Arc V- Chapter 1: Preparation

Maz & Maggra

Harrowhall did not panic.

That was the first thing Maz noticed.

It moved.

The tunnels hummed with low, constant motion boots on stone, sledges dragged along bone-lined paths, the clatter of stacked shields and crate lids. Smoke threaded the upper vents in disciplined streams now, not the lazy curls of cookfires but the darker, oil-fed breath of forges brought fully awake.

Goblins passed her carrying lengths of sharpened timber. Others hauled sacks of dried fungus and smoked meat toward deeper store chambers, faces set, mouths quiet. No shouting. No questions.

They had learned.

Maz paused at a junction where three tunnels met and watched as a crew of young goblins reinforced a choke point wedging iron-shod beams into grooves carved generations ago, stone teeth waiting to bite anything foolish enough to push through without permission.

“Add a drop channel,” she murmured.

One of them nodded immediately and redirected the work. No argument. No fear.

Harrowhall remembered sieges.

Maggra’s ogres dominated the lower levels.

They worked with the patience of creatures who understood weight lifting slabs of stone into place, bracing ceilings, widening murder slits that would allow massive hands to reach through and pull. Their voices rumbled low, carrying instructions and warnings, but even they kept the noise down.

Grond the Graveheart stood near the eastern approach, immobile as a standing obelisk. His greatsword rested point-down against the stone, runes faintly awake. Goblins gave him wide berth not out of fear, but respect. He was a promise given shape.

Maggra moved through it all like a storm that had decided where to break.

She barked orders, adjusted placements with a shove of her shoulder, corrected an ogre who was reinforcing the wrong angle with a cuff that would have crushed a lesser being. Her tusks caught the forge-light when she smiled not pleased, but satisfied.

“They’re doing better than last time,” she said to Maz, watching a goblin crew lower a spiked grate into position. “Less wasted motion.”

Maz nodded. “They know what’s at stake now.”

A tremor ran through the webbing stretched high along the cavern walls fine, nearly invisible threads Ravha had allowed to remain. Maz felt it before she saw it.

“The scouts are back,” she said quietly.

The web tightened.

Ravha’s brood descended not as messengers but as memory.

Maz braced herself as the impressions washed over her.

Stone-black hills crawling with movement. Troll encampments dug deep and fed well. Fires banked low and long. Meat pits worked without pause.

Dead ogres.

Not fallen in battle processed. Bones cracked, marrow taken, flesh stripped with methodical care. Trolls who did not linger, who did not celebrate.

Then the village.

Small. Human. A place that should have been forgettable.

It wasn’t.

No bodies. No survivors. Just gnawed posts, broken tools, churned earth where homes had stood. The absence screamed louder than blood ever could.

Maz swallowed. “They ate them.”

Maggra’s expression did not change but the forge behind her flared hotter.

“Then these aren’t scouts,” she said. “They’re clearing a path directly to us.”

Maz folded the map tighter, hands steady now. “Advanced elements,” she corrected softly. “The edge of something bigger.”

Silence stretched between them, filled only by the sound of Harrowhall working.

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“They’ll reach our outer routes soon,” Maz said. “Maybe already have.”

Maggra nodded. “Good. Let them see.”

She turned and raised her voice not shouting, but carrying.

“Double the meat rotation. I want no empty bellies when they arrive.”

Ogres rumbled assent.

Maz added, “Pull the outer families in. No lone burrows. No stragglers.”

Goblins moved immediately, spreading the word without fuss.

The warg handlers passed through, signaling with hand signs rather than calls. Packs shifted positions, settling into deeper pens closer to Maz’s routes, Varkha’s absence felt but accounted for.

Everything was tightening.

Not in fear.

In readiness.

Maggra rested a heavy hand against Grond’s armored arm. The crystal in his chest pulsed once, slow and patient.

“Ulg thinks in mouths,” she said. “He’ll expect us to starve or break.”

Maz looked east, toward the tunnels that sloped toward the Crawl.

“Then we make him work for every bite.”

Above them, Harrowhall breathed stone reinforced, people fed, weapons waiting.

The Red Maw was not roaring.

It was closing.

The dark deepened.

Not gradually decisively.

Meanwhile.

Vris felt it the way one feels pressure in the ears before a storm breaks. His darkvision thinned until it was barely vision at all, the world reduced to overlapping shades of gray and black, depth and distance becoming guesses rather than truths.

The Deeps did not welcome light.

They tolerated it.

Only occasionally did bioluminescent growths interrupt the void pale mushrooms clinging to stone like cautious stars, vein-lit fungi crawling across walls in slow, sickly blues and greens. Each pocket of glow felt like surfacing for air before sinking again.

The silence was wrong.

Not empty watchful.

Vris moved carefully, stonebond carapace shifting soundlessly with each step. His claws brushed rock that felt older than the mountain above, worn smooth by time and pressure rather than water. Every sense stayed coiled tight, his runes crawling faintly beneath ash-gray skin, reacting to things he could not see.

Ahead, movement.

He froze.

Shapes resolved slowly feeding shapes.

Hollowborn.

Their bodies hunched and asymmetrical, chitin plates catching what little light there was. They tore into something half-buried in the stone, wet sounds echoing softly through the cavern.

Vris crouched, watching.

The carcasses were… wrong.

Humanoid, yes but smaller. Slighter. Long-fingered hands, narrow faces crushed beneath mandibles and teeth. For a heartbeat, the old part of him thought goblins.

No.

He narrowed his eyes.

The proportions were off. The bone structure too fine. The beards what remained of them threadlike and pale.

Deep gnomes, he realized grimly.

Creatures meant for stone and shadow, native to depths like these. Predators in their own right, once.

Now prey.

The Hollowborn fed without urgency, methodical and obscene, as if they had all the time in the world.

Vris slid past them without sound.

He did not strike.

Not yet.

The air changed as he went deeper thicker, threaded with faint vibrations that crawled up his legs and into his spine. The Deeps carried sound strangely here. Not echoes transmissions.

Then he heard it.

A roar.

Not loud.

Distant.

So deep it felt less like noise and more like pressure, a rolling thunder that traveled through stone rather than air. It was followed by chitinous impacts vast limbs shifting, scraping, chittering in patterns too large to visualize.

Miles away.

And still impossibly present.

The Hollowborn Queen.

Each step toward her felt like walking toward a storm you could hear but not see.

Vris slowed, breath measured, mind working. This was no lair in the simple sense. This was territory an ecosystem built around a single, monstrous axis.

His thoughts drifted, unbidden.

Maz’s hands sorting grain.

Her voice steady even when things tightened.

The way Harrowhall moved under her guidance.

He missed her.

The realization struck harder than any fear he’d felt so far.

How had a bullied human who once avoided confrontation ended up here alone, stalking a nightmare through the bones of the world? How had mercy and strategy twisted him into something that hunted queens beneath mountains?

The answer was uncomfortable.

Because someone had to.

Vris exhaled slowly and touched the ring at his claw.

The invisibility answered with a familiar hum, shadow folding around him, stone and darkness accepting the lie without protest. His outline vanished, presence thinning until even he felt less solid.

Good.

He needed every advantage.

Ahead, the chittering grew louder. The vibrations stronger. Whole sheets of stone trembled faintly with each movement of the thing he hunted.

Vris leaned forward and began to close the distance.

a shadow slipping deeper into a darkness that had begun, at last, to notice him.