Hollowstone Mine

Stoutmantle pointed me northwest. “See if you think operations there can be salvaged. We could use the additional resources until our mine in Farshire is operational again.”

Operations. Resources. He didn’t know what Mikhail’s journal had told me. This was where the town leaders met and made their choice.

The mine entrance gaped open in the hillside. Three wooden houses stood silent outside, doors hanging loose. There was no smoke from chimneys or voices.

Then Petrov’s cry pierced the gloom.

“You’ve come to help me, haven’t you!”

Petrov emerged from behind a supply stack, shaking. He’d been hiding long enough that standing in the open seemed to terrify him more than anything in the mine. The sole witness. The one they missed.

Inside the tunnel, I understood why.

The miners still worked. Pickaxes rose and fell, rail carts rolled on rusted tracks. But the hands that gripped those tools were grey and rotting, and the faces that turned toward my torchlight were blank as stone. Whatever they’d been before Arugal’s curse, it was gone.

They’d resisted the Wolfcult, refused to become wolves.

So Arugal made them something worse.

The ones who said no. The ones like Mikhail, like Sasha’s father who sent his daughter away and stayed to fight. This was their reward. Not even the curse of fur and fang. Just endless labor in the dark, stripped of will, stripped of rest, stripped of the release that death should bring.

Silverbrook chose the wolf.

Hollowstone chose defiance.

Both roads led to the same master.

Petrov survived. The miners inside weren’t that fortunate, and their pickaxes are still swinging. What passes for mercy underground begins with Souls at Unrest.