mocked and called Powders, because you too are my people and will be my subjects."
"In the days of old, when Darff founded House Greysunders, he did it because he wanted to sunder the grey from Darv, basking it with light," I kept on. "So, I tell you this: the finest Powder settles deepest and rises first to the pan."
"I am here to bring you hope; to sunder the grey of your lives and to make the Pits worthy of Darff's dream," I declared, my voice loud and mana-strengthened so that everyone could feel my mana signature without it being threatening.
The people of this world always grouped around powerful, charismatic individuals—be they elves rallying around Grandpa, the novel's protagonists following Arthur Leywin, or Phoenixes gathering under Mordain Asclepius.
I would be that figure for all of Dicathen, starting here in Darv like I swore to Gilbert.
—
"Your Water Generator needs a bit of maintenance," I told the Powders as I reached where they kept the Water Generator Marko Felsen had bought for them.
The familiar copper machine, with its tanks and tubes, acted as a sort of city center for the Powders of the Pits—the role a well would have had in a medieval Earthen village.
It was the heart of this forgotten community, a lifeline that kept hope alive in the darkness.
"We noticed it stopped producing as much water as before," one of the Powders, a middle-aged dwarf who, despite his clear state of poverty, kept himself remarkably well, said. "But no one is able to repair it."
I had sold the projects and patent of the Water Generator to the Greysunders soon after I showcased it at the Gem Banquet months ago, but no one would reach the Pits to help these people.
The Upper City had forgotten them, abandoned them to their fate. But I would not.
"I will repair it," I said. "Do we have some tools?" I asked the Unravelers who were part of my entourage.
"Yeah, Young Finn," the leading Unraveler said. "We have pretty much everything you could ask Mother Earth."
"Good, Elder Rahdeas has been thoughtful," I decided, starting to examine the Water Generator to locate where the damage was. "Now leave me to work."
I knew the Moyalembic—the Djinnic Lifework that was the original template of the Water Generator—like the back of my hand, thanks to Avicenna's thorough explanations and the various loops I had spent working on it.
The copper tubes, the valves, the tanks: they were all familiar to me, a language I had learned through blood and sweat and countless deaths.
"Can I ask something?" I said to the Powder who had asked me to repair the Water Generator. "Could you tell me more about Marko Felsen? I don't know what to think about him."
"Felsen is an old fool," the Powder sighed. "He thought he could become someone great in the city above, but he could only become a Water Baron."
"You don't seem to hate him for that," I replied, unscrewing a panel of copper from the Water Generator's main tank to take a peek inside. There were no inner damages, only a bit of rust I could easily remove with the barest use of Ars Terramorph.
"Felsen is one of us," the Powder said. "And he has been supplying the Pits for years since the Motherquake."
"Motherquake? You call the earthquake that sealed the Pits off from Vildorial like that?" I asked, curious.
"Yes, we do," the Powder explained. "As I was saying, Felsen is the one giving us the fuel to keep our fires burning, the clothes we wear, the food we eat."
A question immediately sprouted in my mind: why not Elder Rahdeas? He did everything Marko Felsen was doing in the Pits, but in Burim and a thousand times more efficiently.
Why not help his birthplace too? But then I stopped myself.
You can't judge him, Corvis, I told myself. Just think about how traumatic the Pits must feel for Elder Rahdeas; it's already a miracle he isn't the monster the novel depicted him to be.
I cleaned the Water Generator's main tank of rust and started to do the same for the tubes, all while I spoke with this Powder about the truth behind the Pits.
The work was methodical, almost meditative, and I lost myself in the rhythm of it—the scrape of metal, the flow of mana, the slow, steady repair of a machine that meant life to these people.
Gilbert Hammerfell
I watched the elf—the impostor—move from Powder to Powder, giving them what he could only describe as hope.
The same hope that Elder Rahdeas had gifted to so many people like him and his family. The sight of it stirred something in me, a mixture of admiration and bitter resentment that I could not quite untangle.
Why did Elder Rahdeas betray us for this elf? For this murderer? I ground his teeth together as I looked at Corvis Eralith. I had given the elf his stupid bracelet back; if he thought we could be friends just by offering a "defensive" trinket, he was wrong.
But maybe... maybe I could report him to His Majesty, revealing the elven plot to take control of Darv's throne through their own prince. I could even get a chance for the Throneholder competition back.
It was tempting, very tempting.
No, that would never work, I sighed inwardly as he watched Corvis Eralith distributing the tools and supplies of the Warend Trading Company to the Powders.
The way he did it, with that smile on his face, how the scarce light of the fires of the Pits illuminated him like the lantern of a miner through a dark tunnel...
A lantern of hope. I had been completely wrong about who Finn Warend was, but on one thing I was right: he was a better Throneholder than Gilbert Hammerfell could ever be.
That realization had filled me with determination before I discovered who Finn really was. Now... now it was just a bitter, bitter note in my mind.
Were we really so hopeless that we needed someone who was not our own to become our Throneholder? The question haunted me.
Corvis Eralith and the Unravelers who seemed to follow him like dutiful soldiers helped the Powders with the tasks they couldn't do: repairing stuff, digging up lost objects, reviving the flames.
They moved with purpose, their actions speaking louder than any words could.
"Rahdeas's great-nephew is just like him," an old voice said. I jolted as I turned to see Water Baron Marko Felsen. My blood ran hot in his veins. What did this criminal want? "A born leader."
"What do you think you know of Elder Rahdeas to call him simply by name, Water Baron," Gilbert challenged, spitting his title like the venom it represented.
The severe, almost lifeless eyes of Marko Felsen were on me for a long moment. "I know Rahdeas since we were children," Felsen said. "We just fell apart during the years."
"Quite the fall," I said with irony. "One is a criminal, while Elder Rahdeas is the greatest dwarf to live."
"Criminal," Marko Felsen echoed. "You say it as something to be ashamed of, but a criminal is simply one who disobeys a law. Tell me, boy, would you call a Powder a criminal?"
"What?! No!" I exclaimed back.
"And yet Powders have been labeled since the first days of Darv as criminals, living illegally in the Pits, designed only for miners and the Guilds," Felsen replied.
"You remain a Water Baron," I said, voice hard. "You aren't a Powder, it doesn't matter how much you say so. You have power, money, and influence in Lower Vildorial. I don't care about your philosophy."
"Yes, of course," the Water Baron replied, looking at Corvis Eralith but thinking him Finn Warend.
The elf in disguise was now showing his magic—the impressive power that he had despite being years younger than me—to some Powder children, making small dolls and toys of polished stone with the cold rocks of the Pits.
I watched him, my heart heavy with conflicting emotions. Why did he seem so... honest with what he was doing? All his speech about being Dicathen must have been just big words, big words like those of Felsen. But what if they were not?
What if the elf truly meant what he said?