OOC – Author’s Note:
This story is one of several within the chronicle “Where Webs Whisper”.
Additionally: This piece was shaped with a little help from AI. It provided assistance on things like the structuring, some names, shortening some verbose language/ideas as I'd written them, and it gave me the odd turn of phrase here and there. The heart and shape of the story are my own, but I realise it is important to be transparent about my use of AI assistance.
They think me deaf as well as blind, but the world still speaks to me. It has always spoken, in the wind, in the water, in the hush between heartbeats when folk think silence is an absence. Well it isn’t. Folk don't remember how to listen.
The she-elf asked me how I knew of the tunnels, as if a man needs eyes to remember. My father’s father's father dug them, long before the Eglain had walls worth defending. They ran under the market here, under the road beyond, under the bones of kings whose names we no longer say. When wars swept through and the marsh began to rise in Harloeg, they sealed the ways from Ost Guruth and marked them with runes... not to keep things out, but to keep them in. Folk forgot that part especially!
Now the ground hums again. The air tastes wrong. And I hear them... I hear all eight of their legs, skittering beneath us. They do not belong to these lands, yet they carry the same burden it does: loss, unfinished business, the ache of something half-remembered. Some things are best sealed up.
Around the well, they speak of the missing dwarf... 'Copperhand', they call him. Vanished in the night, and a watcher lying dead. He went looking for the old paths, I think. I dare say he found them!
Copperhand didn't come here alone, oh no! His group now searches for him... the halfling's voice rings clear as a bell. I hear fear under the laughter in her tone. The elves among them, carry a silence as they try to read the old runes around the well. The Bree-lass, burns with that stubborn loyalty that makes heroes and widows in equal measure. There's even a dwarf poking about, I can hear his heavy step. He'd need to be careful of his footing if he peers over that old well... the oldest of the tunnel portals.
If they go below, the fiends will claim them. And if they do find the dwarf, he’ll not be the same. Nothing that returns from Harloeg ever is. I have told them all I can. The rest is theirs to discover.
The runes will open the way soon, I can feel it, like a breath held too long. The web beneath us is waking, shaking off centuries of dust. Something ancient is about to breathe. If the stars take me when it happens, I will not curse it. I have lived long enough to know that every secret must, in time, come up for air.
The crowd has gone quiet now, all except the guards barking orders. The strangers have moved to the well again. Their voices are tight, quick, full of worry and hope trying to share the same breath. I hear the halfling... Feay, they call her... muttering to a pet rabbit, her hands busy with something that crackles faintly, smells of spice and sulphur.
I should tell her to stop, but the words dry in my throat. Then the halfling laughs. Not fear, not joy, something else... the laugh of someone who can’t stop what’s coming even if they wanted to.
She says something I don’t catch, but I hear the soft plink as whatever she held drops from her hand into the dark.
Then the well explodes.
And then there was nothing but light.
You can find more stories related to this in the chronicle "Where Webs Whisper"
