Mike Wild - The Crucible of the Dragon God

It could have been worse, she supposed, she could have lost the leg, but that was actually quite academic right now because she wasn't getting out of here. The place had become her tomb after all.

She looked down at the stalagmites and boulders that were now rushing towards her, estimated she had only a few seconds before she hit, and closed her eyes.

She slammed into the cavern floor. But it didn't hurt half as much as she'd imagined it might.

What? she thought.

Instead of the hard rock Kali thudded onto — and through — a layering of planks, that once upon a time must have been set there to prevent unwary miners stumbling into a dropshaft. They were so rotten she passed through without harm. Another layer was almost immediately beneath them, and then another, level after level of shoring. As Kali plummeted through, her momentum slowed slightly each time.

Kathuck, kathuck, kathuck.

It seemed to go on forever, and Kali was beginning to think she might die of suffocation as opposed to anything else when, at last, she slammed through the last of the layers and crashed, flat on her back, onto a small hillock of rotten wood on some deep, deep tunnel floor.

She lay there for a second.

"Ow," she said.

And then she flipped herself upright, ready for whatever trap was going to be thrown at her next.

But there was none. Kali knew instantly that this place was different to Be'Trak'Tak. It looked different, felt different and even smelled different. And that could mean only one thing. The whole area she'd travelled through to reach Munch's mine had been riddled with other such excavations, and this had to be one of them. She'd broken through into another mine. And what was more, there was light ahead.

Wasting no time, Kali dusted herself down and began to move towards it, trying all the time to suppress the presumption that what was she looking at was an exit. After so long it was just too much to ask for, surely? And it was. Following the light to its source, Kali came upon against a solid rock wall.

No, wait, not solid. There was something there.

Kali's disappointment upon discovering that the light source was not an exit was mitigated slightly by the fact that it seemed to be no kind of natural light, and she found herself intrigued. Also she saw that it was not one light source but two, only seeming to be a whole because they were embedded in the rock close together. No, not embedded, she realised as she examined them further. The lights seemed to be attached to something else embedded in the rock, something bigger that a roof collapse had buried at some time in the past and that had remained undisturbed since. The question was, how long had it remained undisturbed? Kali studied the collapse with a professional eye, noting the visible fossilisation, the settlement of the larger pieces of debris, and the compactness of the scree around them, which was absolutely solid. A very long time, then, she concluded. The only problem now being that, if that were true, how in all the hells could the lights — whatever they were — still be glowing?

She used her gutting knife to work away at the scree surrounding them, eventually revealing two small, orange orbs that seemed to throb beneath her touch, prompting a dull headache as they did. Suddenly, she realised what they had to be. Unless she'd missed her guess, they were some kind of power source for the thing to which they were attached.

Kali slapped the area she had revealed around the orbs tentatively, and then a little bit harder, and then harder still until her palms hurt. No doubt about it. Metal, and solid — apparently armoured or, at least, reinforced. But what on Twilight was it? She took a few steps back so that she could see the thing more fully and, with a pulse of excitement, realised that that the metal object was mounted on some kind of rotating tracks as if it might ride on them — move on them, in fact.

Kali continued her excavation anew, pulling now at larger stones and rocks that were embedded in the scree and then rolling each down over their predecessors until the pile was too big to accommodate more. But that didn't matter because she had managed to reveal enough of the machine for her purpose, and what she had revealed made her step back with a gasp.

She was standing in the space between the rock and what, it seemed, had been travelling through the rock, although what mechanism it employed to do this she could not see as she had not yet unearthed its front end. It was clearly a vehicle, however, as evidenced by the fact that there was a hatch in its side — and the hatch was covered in dwarven runics. Kali ran her palm over it in some wonderment, realising that while it was far from the first dwarven artefact she had discovered, it could very well be the first from the age that had produced it.

Through her own studies she had accredited three distinct periods of development to the Old Races — both elven and dwarven — during which they had progressed from opposing factions, utilising either magic or technology to build their individual civilisations, through periods of conflict where they had waged war using magic against technology, to the final age where, reconciled, both Old Races joined forces to expand each civilisation through magical technology. By this time both were so advanced that they would have been perceived almost as gods, and they could have been glorious and supreme if something hadn't happened. Whatever it was that had been powerful enough to wipe out these two great civilisations — to effectively eradicate them from the surface of Twilight — was perhaps the greatest of all mysteries but one that Kali intended one day to solve. The point was, that the vehicle she was studying appeared to come from the end of that last age, because what else could those orbs be but magical technology?

Becoming more excited by the second, Kali moved to the edge of the hatch, feeling around it until she had traced a round cornered, rectangular shape. It was sealed tightly but, being a hatch, there clearly had to be a way to open it. Perhaps that little niche there, marked with the rectangular symbol?

Kali felt inside and her hand wrapped around what felt like a small handle, which she gripped and pushed. Nothing happened, so she pulled instead. And then she staggered back as a giant, bronchial floprat with halitosis exhaled heavily in her face.

That, at least, was what it felt and smelled like. But there was no floprat, only the rank atmosphere coming from inside.

Kali watched the hatch release itself from its seal, punching away from the main body of the vehicle with a second exhalation and there waiting for a moment before, with a kind of wheeze, it slid slowly to the side. Kali understood now what she had just activated. The hatch was similar to the rune surrounded doors she had discovered in the Spiral of Kos, vacuum sealed by a method she did not understand to protect whatever lay behind them. But, where beyond those doors had lain ancient laboratories, behind this one lay only darkness.

No, she thought, not quite darkness. What appeared to be some kind of small, cramped cabin lay within, illuminated very dully by the same strange glow that had brought her to this part of the cave. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed that the glow seemed to be emanating from a number of places within, each of them small — panels, perhaps, with levers. Some kind of control cabin then? But controlled by what?

Oh, she thought suddenly, my Gods.

The panels were not so bright as they might have been, not because they were actually dim, but because something was blocking their glow. There was a figure within, just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Kali swallowed, knowing that if it moved she would very likely have a dicky fit.

But it didn't, of course. How could it? Who knew how long this machine had been stranded here, within the rock. Anything within it could not have hoped to survive. Hells, what a lonely, lonely death it must have been. But what nagged at Kali more than that morbid thought was, why had no one come to help? She wondered for a second whether it was possible that the inhabitant of the machine had died here because there was no one to come to help — that perhaps he had died here at the time the Old Races had gone away? And if that was the case then it begged the obvious question. What was she looking at?