Experimental writing

Hello again. Sorry for the absence, I've kind of lost my patience for DF in the last few months. Usenshorast was such a sprawling and endless collection of narrow corridors and trash that my laptop could only run the game at around 10-15 FPS. Not very good, and not at all playable. A friend of mine urged me last night to write a bit more, and, with the influences of H.P. Lovecraft on my mind, I crafted this short little story about what happens when one digs too greedily and too deep. It may also serve as legitimate writing if the dwarf names at the end are changed to normal names. Enjoy. (Warning: I have not proofread this!)




Dire percussion pulsed in the thick, hot air. Each beat echoing from its source, and traveling in a wave down the length of the cavern wall. The staccato of beats continued for long time, each hit hanging in the poorly ventilated shaft.

The miner worked. He worked because he knew he must, and because mining was his trade. Something else, however, tugged at his mind. Today was different. He worked in only one spot, incessantly, and could not bring himself to stop. He was getting close to something, and he could not stop.

The beats continued. In their cadence the miner could see the many things around him. The mile long shaft underneath the fortress, where a hundred others worked and lived. His own room, purchased with his meager salary, lay somewhere a thousand feet above.

In his years, the miner had been on through many notable discoveries. The first striking of a vein of silver. The first to crash into an open cavern containing several beautiful quartz crystals. Some said the miner had a knack for discovery, good or bad. Some called it a curse. The miner did not pay much attention to these claims. He only needed to work.

The seconds flew by, counted off by the strokes of his pick. Just a few more feet. The wall was caving away; yielding the glory of that which was unknown to his efforts. In work, he found edification, and in discovery, he found meaning. Money was never important, only to mine and to dig and to search for that that is lost.

Beneath his feet, a thousand miles of rock, sheltering in its embrace secrets. The miner was on to one of them, something big, something forgotten.

A sharp change in sound caused the beating of the pick to stop. A crumbling, wrenching noise. How long had the miner worked? In the darkness below the realm of the sun, days became minutes, and hours were lost like raindrops in a river. He had not seen another miner in a very long time. Perhaps his tunnel was so far removed from the central mine shaft that he simply fell out of the notice of the others.

Silence. Nothing in the empty air, hot as a man's breath, and stinking of the bowels of the earth. In the absence of the meter of his pick, there was nothing. The miner's ears still pulsed and ached in the places where that sound should have been.

He looked down, and saw his pick stuck in the wall. He had broken through to the other side. No he need only hack his way through it. A mad fervor entered his heart at that moment, and he began to slam his pick into the dark rock. What was once the steady metronome of a funeral march took up the intensity of a symphony played at the speed of allegro. Rock flew from the wall, and chips landed in the miners beard and eyes. From then, no one can say how long the miner toiled. In time, a darkness would swallow him, and he would awake, after a time, with renewed desire to break away the wall.

Soon, at least, soon in the mind of the miner, the wall was broken, and all that lay ahead was the darkness of an open tunnel. The miner paused and stared into the darkness. In the silence and blackness, only his mind had power. Could he trust himself to report accurately on what hid in the shadows? Or should he return to the fortress and tell the others. He waited and thought.

No. He would go alone into the black.

He began to walk into the cave. The beat hammered out by the pick was replaced with a similar pace sounded by the miner's footsteps. At first, that sound reflected the crunch and scratching of raw and unrefined rock. But soon, in the minutes or hours that passed, the sound became more even, like walking on tile. When the torpor in the miner's mind subsided, a torpor brought on by hours of intense labor, he stopped. The tunnel had not widened or become taller since he entered it. It was wide and tall enough for him to walk comfortably in. He reached out his trembling hand to touch the walls. His mind begged for and expected a rough, cave-like feeling, and it was not disappointed. He then hunkered down and let his hand drop to floor. Slowly and methodically, he ran his aging and blackened fingers across the floor. It was smooth, but marred by an eternity of dust.

The miner froze, his heart beating audibly in his ears. What manner of place could this be? A dwelling? Perhaps a forgotten entrance to his fortress. The old structure had weathered almost a hundred years, and perhaps it was possible that some passage had been closed off or forgotten. Possible explanations danced in the miner's head. To him, they sounded as hollow rationalizations. He knew the impossible truth of this place, somewhere deep in his mind. An ancient, racial memory or fear of things dark and mysterious in the miles below the surface of the Earth. He did not acknowledge this fear or skittering shadows and creeping ancestral memories. He did not mind the dread of the dark places, or the fear of the unknown. He simply got to his feet and began to walk.

He walked solemnly, with eyes aghast and breath bated, and one hand ever held on the left wall. As time and space fled from him in the night, everything began to change. The tunnel bled with memories, at first joyous. Scenes from his childhood in the fortress, and serving with his father as an apprentice miner. The memories flitted away at him from the corners of his vision, visible specters of lost days and years. As he walked, the memories took a turn for the grim. His father's death in collapse, his mother's illness, the death of his wife in childbirth, and the taking of his son by war. These memories, though filled with their own profound sadness, were conventional and in their own way comforting. In this alien place, even sad memories of a true past were a comfort.

Before long, this peace shifted. Strange, half-imagined scenes entered the miner's mind, as if he was falling into a dream. The cavern itself changed to reflect this. Sometimes it became tight, and the miner had to crawl on his stomach, and other times the cave widened to form antechambers many feet high, and the miner had to guide himself by following the walls. What he saw in his head was shapes and ideas, but never anything concrete. Vague whispers of fear primordial.

In time, the miner saw a light, hanging mournfully in the distance. He marched towards it with grim conviction. Counting off the seconds, the miner knew he had been walking towards the light for many minutes, but it still seemed as distant as ever. His waking dreams became nightmares lasting only seconds. They were powerful images that impressed only the faintest and most powerful primal emotions. Fear and rage coursed through him with each of these walking phantasms. He reached the light, and saw ancient artwork scrawled on the walls. It was at once alien and familiar. It glowed with a strange and eerie light. Ahead, the miner saw what had lead him to dig in the dark forgotten spot that the other miners ignored. A glittering vein in the dark, a precious metal. He reached for his hand pick and rushed towards it, eager to escape the oppressive darkness of the tunnel.

He slammed his pick into the glowing metal, again echoing out the grave drumming of a miner at work. At first, his mind was so clouded by the din of his own work that he did not notice the rhythmic pulsing in the corner of his mind. As it slowly became stronger, he was forced to stop and listen. A potent bass note echoed out along the walls. A powerful rumbling almost too deep to be heard in the ears, but more easily felt in the chest. It grew in power. The heartbeat of the earth shook the miner in his place. In the distance he could hear the grinding of stone, and in his mind he could almost imagine the words of some ancient choir of celebrants, singing out the chorus to worship their earth god.

The miner did not know the madness that led him to this place, but he knew he must flee. As he turned to run from the tunnel, the choir in his head became louder, and the pulsing of the rock became more profound. What sin had the miner committed that would cause such a punishment. The figures in his mind became almost clear, like the figures of men, but somehow changed.

As his mind's eye found its way to the face of one of the figures, the pulsing increased to its final crescendo. The fear in the heart of the miner reached its most severe height, and the miner fell into darkness, forgetting himself, and his place in time.


“Hey, Zasit, wake up. Go home, shift's over”

The miner stirred from his deep and ancient sleep

“You hear me? Go home. You're done.”

“But...I..,” He paused, wiping sleep from his eyes and shaking it from his head, “What happened to me?”

“Reg found you unconscious in a service tunnel. Looked like you had been mighty busy digging. He dragged you over here. You've been muttering something pretty funny.”

“I was asleep?” The miner asked.

“Seemed that way, next to some tunnel you'd unearthed. Mighty fine work. Who would have known that was there? It's true what they say: You've got the gift.”

Panic jumped up in the miner's throat. “A tunnel?! I unearthed a tunnel?”

The supervisor answered, “Well, I mean, yeah. You didn't know? Nobody had seen you in two days, so we started looking. You must have been hard at work, so nobody can really fault you, you know?”

The miner ignored his words. “What did you do with that tunnel? Tell me you sealed it up! Tell me!” His heart raced in fear.

“What are you kidding me? Who knows what's down there? And considering your past intuition, we thought it would be a good idea to check it out. We sent a ten man expedition down.”

The words flowed over the miner like rain. He did not hear them, but understood their meaning. And below him, on the hard cave floor he lay upon, he could feel the ancient rumbling of that place. In his mind, he again thought back to the faces of the figures approaching him in his dreams. As the rumbling below him grew stronger, the face became clearer. As the figure turned around to show his face, the miner could only appreciate the dark glassy nature of the figure's eyes before surrendering to the darkness, and slipping into a slick and fleshless nightmare.