Cuinn's Compendium

Introduction

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More than anything in this life, I fear the Enemy. Why then, did I go back into the mines?

It was dangerously dark for most of the ascent. That is why I had brought my lantern. Though, I admit, I did not light it for fear of giving away my presence to beings with more sensitive eyes. These mines did not feel like home, they felt long, cold, hollow. I clung to the parchment, feeling every groove as I stepped through the black. To turn corners I ran my fingers along the wall until it bent away. And though I could not see the new void on the other side, I felt it. Being confronted with open darkness is a strange thing. You can stand for as long as you would like, straining as hard as you would like, your eyes will never adjust. At night, or day, it is hard to tell, when I made camp. I unpacked, set my alerts, ate a ration, slept, and packed together all in the suffocating grasp of the dark. But I am convinced, or have convinced myself, that this was what kept me alive. I think that it took four days of travel before I finally left the stairways and came into the Eighth Ring. At this point my maps were blank.

Cartographers, amongst whom I barely count myself, had marked every previous route carefully and with ample precision. Between my start and the Eighth I made only two corrections. The first being a door misplaced on the wrong wall, confusing the room’s cardinal positions. Probably it was engraved in such a hurry as I am reluctant to imagine. The other, unfortunately, was the appearance of a new passage. The rim of which felt sticky. I left there quickly before making my notes. The maps kept me guided and safe on the way up. I owe everything to those who came before. The Eighth, however, is counted as one of the lost settlements. There are no maps of it. No memory. It was taken from us, stolen by many claws and many fangs. I am young and unwise. But I have learned what is left of our history. Far above, where the walls are cool and the air draws in from without, in the Rings, we had our home-hearths. We had life. Until the Enemy came and we were driven deeper. Down into the relative safety of the lower Rings. We were cut off from the high passages that connected us to the others. Down below lived only Dvaergi now. And we did live, for a time, in each Ring. The Enemy followed. Our barricades only held so long before we gave them another of our hearths, another score of our lives. As we were driven deeper and deeper, time passed. To pay time's due we gave our eldest, and with them our memory. It was far too late before someone spoke up. We no longer know our own tunnels, something must be done! Perhaps we hoped within us that keeping it out of ear and out of mind would force it into unreality. Unmake this tense reality, that we might wake from a bad dream. But we only stole from ourselves. The places of heritage our people kept and lived in for uncountable lives one after the other, were now foreign to us. That was when the Cartographers were founded. An order of the differently-sane charged by duty, spirit, or other feeling, with mapping our old home. We had tried, of course, to fight the Enemy, but our efforts were paid back in spent blood. Smarter folk than I figured that lone Dvaergi fared better than groups. And I mean not to downplay the cost of this discovery. Groups of fives, fours, threes, all lost to the terror in the tunnels. Their warmth is gone. We leave nothing in this world when all is said and done, save for the memories. Our maps are those memories. They are the paths we walk, the directions for life encoded in runes and scribbles, written in every colour, pressed into thick parchment like brooks eroded into the side of a mountain. Maybe that is why I ventured up. To preserve what had been us, and what might be us again. Maybe too, I longed to see the fabled sun.

Maneuvering through the barricaded pass-gate strained me some, but I emerged on the other side feeling more courage than fear, or maybe courage is measured simply in its presence against mounting fear. As soon as my heart quieted I flexed my ears and heard the familiar notes of silence. For the first time since I left the relative safety of the mapmakers’ holdout between the Ninth and Tenth, I lit a fire. Despite the tremble in my hands, I struck the stones and sparked flames with the first. Memory flowed into me and I saw that day, in my small youth, when my mother held my wrists to guide my strike when I first lit our hearth. It felt like she was still holding gently on. The flame stuck to the stone, and once I placed it into the lantern and had adjusted the mirrors, light flowed easily, casting an orange glow on the painted stone. The tunnel seemed larger at once, and the soft hues of our old colours still sat in the walls.

Now I am here. In a place none of my kind have stood for eras. With a blank parchment and my sister's ink set. Let us make a map.

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Thanks for reading!

The above is an excerpt from a prospective story under the working title “Pitch Black Reflections”. I hope you enjoyed it!

With love <3 -Ventus