Location: Barkla’s Escape Tunnel, Beneath Fubar
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
There is a particular flavor of dread reserved for the moment a door closes behind you and you understand, all at once, that it will not open again from this side. I have caused that feeling in others more times than I could easily count — it is, if I am honest, one of the small cruelties I have always rather enjoyed — and so I confess a certain professional interest in watching my two Azoras experience it themselves, for once, at the hands of an ally rather than an enemy.
There was no time, in the moment, to dwell on such fine feelings. The boots behind them had swelled from rumor to certainty, and Barkla did not wait for either Azora to compose themselves before shoving them bodily toward the black gap in his cell’s rear wall. “Move, unless you’d rather explain to the next wave why you’re still standing here admiring my stonework.”
Emcorae went first, dropping to hands and knees to shove himself through the narrow gap, his pack catching hard against the opening’s edge and nearly wedging him fast until he wrenched it free with a muttered curse and a scrape of leather against raw stone. Nathily came after, her own gear snagging twice in the same unforgiving gap, her falchia’s sheath clanging loud enough against the rock that she froze, certain the sound would carry straight back to the soldiers now spilling into the corridor behind them. It didn’t — or if it did, no cry of discovery followed it — and she scrambled the rest of the way through on hands and knees, heart hammering, into a hollow barely large enough for the three of them to crouch upright.
Barkla came last, and Nathily noted, in the frantic scramble of it, that he’d left both his stolen sword and the iron cell-bar behind among the dead — no dwarf’s true weapons, and so no loss he seemed to mourn in the slightest, unlike the fury he’d shown over his missing armor. He turned at once to the work of sealing the gap behind them, and it was only once the makeshift entrance had vanished back into undifferentiated wall that either Azora found breath enough to feel the full weight of what they’d just done.
Barkla worked with the swift, unhurried competence of a craftsman closing up a job well done, fitting the great stone blocks back into their seams and packing the joints with handfuls of damp earth scraped from the tunnel floor. Neither Emcorae nor Nathily said a word as they watched him do it, though Azazel — had he been anything so indiscreet as visible in that hollow — would have noted the particular tightness gathering in both their jaws. They had followed a dwarf who barely knew them into a hole in the world on nothing more than his word and his confidence, and now that hole was sealing itself shut behind them, stone by patient stone, and there would be no going back.
When the last block settled into place, the dim residual light bleeding through from the cell above vanished entirely, and the tunnel swallowed them whole.
Into the Blind
“Come with me,” Barkla said, his voice oddly muffled in the total black, already moving. “Stay close.”
“We can’t see, Barkla,” Nathily said, and there was an edge in her voice that had nothing to do with the soldiers they’d left behind. “How are we meant to follow you if we can’t see where you’ve gone?”
“Krat.” A short, irritated curse, as though the dwarf had genuinely forgotten, in his eagerness, that other races weren’t gifted with a Drokka’s eyes for stone and shadow. “Fine. There’s but one way to go — forward. Keep a hand on me and don’t lose your grip.”
“I have a better idea,” Emcorae said, and Nathily heard him fumbling blind through his own pack, the scrape of buckles and the soft hiss of coiled rope drawn free. “Bind us together. If one of us stumbles, the rest will know it before we lose them entirely.”
It was, Nathily thought, exactly the kind of practical, steady thinking that had kept them both alive across a hundred leagues of worse country than this — and she was grateful for it now more than she had been in weeks, fumbling in the dark to knot the hemp cord about her own waist, feeling Barkla’s stocky frame shift ahead of her as he tied off his own length, Emcorae’s larger presence anchoring the line behind.
Somewhere beyond the sealed wall, muffled through solid stone, came the dim clamor of soldiers arriving too late to a corridor already gone quiet — voices raised, boots scattering in confused search of quarry that had simply ceased to exist. The sound gave Nathily one small, fierce comfort before it faded entirely beneath the tunnel’s own close, breathing silence: whatever waited ahead of them, it could not possibly be worse than what they’d already left behind.
She would come, in time, to regret how confidently she’d believed that.
The Weight of Stone
The tunnel narrowed almost at once, forcing them into a stooped, shuffling crawl that made every yard feel like ten. The air here carried none of the dungeon’s rot — no waste, no death, only raw earth and cold, mineral damp, a smell that should have been a relief after everything above and somehow wasn’t, because it came paired with a darkness so total that Nathily’s eyes, straining uselessly against it, began to invent their own faint, swimming shapes out of nothing at all.
For Nathily most of all, this was its own particular torment. She had grown up beneath open canopy, had learned to fight on high boughs where the wind moved freely and the forest’s light, however filtered, always found some way through. Amorosi were creatures of sky and leaf-shadow, not of stone pressing close on every side — and with every stooped, shuffling step deeper into Barkla’s hand-dug hole, some old and wordless part of her began to scream that this was wrong, that the world was not meant to close in around a living thing this tightly, that she had traded an honest death by the sword for a slow smothering in the dark instead.
She found herself murmuring, without quite deciding to, a fragment of an old Amorosi blessing her mother had taught her as a child — Alyssa’s light finds even the deepest root — not because she believed the goddess could hear her through so much stone, but because the familiar shape of the words in her mouth gave her something to hold onto that wasn’t rock or rope or her own rising panic.
Behind her, she felt Emcorae’s hand find hers along the taut line between them — not a grip, just a brief, steadying press of fingers in the dark, there and gone, a wordless acknowledgment that he felt it too. She held onto that small warmth longer than she probably needed to.
Barkla, for his part, seemed to feel none of it at all. He moved ahead of them with the easy, unhurried confidence of a creature entirely at home in the earth’s embrace, occasionally grunting some observation about the quality of the stonework — “shoddy,” “rushed,” once, with something like real contempt, “whoever cut this level should have been drowned at birth” — as though the crushing dark around them were nothing more than an unremarkable Tuesday spent underground.
“You carved all of this,” Emcorae said at last, his voice tight with the effort of keeping his own breathing even, “with your bare hands. In two months.”
“Wasn’t hard,” Barkla said. “The stone here is soft, and lazy men built it lazily. Give a Drokka decent granite and two months, and I’d have carved you a cathedral instead of a rat’s crawl like this one.”
Nathily, despite everything, found herself almost smiling in the dark at that. Almost.
It helped nothing that they’d never thought to shed their gear before committing to the hole. Emcorae’s pack caught against every outcropping the tunnel offered, forcing him twice to stop and wrench it free while the rope at his waist went taut and impatient; Nathily’s own bow, still slung across her back, scraped and clattered against low stone until she finally worked it loose and carried it awkwardly bundled against her chest, one hand fumbling blind along the rope all the while. Their weapons, so essential a few hours before, had become nothing but dead weight and noise in a passage that punished both — and more than once Nathily found herself silently cursing whatever instinct had kept her from simply abandoning the lot of it back in Barkla’s cell.
The Long Dark
What followed defied any honest accounting of time. An hour passed, perhaps more — Emcorae would later swear to something close to that, though he could not have said with any confidence how he’d have known, blind and stooped and aching in a passage that offered no horizon, no light, nothing at all to measure a minute’s passing against. His knees found the jagged walls more times than he could count, his shoulder scraped raw against outcroppings he never saw coming, and each fresh collision cost him a little more of the composure he was trying, with visibly failing effort, to maintain.
Nathily fared little better. Her lungs, for all that she wasn’t truly winded, seemed to refuse the air offered them, dragging in shallow and coming out ragged, and the longer the dark pressed against her, formless and absolute, the more her mind began conjuring its own quiet horrors — that the tunnel had no end at all, that Barkla had led them not to freedom but simply deeper into the earth’s cold indifference, that they would wander this black vein of stone until their strength gave out and the rock simply closed over them for good.
I have watched a great many mortals unravel in the dark over the ages, and I will grant you this much honesty: there is something almost admirable in how thoroughly the human mind — and the elven, for that matter — can convince itself of its own doom, given nothing more than silence and the absence of light to work with. I’ve employed the trick myself, on occasion, though I confess I’ve never needed a tunnel to manage it.
Still they pressed on, rope taut between them, Barkla’s steady, unbothered pace the only thread of certainty in a world gone entirely to touch and dread. Emcorae lost, somewhere in that stretch, any sense of which direction was up. He could not have said whether they climbed or descended, only that his body ached in ways that suggested both, and that some small, treacherous part of him had begun to wonder whether Barkla himself had any better idea of their position than they did.
The False End
Then, without warning, Barkla stopped.
He said nothing. And in the absence of his voice, in the sudden, suffocating stillness of the tunnel around them, both Azoras arrived at the same terrible conclusion in the same instant.
“Oh, gods,” Nathily breathed, reaching past the dwarf’s stocky shoulders to feel, with her own trembling hands, the unyielding wall of stone that had risen up to block their path entirely. “That’s it. That’s it, we’re going to die down here—”
“Don’t you dare tell me this is a dead end.” Emcorae’s voice cracked from the rope’s far end, raw with a fear he’d been holding at bay for the better part of an hour and could no longer entirely contain. “I can’t go back. I won’t. I’d rather stand and fight the whole of Fubar’s army again than crawl back through this hole a second time.”
Barkla did not answer them. He seemed, in fact, not to hear either of them at all — some part of him gone entirely still and focused, his blunt fingers spread wide against the rock, tracing seams and textures too fine for either Azora to have detected even with a torch in hand. He pushed his fingers through packed dirt and crumbling mortar, feeling his way along some pattern only a Drokka’s instinct could have read in absolute blackness, and then, all at once, he reared back.
“Move,” he grunted, and shoved his companions bodily behind him with one broad arm.
Then he drove himself forward with the full weight of his stocky frame, shoulder first, into a single specific point along the wall — and the stone gave way before him in a shattering crash of crumbling rock and displaced earth, the tunnel’s false ending tearing open all at once into something Nathily had genuinely begun to fear she would never see again.
Light. Real light — grey, overcast, ordinary morning light, spilling through the breach Barkla had just torn open with his own body, and beyond it, impossibly, the green-shadowed slope of the hills outside Fubar’s walls, cool air rushing in to replace the tunnel’s close, dead breath.
The three of them stumbled out into it together, blinking, gasping, filthy and bleeding, and for a long moment none of them said a single word — only stood in the pale morning light, drinking in air that tasted, after everything they’d just crawled through, sweeter than anything Nathily could remember breathing in her entire life.
Then, all at once, something in her simply broke loose. She laughed — a startled, disbelieving sound with tears mixed somewhere in it — and threw her arms around Emcorae before either of them had decided the gesture was wise. “We’re out,” she said, half a sob, half a laugh. “Em, we’re actually out — we did it—”
“We did.” He caught her, laughing himself, some of the iron holding his face together for the last two months finally, briefly, loosening. “I honestly wasn’t certain we would.”
“Small mercies,” Barkla grunted, already turning to survey the slope around them with a far more sober eye than either Azora had thought to spare it. “Save your celebrating a while longer. We are not free. We are simply outside rather than below.”
Nathily’s laughter died in her throat. “What do you mean? We’re clear of the palace—”
“We are clear of the palace’s stones,” Barkla said. “We are not clear of Fubar. Look about you — those walls are still in sight, and somewhere behind them a general lies dead by my hand and an army of frightened, furious men are searching every corridor they haven’t yet thought to search. You think they will simply forget three prisoners vanished from beneath their own dungeon? They will scour every hill within a league of that wall before the sun climbs much higher.” He hefted nothing — no weapon, no armor, only his own bare, scarred hands — and scanned the tree line below them with a hunter’s wary patience. “We have won ourselves a morning. Perhaps. I would not wager more than that on it.”
Emcorae’s brief lightness sobered fast, his hand finding his katana’s hilt out of old habit even here, in the open air, with no enemy yet in sight. “Then we don’t stand here congratulating ourselves. Which way, Barkla? You clearly gave this more thought than either of us managed.”
The dwarf allowed himself one last, grim flicker of satisfaction before turning toward the tree line below. “I know a place. Follow me, quickly, and quietly — precisely as we did everything else tonight. Come. Freedom is not the same thing as safety, little ones, and I would hate for either of you to die of that particular confusion after surviving everything else Fubar tried to bury you under.”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 