The morning broke grey and grim over the ruins of Sunderwind.

  We made a cold camp amidst the rubble of the inn. The roof was gone, leaving us exposed to the bruised sky, and the silence of the dead town lay over us like a heavy, wet wool blanket.

  Breakfast was a quiet, joyless affair. Our rations were officially exhausted, save for one terrifying exception.

  It consisted of the last of Elmsworth’s glowing green slurry, which had, overnight, congealed into a texture that was both gelatinous and alarmingly crunchy. It sat in our wooden bowls, quivering slightly in the wind, emitting a faint, radioactive pulse of light.

  “I think it’s looking at me,” Faelar mumbled. He poked the trembling green substance with the tip of his dagger. It jiggled aggressively. “It has the consistency of a goblin’s sneeze. And it smells like a wet dog that rolled in a patch of poison ivy.”

  “It is a triumph of culinary alchemy!” Elmsworth insisted from across the fire pit. He shoveled a large, glowing dollop into his mouth, chewed with disturbing enthusiasm, and swallowed with a loud gulp. “A perfect balance of essential nutrients and bio-luminescent fungi! We are, in essence, eating a highly efficient, moss-based lantern. Think of the caloric density!”

  Liam sat on a broken beam, swirling the green paste around his bowl with a look of deep, philosophical disgust.

  “It’s like eating a glow-worm’s regret,” the elf said softly. “I’d rather chew on my own boot. The leather probably has more flavor, and certainly more dignity.”

  He sighed, tilted his head back, and downed the sludge in one go, grimacing as if he’d just swallowed poison. He immediately wiped his mouth and reached for his whetstone, needing to do something with his hands to forget the taste.

  The grim meal was a prelude to the grim task ahead. We packed our gear in silence, the mood heavy with the knowledge of the caged badgers and the strange, cruel efficiency of our enemy.

  As we walked out of the ruins and back onto the ash-covered plains, the conversation from the night before picked back up. It was a low, grim murmur under the howling of the wind.

  “It’s the logistics of it that still baffles me,” Liam said, adjusting his pack. The discussion had apparently been stewing in his mind all night. “An army of burrowing monsters. Think of the food they'd require. The sheer manpower needed to keep them controlled. It's a massive, inefficient undertaking unless the payoff is equally massive.”

  “Perhaps efficiency is not the primary objective!” Elmsworth countered, striding forward with his staff tapping against the rocks. “Perhaps the goal is terror! A weapon that strikes from below, without warning, that turns the very ground you stand on into an enemy… it is a weapon that shatters morale! It is a tool of psychological, not just physical, warfare! It’s diabolically brilliant!”

  “It’s a coward’s tool,” Faelar grunted, spitting a piece of green gristle onto the floor. “And that’s the real puzzle. This Malkor fellow is powerful, aye? Got demons and magic and all that nonsense. Why rely on a bunch of overgrown moles to do his dirty work when he could face his enemies head-on? There's no honor in it.”

  Liam scoffed, checking the fletching on his few remaining arrows. “Honor is a luxury, Faelar. One Malkor doesn't seem interested in. He’s interested in winning.”

  “Honor is everything!” Faelar boomed, stopping in his tracks. He turned to face us, his beard bristling. “Without honor, you’re no better than a goblin trying to steal the teeth out of a dead man’s mouth! It’s about rules! Principles! Even when you hate the other guy!”

  He gestured wildly with Bessie.

  “It reminds me of the duel between my third cousin, Grorin Stone-brow, and Grimnir Iron-gut. It was over a matter of a stolen recipe for mushroom ale.”

  “They had a duel over a recipe?” Willow asked, her eyes wide.

  “A sacred recipe!” Faelar corrected, looking offended. “Grimnir claimed Grorin had peeked at his notes during the Great Delve Bake-Off. A terrible accusation! Accusing a dwarf of culinary espionage is like slapping his mother! So, they had an honor-duel. A proper one.”

  Faelar’s eyes grew misty with nostalgia.

  “They stood back-to-back in the Great Hall of Khaz-Modan. The Thane himself was officiating. Each dwarf held a full, heavy ceramic mug of ale in one hand and a throwing hammer in the other.”

  “This sounds promising,” Liam murmured, sounding like he regretted asking.

  “It was a sight to behold!” Faelar continued, his voice full of reverence. “They took ten paces. On the count of ten, they had to chug the entire mug of ale in one go. Not a drop spilled! Then, and only then, they turned and threw the empty mugs at each other’s heads. Hard. First one to get knocked out by a flying piece of pottery lost his claim to the recipe. That, my friends, is honor!”

  We walked in silence for a moment as we processed this information.

  “That,” Liam said slowly, “sounds like the single stupidest contest I have ever heard of in my entire life. And I’ve seen goblins play ‘catch the burning torch.’”

  “It was a matter of principle!” Faelar insisted. “And besides, it was a draw. Went on for three rounds. They were both too thick-skulled to knock out. By the end, they were so drunk they forgot why they were fighting and ended up sharing the recipe. And the headache.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “A duel of liver failure and blunt force trauma,” Soul-Drinker whispered from Liam’s belt. “How… quaint. I prefer flaying.”

  “Shut up,” Liam muttered to his hip.

  As we prepared to leave the outskirts of the town, Willow stopped. She walked to the broken fountain in the center of the square. It was dry, choked with grey dust.

  She took a moment. From her pouch, she pulled a small piece of splintered wood she’d found in the inn. With a small knife, she carved a rough, simple bird shape. It wasn't art, but it was effort.

  She placed it gently on the fountain’s crumbling edge.

  “For the ones who are still listening,” she whispered to the wind.

  Then she turned, her small face set with determination, and followed us out of the ruins.

  We returned to our tedious, paranoid march. It was a slow crawl across the plains, hopping from one outcropping of bedrock to the next to avoid the soft earth. The wind howled, whipping grit into our eyes.

  It was late in the afternoon when we saw it.

  We crested a high ridge of slate. Below us, breaking the monotony of the grey wasteland, was a new feature in the landscape.

  It was a massive, raised vein of what looked like black, metallic rock. It was at least twenty feet wide, snaking across the plains from horizon to horizon. In the distance, it ran in a perfectly straight line for miles, cutting through hills and valleys alike.

  It was unnatural. A stark, black scar across the grey, dead world.

  Faelar’s exhaustion and gloom vanished in an instant. He let out a low whistle.

  “Now that,” he said, “is something solid.”

  He scrambled down the ridge, his earlier caution regarding badgers completely forgotten. He reached the black road, dropped to one knee, and pulled a small, heavy-headed hammer from his pack.

  He gave the surface a sharp tap.

  CLANG.

  It rang with a deep, metallic note that vibrated in the air for seconds.

  “Just as I thought!” Faelar bellowed, his voice filled with a craftsman’s joy. He chipped off a small, glittering piece and held it up to the dim light.

  “Cold-forged iron ore! But look at the grain! The striations, the cooling patterns! It’s not natural! This was melted, poured, and cooled under immense pressure! This isn’t a vein, lad, it’s slag! The runoff from some great, ancient forge! A forge so big it bled a river of iron across the world! Can you imagine the size of the bellows? The heat of the flame? The songs they must have sung!”

  Elmsworth, having made his way down the slope at a more dignified pace, scoffed at such a mundane explanation.

  “A forge? My dear dwarf, your thinking is depressingly two-dimensional. You are standing on history! On mythology!”

  He gestured grandly at the black expanse, his robes whipping in the wind.

  “You are looking at the fossilized circulatory system of a colossal, ancient Earth Titan! The iron is the titan's ‘hemoglobin,’ flash-calcified during a cataclysmic magical event in a forgotten age! We are standing on the artery of a dead god!”

  Faelar stared at him. He looked at the rock. He hit it with his hammer again. CLANG.

  “It’s slag,” he repeated, his voice firm. “From a forge. Probably a big one. My great-uncle Borin worked a forge near the Under-Deeps that left a slag-river half this size.”

  “Was that Borin the Beardy or Borin the Other-Handed?” Liam asked with mock seriousness from the top of the ridge.

  “Borin the Soot-Faced, if you must know!” Faelar shot back without missing a beat. “And he would tell you the same! This is high-quality, high-carbon slag! You can tell by the resonate frequency of the clang! Listen to it sing!”

  “The resonant energy is all wrong for simple slag!” Elmsworth argued, his voice rising with academic passion. He placed his cheek against the cold iron. “It hums with the memory of cosmic agony! Can’t you feel it? The sorrow of a dying world is locked within its crystalline structure! A forge-scar would feel of industry, of purpose! This feels of… of a great and terrible ending!”

  “I feel a good, solid bit of rock under my feet for the first time in a week,” Faelar retorted. “And it feels bloody wonderful.”

  While they were locked in their passionate and completely ridiculous argument about geology versus theology, Willow approached the road. She didn't step on it. She reached out a hesitant hand.

  She touched the black iron.

  She shivered violently, pulling her hand back as if burned.

  “It’s cold,” she said, her voice a whisper that still carried on the wind. “Not like normal rock. It feels… empty. Like all the life was burned out of it a long, long time ago. It feels lonely.”

  Liam, ignoring all of them, had been scouting. He walked back to us, his limp less pronounced on the flat, even surface.

  “Call it a road, call it a god’s artery, call it a convenient place to take a nap, I don’t care,” he said, his voice cutting through their debate.

  He pointed down the unnatural path. “It's flat, it's solid, and it heads northeast, exactly where the ward-stone is pointing. It's the fastest way forward.”

  He then gestured to the wide-open, empty plains on either side.

  “It's also a perfect, raised shooting gallery,” he added grimly. “There is absolutely no cover. At all. If we take this road, we are visible for miles.”

  The choice hung in the air. The slow, safe, winding ridges of bedrock that protected us from the badgers, or this strange, fast, but dangerously exposed iron road.

  “We’ve wasted enough time playing games with the dirt,” Faelar grumbled. “I say we take the road. Let’s make some real progress for a change. I want to hit something that isn't a rock.”

  “The tactical risk is significant,” I countered. “We’d be visible for miles.”

  “But we’d also see anything coming from miles away,” Liam pointed out. “It’s a trade-off. Slow and paranoid, or fast and exposed.”

  The debate was cut short by Liam again. His head snapped up. His eyes narrowed, scanning the bruised twilight of the sky to the east.

  “Company,” he said, his voice a low, urgent hiss.

  We followed his gaze.

  High above, circling on the wind, were four or five dark shapes.

  They were too large to be birds. Their movements were too predatory, too fluid. They had long, serpentine bodies and leathery wings that snapped in the wind.

  Elmsworth squinted, shielding his eyes with a wrinkled hand. “Ah,” he said, his voice losing some of its earlier cheer. “Well, that complicates matters.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Ashdrakes,” Elmsworth identified. “Lesser draconic cousins, known to inhabit blighted, volcanic regions. Primarily scavengers, but they are notoriously opportunistic predators. They have excellent eyesight, a distinct fondness for attacking anything caught out in the open, and their spittle is highly acidic. It can melt through leather in seconds and flesh in about a minute. A thoroughly unpleasant creature, all around.”

  We all looked from the circling, dragon-like shapes in the sky to the completely exposed, cover-free iron road. Then back to the winding, shelter-filled ridges we had just left.

  Our decision had just become infinitely more difficult.

  As we watched, one of the Ashdrakes let out a piercing, hawk-like shriek that cut through the howl of the wind. A clear, hunting cry.

  Nugget, who had been quietly preening on Elmsworth’s shoulder, turned a pale, frightened white.

  The chicken let out a series of frantic, panicked clucks and dove under the collar of Elmsworth’s robes, trembling violently.

  Elmsworth’s face went grim. He listened for a moment to the muffled clucking against his chest.

  “She says,” Elmsworth translated, his voice barely a whisper, “that they have seen us. And they are hunting.”

  We stood frozen on the road of black iron, miles from any shelter.

  The circling shapes in the sky began to widen their gyre. Their dark forms grew larger as they began their slow, deliberate descent.

  Our debate was over. We had to find cover, and we had to do it now.