Without warning, there was no more line on the spool. Balian flinched, his senses jerked by the vibration of the spool’s sudden stop. Tapping a finger against the tool made it easier to see the reflection of the markings on it.
“That’s the longest sound we have,” Vessek said, sensing Balian’s tapping in the total darkness that surrounded the two Morcegan surveyors. “Did it hit anything?”
“Nothing,” Balian confirmed as he began the process of rewinding the 3,000-foot spool.
Neither surveyor needed a light to perceive the small cavern that surrounded them amid the clicking of the sounding spool. Like most who lived in the underground city of Stilled Night, Balian and Vessek were Morcego; a race of short humanoids who saw the world through the vibrations around them rather than with the eyes they did not possess.
Sighing, Vessek rubbed his forehead, doing his best to make sense of what they had been sent to inspect. Usually, when miners broke through to a previously unmapped natural cavity, it was a simple task of sounding a depth, getting a proper length of rope, and sending surveyors down to map out the new cavern. Granted, this process was sometimes made more difficult by deep structures or the presence of water, but no one had ever encountered a hole quite like this one.
Miners from the city’s Niter Guild had been following a deposit of sulfur at the near bottom end of a shaft that had been heading steadily downward for the last three years. In that time, hundreds of spurs had branched off to chase other minerals, with one particular tunnel in pursuit of a vein of gold-bearing ore. In all that time, the shaft had continued downward, earning it the nickname “The Dive” and becoming a bit of a local legend in Stilled Night. Now the legend would only become that much stranger.
The Dive passed through a dozen natural tunnels and chambers on its way down. Each such structure had been properly mapped by members of the city Survey Corps each time they were encountered. Neither Vessek or Balian had thought much of it when they were asked to come inspect yet another cavern that The Dive had opened up.
No one could see into the cavern very well, but that was normal. Seeing the world through vibration tended to put limits on your sight when there was a large body of air involved. For that reason, the Morcego stayed underground, where they could control how high the roof of their world was and not lose sight of things. When the shape of a new structure could not be seen, then the Survey Corps would proceed to send surveyors into the space to map it manually. With each passing attempt at sounding this new opening, it was seeming more and more like even doing that would be impossible.
“Does the office have a longer sound?” Balian asked, still winding the spool on their current sound, the loud clicks from the tool making the chamber around them seem brighter as the sounds bounced off the stone and into the minds of the two surveyors.
“Not that I know of,” Vessek confessed, leaning against the chamber wall and trying to perceive anything past the rim of the hole the sound was set up over on a tripod. “Even if they did, I don’t think anyone’s got a rope that long. We couldn’t repel into this one even if we had found the bottom with this sound.”
“Truth,” Balian conceded. “I’m not sure I’d want to repel this one anyway. I hate dropping into new caverns. It’s like floating into the Space Between Spaces itself…can’t see anything except the rope on your own hands.”
“Ever looked at your bones when you get into a void like that?” Vessek asked.
Balian shuddered. “Once, when I was descending into Chamber 43 last year. It was an 800-foot descent and about halfway down I took a little break. Hanging there in the nothingness, I decided to see if that old tale was true; that in a void like that we can see our own bones. Freaked me out, watching all those little bones in my wrist move about.”
“I hate that I can see all the stringy bits that hold your bones together when in the nothing like that,” Vessek laughed. “Something this deep? You’d have time to ponder all your organs on the way down.”
“Gross,” Balian chuckled, still winding the sound’s spool.
Eventually the plumb on the end of the 3,000-foot line came swaying into view. The dense wedge of lead tended to absorb vibrations more than other metals, making it look fuzzy and dull. Despite the distortion, Vessek noted something was different about the hunk of metal as it finally reached the spool.
Reaching out, Vessek drummed his fingers across the frame of the sound. Vibrations from his tapping raced through the mechanisms of the sound, causing different parts of it to momentarily become brighter in his mind’s eye, creating little waves of shape and allowing him to see that there was indeed something different about the plumb attached to the device.
Fungus was nothing new to any Morcego, especially those that dwelt in Stilled Night. Various fungi were intentionally cultivated in specialized caverns that served as the farms of the city. Vessek had grown up on such a farm, which was why he specialized in mycology in the Survey Corps.
Whatever was now attached to the plumb was a fungus he had never perceived before.
“You feel that? There, on the plumb?” he asked Balian in the hopes that he was sensing something that wasn’t actually there.
“I thought it was just my imagination,” Balian confessed as both of them rested a hand on the frame of the sound to get a better view of the plumb. “Is it a mushroom?”
“Feels like it,” Vessek replied, weighing whether he should reach for the odd structure that was adhered to one of the plumb’s faces. “But…that can’t be right. We didn’t make contact with anything. Fungal spores need time to germinate anyway, so it can’t be something that was already on the plumb.”
“It’s not like any fungus I’ve ever noted either,” Balian added, his heart beating just a little louder, but not loud enough to determine if the increase was from fear or excitement. “It’s so…small.”
“Small or not, it isn’t supposed to be there,” Vessek said, gingerly reaching out and pulling the plumb towards himself, gripping only the line above the lead implement.
Up close, sharper images formed, granting Vessek a clear picture of the strange little fungus that had somehow hitched a ride on their surveying tool. A slender stem anchored itself to the plumb with a vicious network of roots that had managed to dig into the soft lead of the plumb. An unusually broad, flat cap was held aloft by the gentle stem. The skin of the cap was lumpy and deeply ridged, the gills beneath delicate, thin, and numerous.
This little hitchhiker matched no description of any fungus Vessek new of or had ever personally handled.
“What do we do with it?” Balian asked amid the echoing silence, his voice sparking against the chamber around them.
“Get me that bucket from over by the spool crate,” Vessek answered as he drew his knife and cut the plumb free from the line, careful to neither touch nor disturb the strange little mushroom. “We’ll take this back up and see what the alchemists make of it.”
The alchemists were, unfortunately, just as perplexed as the two surveyors. While the alchemists handed off their work to scholars and mages—all of whom were just as perplexed by this bizarre new fungus—guards were stationed at the entrance to this new chasm. Since the reports of a cosmic tear creating a new valley in the middle of a battlefield on the disputed border between Preatannai and the Holy Jahlnarth Empire had been confirmed, no one was willing to take risks with things that appeared supernatural, even in the slightest.
“I heard a whole army appeared in a cattle pasture near Karath,” said some who congregated in taverns to share rumors of what was happening on the surface.
“They say the Horror just killed some sort of extra-dimensional monster in Knocking Dread,” said others.
“Whole universe is full’a holes now,” still more declared over their drinks to their astonished friends. “Things’re leakin’ in from all sorts’a Realms! Won’t be long before we got demons all up in’er tunnels an critters made’a pure Chaos stalkin’er streets!”
“It’s just a previously undiscovered fungus,” one alchemist was heard to grumble when she was told such things. “So it came from a cavern that was too deep to sound with our current gear? The tunnel teams have already sent for longer sounds from Knocking Dread and Dead Halls. We’ll get to the bottom of this, literally, and soon.”
Those set to guard this new chasm had their own opinions. Many of them would glance into the hole, smirking or chuckling at the rare event of their Morcegan sensitivities being unable to penetrate the void the hole opened into, before returning to their duties without a second thought. Some sat and tried as hard as they could to hear into the chamber, though there was little to hear except the greyish hissing of open air. A few thought the faintest bursts of sound were making it to the hole; little flashes of vibration that were too spread out to make sense of, but which almost certainly existed.
All of this was taken into consideration as a new, 10,000-foot sounding spool, was jacked into place and sent down into the depths.
At 9,426 feet, the plumb landed on something solid.
“That is the deepest reading I’ve ever taken,” Balian noted as he gouged the number into the clay tablet he had been keeping notes on. Paper was fine for other races, but for the Morcego the soft fibers of paper did not reveal what lay on their surface as easily. Something durable, like clay or stone that was carved made it much easier to see the characters on it.
“That’s the deepest reading I’ve ever heard of, let alone taken,” Vessek said sourly. His mood had been taciturn ever since it had been decided that neither he nor Balian would be surveying the chasm once its floor had been found.
“We aren’t qualified for something like this,” Balian said patiently, trying not to chuckle at the tension in his friend’s joints and muscles that creaked loudly.
“Don’t mock me,” Vessek grumbled, having heard the soft huff of suppressed laughter in Balian’s chest. “This was our discovery! They can’t just take it away and send someone else down there!”
“They aren’t taking it away though,” Balian said. “Our names are already etched into the record as the ones that found the chasm.”
“And we’ll become a footnote once some hotshot spelunker goes down there,” Vessek snapped back.
Balian could hear his friend’s heart starting to race. The increased pulsation made Vessek glow a little, his blood shaking, making his frame more visible as Balian began to wind the spool back up.
“I…wish I could disagree with that,” Balian relented, hiding his own disappointment behind the clicking of the spool’s mechanisms. “But what can we do? Neither of us has the gear to make a dive like this. Almost 10,000 feet, Vessek! Do you have any idea how long that would take to repel? How much weight we’d be carrying in gear? Neither of us has ever descended more than 5,000 vertical before. Can you even imagine what it will be like, floating in a void, with the only solid thing you can perceive being the rope and me?”
Vessek couldn’t help but shudder. Every surveyor had to experience depravation training. They would be suspended in a cavern that was deep enough that they would not be able to see anything in any direction. All their senses could perceive would be the rope they hung from. This was the test that many Morcego that wished to be surveyors or spelunkers failed, because the madness incurred when you could feel literally nothing around you was rather potent. When his time for depravation training had come, Vessek had felt sick, so sick that he had vomited while hanging in the chamber that had been chosen for his training. For days at a time, he had hung there, an island of vibrations in an otherwise empty void that reciprocated nothing, even when he shouted as loud as he could or clanged metal tools together, desperate to perceive something other than the hissing nothingness around him.
“We could do it,” Vessek insisted, pushing back his memories of being suspended in literally nothing. “I know we could! Eldri has those new gearboxes she started making for repelling. You just strap it to your belt and go down at a gentle pace until you pull the brake near the bottom. We could convince her to lend us a pair—”
“You mean you could convince her,” Balian smirked as his friend’s heart fluttered at the mention of Eldri.
“Yes yes,” Vessek said impatiently, even though his heart was still giddy. “Fine. I could convince her and then down we go. We have plenty of supplies and other gear.”
“And the return?”
The question was met with vocal silence as both hearts in the chamber began to thump a little harder. Fear was one of the most readable emotions to a Morcego. The heart would race. The breath became uneven, shallow, ragged, even if only by a small degree. Truly skilled Morcego that had honed their senses could even hear the crackle of adrenaline as it burned through the muscles of a creature that was afraid. Neither surveyor could hear muscles, but each could hear the other’s body as it betrayed their unspoken fear.
“It’d be one monster of a climb,” Vessek mumbled amid the continued, suddenly ominous, clicking of the rewinding spool. “But…we could do it.”
“You know that no Morcego can lie to another, right?” said Balian pointedly. “You don’t believe that we could make it back up if we go down there. I don’t believe it either…but a part of me still wants to try.”
Balian watched as his friend changed, his fear subsiding as he lifted his head in hope.
“As soon as you’ve got this spool secured, I’ll go talk to Eldri,” he said quickly. “If you can get some supplies together, we could descend tonight!”
“Rope will be the hard part,” Balian reminded his suddenly excited compatriot. “It’ll take a day or so to find something that long. You know what rope those new gearboxes are supposed to clamp to?”
“I’ll get you specs as soon as I know,” Vessek promised. “This is going to be legendary, I can tell!”
“Or we’ll become a cautionary tale,” Balian chuckled, his own body starting to show signs of excitement rather than fear. “Either way, it will certainly be memorable.”
Three days passed before Balian was able to find a suitable rope. Not only did the new gearboxes Vessek acquired from Eldri need a specific diameter of rope to not drop the user to their death, but everyone had ropes that maxed out at between four to five thousand feet. The rope he was finally able to acquire had to be custom made by a braider that worked near the surface of Stilled Darkness.
“Do you have any idea how much this damn rope cost me?” Balian griped as he patiently anchored the rope in the chamber.
“It’ll be worth every bit you spent,” Vessek assured him repeatedly as he checked over the supplies they had brought. Time was not on their side. They had to quickly secure the rope, don their repelling harnesses, and get moving before the guards realized the permit they had given them was a forgery. Once they were on the rope, nothing else would matter. By law, the guards could not cut or lift the rope, as doing so would be considered an attempted murder.
With all in place, Balian locked onto the rope first, cursing quietly at the new gearbox as he toggled its mechanisms before he lowered himself into the chasm. Vessek came down right above him, both moving at a gentle but steady pace as their gearboxes ticked along.
“Did you see that she included a measure on these?” Vessek called down Balian as the ceiling above them faded from their senses.
“Yeah,” Balian replied, who was suddenly grateful for the sharp vibrations of the gearbox on his belt, as they made the rope easy to see and cast Vessek in sharp contrasts. “Handy little thing. Hey…what did you have to give Eldri for these anyway?”
“Let’s not worry about that,” Vessek muttered, his heart fluttering. “Remember, we have to oil these things as we go.”
“And stop every 800 feet to let the gears cool, yes, I remember,” Balian said, tossing his hands in the Morcegan equivalent of rolling one’s eyes. “You only told me a million times.”
Both of them chuckled as they continued to gently sink into a void that had no equal.
Because of the distance they would have to travel, they had agreed to set their gearboxes to a 300-foot rate for the first 9,000 feet. At this speed, they would travel 300 feet every hour, which would put them at the 9,000-foot mark in approximately 30 hours. Accounting for 30-minute cool-down/oil breaks for the gearboxes every 800 feet and the last 400 or so feet of the descent, which would be taken at a slower pace, Balian had calculated that it would take about 45 hours to reach the chasm floor.
What neither surveyor had said aloud, but which both had thought, was that there was a possibility that the plumb had hit a shelf rather than finding the floor of any chamber. While the spool had refused to lower the plumb further, which usually indicated it had hit a very wide surface and was not hung up on a small outcropping, it was still a distinct possibility. In that case, they would need to return, report what they had found, and likely be chastised for undertaking such a risky exploration while lacking the proper training for doing so.
As Balian’s belt-worn time piece chimed out that they were well into the 44-hour mark, and as they were descending through the last 400 feet, he caught the vibrations of the gearbox echoing up at him from a broad structure. Whatever it was, there were multiple of it below them. They were rounded, soft things that absorbed more sound than they gave back. They were, however, solid, and the rope was resting atop one such structure.
“We’re coming down on something soft,” Balian called up to Vessek.
“Just saw them,” Vessek called back, confusion shaking his voice and his breathing. “Are…are they mushroom caps?”
“Looks like it,” Balian replied as he slowly applied pressure to the break lever on his gearbox, aware that he was quickly approaching what did indeed seem to be the broad top of a mushroom that was wide enough to build a house atop of.
Once both surveyors were standing securely atop what was indeed one among many gargantuan mushrooms, they took a minute to collect their gear and do a little stomping about, trying to feel out as much of the world around them as they could. Neither of them could perceive a wall in any direction. Mushroom caps rolled on in all directions; tiny hills with deep valleys beneath them. Their current mushroom was about 25 feet tall and both surveyors could faintly see stone beneath the giant fungus they stood on.
Using a bit of extra rope, the two descended the last 25 feet to the stone below. Balian could feel his own relief echoed in Vessek’s slowing heart and deep breaths. Both of them had managed to laugh off the looming sense of dread that tended to accumulate in the brain as one sank through nothingness, but nothing could cure depravation madness like good stone under one’s boots.
It was agreed that they would explore a little bit after carving a mark they could clearly feel into the fibrous trunk of the mushroom their main rope touched. While it was important to discover what they could about this new environment, it was also important that they not become lost. The rope was their only connection to the surface. If they couldn’t find it again, they would be trapped in this mushroom forest for the remainder of their days.
The surveyors hadn’t made it far when they noted something strange. All around they could detect the truncated remains of mushroom trunks. Closer examination revealed that these stumps had indeed been cleanly cut. Someone, or something, was harvesting these tree-like fungi.
With the threat of intelligent life looming before them, the surveyors had a choice. They could return up their rope and report what was already surely a monumental discovery, or they could seek out whoever was busily logging these colossal mushrooms. After a short debate it was agreed that they would at least try to discover who was down here.
Heading in the direction that seemed to have a denser concentration of stumps, Balian and Vessek wound their way through the mushrooms. Perceiving anything among the fungi was a little more difficult, as the soft nature of the mushrooms made it hard for vibrations to travel any significant distance. Because of this, and possibly because the two were so busy trying to take in all the strange details of the stone under their boots and the fungi growing around them, they were startled when they caught the distinct tremors of a bipedal creature moving about ahead of them.
From the relative safety offered by the wide trunk of a mushroom, the surveyors observed this new individual. The creature did walk on two legs and was busy sawing lengths of mushroom stems into more manageable sizes.
Balian was the first to spot what made this creature truly unusual. Despite the fact that its body was spongy like the mushrooms all around them, there was a fist-sized stone lodged in its chest, right where the heart on most creatures would be.
Ahrlu were something most Morcego had no experience with. On the outside, the Ahrlu were an amalgamation of various durable organic materials, usually wood, that formed a humanoid body. Inside that living framework was the actual Ahrlu, condensed into a dense mineral formation called a Core Stone. These stones were rumored to be unbreakable vessels that the Ahrlu’s soul resided in, allowing them to move from body to body throughout the ages, bringing knowledge and wisdom with them that few could hope to rival.
Balian himself had only ever seen one Ahrlu, and that had been from across the crowded market on the surface above Stilled Night. This individual appeared almost the same as that one had, except instead of wood, twisted vines, and taut rawhide, this Ahrlu was comprised of fungal colonies growing in tight clusters to form a body that was taller than a Morcego, but much thinner, reminding Balian more a human than anything else.
Gathering what little courage he could find, Balian approached, leaving Vessek sputtering and confused, but unwilling to stay hidden should this strange new Ahrlu prove hostile. Both surveyors stepped into the Ahrlu’s yard, hands open to show they carried no weapons, Vessek noting that there were numerous lanterns dangling from hooked posts around the yard. This creature relied on visual sight, so if they had to flee from it, Vessek felt confident they could lose it in what had to be the eternal gloom of whatever place they had descended into.
The Ahrlu, who would later inform them that his name was Pollam, was startled to see the two approaching, but was no more hostile towards them than one would be angry at a pair of lost deer wandering out of a thicket. While he had an unrivaled accent, Pollam could communicate with the surveyors in fairly fluent BTL—Base Trade Language, a tongue developed by those on the surface to create a streamlined method of communication between peoples without anyone needing to forgo their own linguistic culture in favor of another.
Pollam, the surveyors learned, lived a mile or two from an entire city. This metropolis, which the Ahrlu mushroom harvester called Beaudaeca, was a commerce hub for this entire region of the Underdark.
“The what?” Balian asked, his question posed in the midst of Pollam describing the city of Beaudaeca while Vessek quickly pressed notes into a soft clay tablet he had brought.
“De Unda-dahk,” Pollam repeated with a friendly gesture to the dimly lit world around the three. “Is da place where you be now, an da place da be touchin’ many udda places too.”
“That’s not a Realm I’ve heard mention of before,” Vessek muttered to Balian. “You think it’s just a pocket of this particular Mortal Realm?”
“We’ll let someone smarter than us figure that out,” Balian whispered back before continuing his interrogation of Pollam.
In the end, the two surveyors were left with a great deal information and one very serious conundrum. Firsthand accounts of anything were good, but the idea that a world existed beneath their already subterranean one would be a lot to convince anyone of. The easiest way to prove that what they had found was real would be to bring something back with them. Samples of the giant mushrooms would be a good start, but more mysterious fungus added to the one that had already been accidentally pulled up during their first attempt at sounding the chasm would be catalogued and ignored. They needed something shocking, something irrefutable, something with two legs, an accent that didn’t have a comparison in the crypt cities or on the surface, and who was made of a material that no other Ahrlu had ever been known to use.
At first, Pollam resisted the idea of returning with the surveyors. He had, as he put it, work to do and was afraid of heights. When it was pointed out that he wouldn’t be able to see how high up they were because of the dark, he objected to the length of the climb. These worries were laid to rest by the fact that Vessek had an extra gearbox—which he had convinced Eldri to give him in case one of the other two malfunctioned. While certainly not as effective at lifting on a rope, the gearboxes would make the climb much easier, as their springs could be manually wound and assist in ascension, even if they wouldn’t pull one up quickly.
“Think of it this way,” said Vessek when Pollam hesitated. “You have a chance to go somewhere never before seen by your people. You could become a legend.”
“You’d also help us a great deal,” Balian added. “Our people are diggers. Eventually, more of them will find their way down here. If they know there’s a whole world down here, they can avoid causing trouble during future ventures. Our people, and probably yours as well, would certainly appreciate that, right?”
“Of course day’d ‘ppreciate dat,” Pollam relented. “But I dun know…it be soundin’ powerful dangerous…but could be good ting too…okay den…we go.”
They rested at Pollam’s cabin during what the mushroom harvester called “da restin’ time” and set out for the rope on what Balian calculated to be midmorning of the following day. Pollam, it turned out, knew the area so well that when they reached the marked mushroom he commented that he had come here many times.
“Der be a lovely spring o’er da way,” he noted, pointing into the dense forest of fungi. “Got a lotta mineral in it dough, so can not be soakin’ too long in it.”
While they made preparations to climb the rope, which was still there, Vessek did his best to finalize the map he had been etching into a tablet throughout the night. Adding a marker for the spring Pollam had mentioned, he stowed the tablet and set about helping Balian explain the gearbox and harness system to the pleasantly confused Pollam. The materials and mechanisms of the gearbox were foreign to the fungal Ahrlu, who explained that there was little to compare it to down in the Underdark.
“I’m sure our tinkers would be thrilled to trade designs with yours,” Balian said.
Pollam laughed. “Don’t be talkin’ like I da king now,” he chuckled. “Today, I’m jus da messenger. So, da rope go be passin’ dis wheel here den, ya?”
The climb was much more arduous than the descent had been, but it was just as uneventful. Pollam kept Vessek and Balian sane through the void, constantly asking questions, pointing out things that he could see in the distance of the chasm that were invisible to the two Morcego, and entertaining them with stories of the strange creatures he had encountered while making a living harvesting mushrooms to be sold at the markets in Beaudaeca.
Finding a fully armed security detail waiting for them at the top of the rope was, admittedly, a little surprising. The guards, however, were more interested in the Ahrlu that came back up the rope with the two rogue surveyors than they were in the laws they had been sent to enforce.
News spread fast through Stilled Night, and even made it to Knocking Dread, about the strange new kind of Ahrlu that had come up from an exploratory borehole, escorted by the now famous surveyors Balian and Vessek. There was a new world beneath the feet of the Morcego, who already lived deep beneath those above their heads. Caution was, naturally, expressed by the leaders of Stilled Night when they met with Pollam, but there was also eagerness. The surface world was filled with its own problems, which the Morcego leaders were uneager to engage with. Keeping their people safe was their first priority, but the idea of a possible ally that no one else could access made them quiver in anticipation of the possibilities.
Delegates were assigned. Teams were sent to construct a proper hoist and widen the borehole, creating a lift that could raise and lower personnel and supplies much quicker than the suddenly popular gearboxes made by the previously unknown tinker Eldri. Pollam was shown around the city, introduced to leaders and guild masters and excited children and curious adults. He was even shown up to the surface, where the ruins of the Jahlnarth city that had once been built over the crypts the Morcego had tunneled underneath decorated the land like shattered gems. Pollam had to make two attempts at seeing the surface, because the first time he was escorted up, the sun was out. While this did not seem to affect him physically, it was clear that the bright light was something his eyes were not accustomed to.
“You be lucky,” he noted to Vessek as he sat in the dark once more, furiously rubbing his eyes after having merely glimpsed the intensity of the daylight pouring in from the other end of the tunnel. “Dat light be too powerful! You what got no eyes can no see it, but brudda it be burnin’ da eye!”
After sundown, they tried again. Even the light of the full moon was almost too much for Pollam, but he shieled his eyes and ventured forth all the same.
The world above ground did not see the strange creature from the Underdark that night. It would be years before anyone outside of the crypt cities of the Morcego heard about the Underdark, let alone saw creatures from below. As resources, information, and personnel flowed up and down the increasing number of lifts in Stilled Night, other cities dug for passages into the Underdark. It wasn’t long before Stilled Night was joined by Knocking Dread in their ability to go down into a place no one had previously fathomed. The already intentionally isolated Morcego cut off even more ties with the surface, content to work with those who could understand them better; those that came from the Underdark.
