Chapter Text
There’s something familiar to the echo of a long stone tunnel. A sound you don’t understand that you recognize until you hear it. It spirals smoothly down the corridor and plays your footsteps back at you, filling the space with your own presence.
Lengths and lengths of abandoned mineshafts snake through the underground. Giant wormholes carved out of the earth like memories past, reminding us that we were not the first to walk here, nor will we be the last. The flickering light from Grian’s torch casts dancing shadows in every crevice and crack, sinking into hollowed out nooks where ore deposits in the path were scraped clean long ago. He won’t find anything of value while tracing these ancient footsteps.
Ducking under supportive wooden archways and past rusted minecarts stained with coal dust, he keeps his eyes peeled for any holes or fissures where the old tunnels have lost integrity and crumbled into a natural cave below. Ideally, something untouched even by the test of time, brimming with metamorphic treasures ripe for pillaging.
How terribly inconvenient that the ores hidden underground could not possibly be renewed within a single lifetime. With each successive generation of explorers burrowing farther and farther below the surface with every new mining venture, it doesn’t seem at all unlikely that the earth would become hollowed out before a single turn of the rock cycle filled it back up. Compared to the majesty and might of tectonic powers, human lives are short, frail, and fleeting. Especially so with the very essence of one’s being entangled with the fate of a walking health and safety hazard.
By all means, Grian fully expects himself to spontaneously explode at any given moment.
And as if on cue, a blunt rush of force strikes between his shoulder blades, sending a crackling shock along his spine while hot pain trickles down his back like ink through water. The shock of the phantom blow knocks him onto his knees, which jam roughly into the stone floor. His torch is sent flying out of his hand and plummets into a yawning pit in front of him.
“Jesus, Scar what on earth are you…” Grian begins to scold into the blackness, trailing off as he processes that there is in fact, a giant yawning pit just in front of him.
The hollow thunk of wood bouncing off deepslate gives promise to an eventual bottom far below. Cautious of the sudden darkness he’s been plunged into, Grian feels for the edge of where stone crumbles into empty black void. Through the greyish shadows of negative space, he can discern the rest of the tunnel several metres away, as well as the broken rope bridge that once spanned the gap, now dangling into the relative abyss. Based on the position of the struggling orange glow where the torch has landed, he approximates that he could clear the distance without any particularly grievous injuries, and begins descending the vertical bridge like a rope ladder.
The final jump from the makeshift ladder’s end to the bottom is a bit of a steeper fall than expected, sending a shock through his ankles that shoots up to his knees like a jolt of lightning. No doubt Scar would be feeling that, though it’s only a just payback for the earlier scare.
With the satisfaction of such healthy relationship behaviours as reciprocal friendly fire between soulmates, it’s time to get to work.
Depending on your tastes, long mining trips can be oddly relaxing. Through years and years of lonely ventures below the surface, you tend to settle in to the rhythm of the earth’s heartbeat. A feeling outlined in the subtle underground ambiance, the hypnotic gleam of diamond blue in the magma’s glow, the gratifying lack of anyone to laugh at you for spending half an hour hacking away at obsidian with an iron pickaxe. If no one saw it, it never happened.
As an added bonus, it’s been a solid couple hours since there’s been any pull from the other end of the string, leaving Grian to focus on his work completely uninterrupted.
Maybe a bit too relaxing. Suspiciously so. This kind of silence in the soul link is uncharacteristic for Scar.
Perhaps it’s time to return to the surface.
For all the therapeutic benefits of mining, a waltz through the caves is never without its dangers. One such unfortunate danger being the small chance of stumbling on a spot where unearthly infestations of corruption have bled through the soil. Places where stone is turned to mush and light is swallowed by hungry blackness. Places where an underground adventurer’s childish glee upon spotting a stray diamond on his way out, turns to sudden repulsion when he finds his treasure infected with tangled tendrils of parasitic moss.
The perilous Deep Dark is something Grian has nary dared to trifle with in his lifetime. It’s creepy. Even while barely skirting the edge to collect his last treasure, he catches a rancid whiff of decay and rot and nauseous fumes. He has to brush some of the vines away from where they spill over the infection’s border, shuddering when the tendrils cling to his skin. Their pores suck on to his bare flesh, trying to drink him in like some kind of carnivorous plant (which it very well may be). He’s more than ready to book it out of here as soon as he’s finished, when the first clang of his pickaxe is followed by a gut-wrenching screech that makes his skin prickle with goosebumps.
With a violent full-body shudder, Grian is forced to contemplate the risk-reward factors standing between himself and an incremental increase of wealth. On one hand, diamonds are very shiny. On the other, any more sharp noises will only aggravate the skulk shrieker, likely attracting some much unwanted attention. All things considered, it’s a situation best left alone.
Which is exactly why he finds himself edging along the side of a giant stalagmite, dangling over a lava river, getting up close and personal with carnivorous moss, while inching closer and closer towards an object (Plant? Creature?) of extreme danger.
Even superficially deep into the biome, the terrain has been completely suffocated by a thick shag carpet of skulk. Its hundreds of tiny grasping tendrils are trying their best to absorb Grian into the mulch, and he’s forced to lean into their embrace to avoid tumbling to a fiery end, all the while trying to cough their toxic spores from his lungs, taking shallow breaths as though it might stop the mold from taking root in his airway. As he works around the pillar, molten magma bubbles and oozes with a passion just a short fatal drop below. A single shove or bump from Scar’s end right now might jog his memory of what boiling to death feels like.
All this, for a single round swing of his pickaxe that digs itself into the shrieker with a disgusting squelch. The abomination wheezes and gargles as it dies, tentacles writhing and seizing before finally falling limp, lifeless and grey. Brought to a sputtering end, its final misfortune is a sickening spell of darkness. What little light he has flickers at the edge of his vision, complete blackness clouding his periphery and all his surroundings strobe in and out of shadowed focus. All that stops him from a total blackout is the ghostly wail of the shrieker’s rageful distress echoing through his skull.
That certainly could have gone much better.
Fighting his way back to consciousness and doing a quick check-over to make sure he probably isn’t dead, Grian thanks his lucky stars that at least he isn’t facing off with a warden. Finally, shimmying back over molten death, hugging a wall of moss that is uncomfortably damp and also trying to eat his skin, he is free to collect his prize: a single diamond.
Heaving a long-winded sigh, now thoroughly exhausted with this whole mining fiasco, Grian stomps his way through the mushy soil, making sure the ground is aware of his frustration. The ground responds by hissing and squelching and exploding into clouds of glowing spores under his boots. Several patches of tendrils light up and wave at him passing by.
“Warble!” A couple of them eclaim.
“Knock that off!” Grian retorts, stopping to glare at the little skulk sensor, waving back and forth to the sound. “Are you trying to sell me out?”
“Warble!” They reply, even more excited by the shouting. He must admit that they are awfully cute.
“… you’re right. I’m sorry, that was rude.”
“Warble.”
“Yeah I’m worried about him too. That’s why I’m going back up, to find out what he’s burning down this time.”
“Warble.”
“Guess I’ll leave you to it then.”
“Warble.”
From there he moves quietly so as not to trigger the sensors any further, already brainstorming how he could use them in all kinds of nasty traps. Maybe later though. He’s had enough of dealing with corrupted terrors today.
With the barely-even-worth-it diamond shoved deep in his satchel, Grian begins the climb back to the top, leaving all thought and danger of the deep dark behind him.
Hopefully for good.