Chapter 57: Ch. 057 – (Then) Welcome to Hell

Jonathan woke up a few minutes later when the guard that had been escorting splashed him with a bucket of water to shock him back to consciousness, but it would take much longer to live down the moment of weakness. He grudgingly got to his feet and continued the tour dripping wet. Eventually they arrived at the barracks he was sure he’d be stuck in for the foreseeable future, and he could see from the looks he got from the dwarves that made up his shift that this wasn’t going to go well. The cellblock housed just over a dozen of the stone men, and they looked at him in confusion when he arrived, obviously wondering how or why a man would end up in such a strange place that he was utterly unsuited for. 

That much made sense. Jonathan would wonder the same thing if he saw a dwarf out playing in the snow. Some sights were just too strange to exist. The confusion faded eventually, but the contempt in their eyes never did, and as soon as the guard left, the jeers and the ridicule started. 

“Look at that,” a scarred dwarf pointed at Jonathan and laughed, “A cold blood. I didn’t think they could even go this deep! Now I’ve seen everythin!”

“He’s melting already,” another said when the laughter died down. “He’ll be gone by mornin. There’ll just be a man-shaped puddle and a pair o’ boots on the ground when you wake up Gregok.” 

“Do you think he got lost, or did he just really piss someone off?” another dwarf just starting to go gray asked, “seems to me he won't last long enough to pay for the coal they used to bring him here. That’s something you do when ye are tryin send a message.”  

“Well - why don’t you ask him yerself. Might make for a good story,” Gregok asked. He didn’t look to be the meanest or the strongest dwarf, here, but he seemed to be something of a leader that the other stone men looked to for approval. Jonathan just tried to remember what Ekrom told him while they were at the salt mine and tried not to make eye contact with any of them. The last thing he wanted to do was pick a fight. 

“Why would I give two goblin shits about anything a giant would have to say, even if I could speak that goofy tongue o’ theirs!” the gray dwarf asked. This caused another round of laughter. 

After that they spent the better part of an hour making up ridiculous stories about who he’d have to piss off to end up at the ass end of nowhere. Most of the stories dealt with business dealings that went awry. A few reckoned that he was a human prince being exiled so he couldn’t try to take the throne from his brother, or alternatively that his brother had stolen his throne from him and he’d been sent down here so he couldn’t raise a revolution to retake it. Notably, even in their most outlandish guess, that he was here because he’d fallen for a pretty young dwarf girl. That, as much as anything, showed him just how beyond the pale what he’d done was. He was certain that any of these criminals would have beaten him to death if they learned the truth, so he said nothing and let them believe whatever they wanted to about him. 

Though it didn’t seem like any of them here hated men as much as Fedon had, Jonathan was sure that he’d never find friends in this room. He tried not to let that get to him as he sat there against the wall, but a sudden wave of regret went through him at the realization that here he wouldn’t find a Kaspov or an Ekrom to talk to. Here there was never going to be anyone to watch his back. He was on his own now, for better or worse. 

In this mood that suited him fine. He ignored the jokes the dwarves made about how weak he looked and how they doubted he’d last the night, and instead focused on cooling down to prove them wrong. After that he started pulling small amounts of fire from his body and into the stones under his feet without any regard for the powder and its flammability. If he was blown up by a freak explosion, then at least he’d take these bastards with him. This was truly the dregs of dwarven society. He didn’t just mean the convicts either, the guards weren’t a lot better. Which made sense. Why would any free dwarf want to work at a place so miserable and dangerous that it was only worked by prisoners with nothing left to live for?

Half a day later after a long and almost sleepless night, Jonathan found out what the pits were. They were as close to a literal hell as one could likely find, without dying. It turned out that the powder mill was a small part of the whole facility. It wasn’t much bigger than the cell blocks, and it was only half the size of its attached warehouse. All of those buildings were dwarfed by the vast caverns behind it though. They reeked of sulfur and shit, because that’s exactly what they were full of. From somewhere above them, a river of sewage flowed down into the caverns where it filled innumerable pools and trenches with the foul brew. After that it was the prisoner’s job to walk through the awful place, searching for areas where a white powder that the dwarves called stone salts bloomed as a white crust across the surface of the sludge. 

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Unlike almost everywhere else he’d seen in the dwarven world, the caverns were lit by fire rather than glow stones. Jonathan thought that was an unusual touch, but despite the fact that the bright fires and the flickering shadows certainly made the awful place feel that much more like he was damned, he soon figured out the reason why. The pools released all sorts of noxious gasses, which would make the dancing flames flare suddenly as it burned off some infernal or another. He wasn’t sure if the torches were meant to keep the whole place from exploding, or to keep the prisoners from suffocating, but either way, they were serving a purpose of some sort. 

Jonathan had never been given such a pointless and frustrating task in his life, but now every day he was sent into a steam filled cavern that was so vile that it was all he could do not to vomit as he sought to stay busy. The first day he learned the hard way that if you brought back nothing, then you went hungry. He had only water, and most of the inmates subsisted of meager rations, while the dwarves that brought back the most ate a thick and hearty stew along with the guards. Jonathan could sense the jealousy that was directed at them, and wanted no part of that, but a little bit of their beer would have been nice to take the edge off of how awful he felt. It wasn’t really his fault, but that was the way this place was run, and he wasn’t about to argue with them. It wasn’t his fault though. Not only were all the best spots already staked out by dwarves that had been doing this longer, but between the heat and the exhaustion it was all Jonathan could do to stay standing. He felt that at any moment he might lean over too far or pass out and fall into the sludge. He was sure no one would shed a tear, or try to save him either. 

It was an awful, thankless existence, and honestly he didn’t even understand what it was all for. This white substance they were gathering clearly couldn’t be a part of black powder he’d seen on the loading docks. Black powder was black, and adding a while powder to it would merely make it anything but black. It was a mystery, and one he’d try to unravel normally, but right now he was too tired to think. Between the lack of food and sleep he was having trouble channeling fire, and he was fairly sure if he stopped getting rid of the fire that was building up inside him he’d be dead inside of a day

Jonathan spent hours that night cursing his decision not to escape on the train when he had the chance. Nothing would have stopped him from melting the chain, burning the lock from the door and escaping the first time they slowed down to make a sharp turn. He could have been halfway to the surface by now if the gods had been with him. He’d wrongly assumed there was no worse way to die though, and that being lost in the dark as his water slowly ran out was the worst possible outcome. He was wrong. He'd never dreamed that a place as awful as this could have existed. Outside of religious scriptures he doubted that anyone else had either. No one but a fire blooded could even survive this deep for any length of time. 

His sleep that night was fitful but mercifully dreamless. It was all he could do to lower the scrap of stone floor that he slept on to a cool 60 or 70 degrees. That reservoir of comfort didn’t last long, but it was long enough for Jonathan to fall asleep and stay asleep until he started sweating too badly. Then he would spend a few minutes doing it again until he could fall asleep all over again. It was an awful cycle, but it beat the sleepless night he’d had the night before. 

The following days weren’t a lot better for Jonathan either. Stone salts were an elusive quarry, and he spent as much time trying to avoid the other dwarves as he did actually looking. At least he was no longer hungry though. After a couple days his body, convinced that it was starving to death, began to shut down. It gave him a sort of clarity that made his efforts to keep cool despite the sweltering temperatures become almost a meditation, and that calmness made the whole ordeal seem less real. 

What were the odds that there would actually be a place anywhere in the world like this though? Even in the deeps? Would the dwarves really manufacture their fearsome powder from ingredients mined in a literal hell? If he’d told the story to his brother's friends or the village boys, he doubted they would have believed him, even though they hated dwarves with a passion born of ignorance and fairy tales. It was just too ridiculous and on the nose. In the stories, dwarves sometimes stole lost children and smuggled them deep into the earth, and forced them to work in the mines until they grew too tall for them. After that they either formed some clever plan to outwit the stone men and escape or were butchered and eaten for dinner, depending on the tale. 

Even though Jonathan knew the latter outcome was untrue, he still planned on being in the former group. He doubted he could survive much more than a month in this awful place, even if he got good enough at finding these stupid salts to get him fed on a nightly basis. It was just too awful for words down here.

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For the handful of loyal readers enjoying this story, thank you. Before I started writing this story I made a 100 chapter outline. At the time I was a bit too pessimistic in how much could fit in each chapter, so by the time I got to this point that outline had slowly been condensed into a 76 chapter outline. As I post this I am in the process of writing chapter 62, and i felt like I was running out of content, so I have spent a little time on the outline this week and increased it from 76 chapters back to 110, which brings me to the end of the story. Realisticlly I will still manage to squeeze some of those together, so that means there are less than 54 chapters remaining. That will still make the story an unpublishable 220k word monstrosity, but it's a hell of a ride. 

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