By the time they reached the bottom of the steps, they had been traveling for many hours. Rowan expressed nervousness that they seemed mostly to be going down rather than heading in any particular direction. Maric, however, was just glad that they had seen no darkspawn. They cleared away a section of the road in order to make a camp, though Loghain insisted they keep the fire small. There was no telling how much air was down in the tunnels, or what might be attracted to the light if they kept a blaze going for too long.
It was a discomforting thought, and that first night, none of them truly slept. They took turns keeping watch with a single lit torch, staring into the shadows that danced around the camp. In truth, anyone could have crept up on them. With the dust in the air and the dim light, anyone keeping watch couldn’t see more than ten feet. But having someone on guard made them feel better, and it let the others close their eyes while trying to pretend that many miles of rock weren’t pressing down on them overhead.
If anything, the silence was the worst. It lay heavy, like a shroud, broken only by the sound of labored breathing and the faint scratching sounds of feet moving on stone. When the group stood still, sometimes they could hear the faintest clicking sounds off in the blackness. The clicks came and went, and none of them could identify what the sounds might be. They kept their weapons out after that, but no attack manifested.
For two days, they traveled in this way, heading farther and farther underground. They stopped regularly to rest and get their bearings, and this allowed Katriel the opportunity to attend to Maric’s bandages. She worried about infection, particularly with his head wound, but after a time declared that the poultices were working. He was healing nicely. Maric declared that it was about time something good happened.
The fact that they were traveling on a road became more evident. Even with the general sense of decay, they could see the regular stone columns along the walls and statues of grim dwarven figures barely discernible for all the wear. There were deep grooves along the bottom of the walls, which Katriel claimed would once have channeled lava. That same lava would have been collected in pools along the walls for light. Loghain asked where the lava came from, but she didn’t know. It might have been magic, though the dwarves didn’t use any. Wherever it might have come from, there was none now. There was only the dust and the quiet gloom.
The first intersection of passages they reached had great runes carved into the walls, and after clearing away as much dust and debris as they could, they waited while Katriel studied them closely with torch in hand.
“It’s definitely dwarven,” she muttered. She tapped on one rune that was repeated several times. “See this one? It has two parts:
“Gwaren?” Maric leaned forward, his head close over Katriel’s shoulder as he studied the rune for himself. She blinked nervously, but he didn’t notice. “That must be it, right? The dwarven outpost has the same name.”
“I believe it’s pointing down the right-hand passage.” Katriel looked up at Maric with a frown. “But I can’t be certain.”
“Better your guess than mine.” Maric grinned.
Rowan and Loghain traded leery glances, but they could do little but trust the elven woman’s knowledge. Loghain had long ago given up on his sense of direction.
Less than a day later—though their estimate of how much time was passing was becoming increasingly inaccurate the longer they were surrounded by constant darkness—they encountered a thaig, a cavern where the dwarves had built a settlement. There was a large amount of debris and rocks at its entrance, perhaps due to some kind of cave-in, and it required hours of labor to clear a passage. Once through, they stood at the edges of a place no dwarf had likely touched in living memory.
The flickering light of their torches didn’t reach very far into the thaig, but what they did see evoked a memory of grand stone buildings rising high up toward the upper reaches of the cavern. The walkways between these buildings had once been lined with giant columns carved with lines upon lines of runes. Now most of these things were collapsed and in ruin, jagged stone skeletons covered in massive webs.
Here the webs were everywhere. They hung from building to wall like gentle gauze, and as the cavern rose, the webs seemed to get thicker and thicker until the torchlight couldn’t penetrate them any longer. It was as if the webs kept this place cocooned, suspended out of time in darkness and quiet.
“Careful,” Loghain warned softly, moving his torch so as not to light the webs. Such a blaze would have spread quickly into the upper reaches of the thaig, and likely brought all of it raining down upon their heads.
