“One foot in front of the other, plodding along, endlessly trudging our way through this dark, dank pit of despair and suffering. Hoping for a way out into a different kind of pit of despair and suffering, where the sun is shining, the hordes are hungry, and we can do more trudging. Oof! Hey! What was that for!” Sebastian’s grumbling was cut off by a fierce elbow from Sarah.

“As if it wasn’t miserable enough to walk for hours through this musty old hole in the ground, you seem to feel like grumbling out loud about pits of despair and hungry monsters.” Sarah growled at him irritably, “Keep your dark thoughts to yourself if you don’t mind, I’m sure the rest of us have plenty of our own to go around.”

They were all a bit grouchy after what felt like days of walking. Sebastian was actually beginning to seriously doubt that this was a mine at all. No mine he had ever heard of had such a long walk to get to a vein of ore. This felt more and more like a warren of tunnels, they had encountered several intersections, cutbacks, dead-ends and precipitous drop-offs that seemed to swallow the light and defied any efforts to determine their depth. The whole place made Sebastian’s skin crawl, and with every step he could practically feel the mountain over his head weighing down on him more and more. At this rate he was sure that he would lose his mind before they starved to death.

Eventually Kyle called a halt, and Sebastian gratefully dropped his pack and promptly sat on it. He pulled out a travel biscuit and started to nibble on it halfheartedly. I wonder if they actually went out of their way to make these things awful. I mean sure they last basically forever, but I’m sure that’s mostly because nobody wants to eat the bloody things to begin with. He made sure to keep his complaints silent though, no need to inspire more bouts of rib bruising after all.

A grunt next to him, followed by a heavy thump, heralded the arrival of one of the new banes of his existence. “Hi Greg, here to change my bandages Greg? Or are you just here to make my life more miserable Greg? Oh wait, those are the same thing. Carry on Greg, make with the poking and prodding and painfully tight bandage wrapping!” At least his ankle had stopped aching and didn’t need to be tended to. Particularly since it had swiftly become exceptionally clear that Greg didn’t approve of anything that might reduce the pain, up to and including a gentle bedside manner. The man was also a terrible source of conversation, so far most of his answers were a single syllable, and at least half of them were grunts that Sebastian only loosely counted as an attempt at communication.

He winced as Greg unceremoniously grabbed hold of Sebastian’s injured hand and started peeling the bandages away. As much as he hated Greg being there on account of it hurting to get the bandages changed out, he took a perverse kind of joy in taunting the man. It took his mind off his overly depressing surroundings, and the complete and utter lack of response from the man made getting a rise out of him an interesting challenge. A challenge that he was doomed to fail at it seemed, as yet again the man remained noticeably unruffled by Sebastian’s sarcastic tirade.

Sebastian quieted down though and turned away, not particularly wanting to watch again. He watched the first time and was horrified and disgusted by the vaguely hand shaped lump left where his nice, normal, and actually functional hand used to be. Most of the bones appeared to have been broken by the force he unleashed to launch his iron sphere the way he did, and the flesh hadn’t fared much better. Greg was the only surviving guardsman that knew anything about treating wounds beyond the absolute basics everyone learned in a frontier town like theirs had been, which is what led to Sebastian seeing him like clockwork every time they stopped to break or sleep. Sometimes he changed the bandages, others he just looked them over before grunting and stomping off to treat some of the other walking wounded.

Greg tsked a couple times, drawing Sebastian’s attention back to him. “Methinks you are gonna have to lose the hand lad. Not much I can do to save it with what we got, and the longer we wait the more the risk of it turning green on ya.” He had already started the process of rewrapping bandages around it, and Sebastian watched, somewhat nauseous at the sight, as his mangled hand disappeared from sight under tightly wrapped bandages. They were thick and stiff enough to keep him from being able to move anything, which had the much-appreciated side effect of reducing the pain to a dull throb.

Sebastian was silent for a moment, “Why am I not surprised that the most words I’ve ever heard you string together at any one time are you telling me you want to cut my hand off? No thanks, I think I’ll pass.”

Greg grunted, “Your choice lad, keep in mind that you either lose the hand now, or it goes green and you lose the arm or your life later.” With that less than appealing set of options having been offered, he tromped off without another word to check on his next patient.

Sebastian sat there scowling at his bandaged hand for a while. When he did look up he saw Sarah staring at him, her expression inscrutable. He sighed and went to rub at his face, only to freeze when he felt the bandage touch his cheek. He scowled again as he lowered his hand back down to rest in his lap. Looking back at Sarah he couldn’t help but ask, “Am I allowed to do a bit of grumbling now? Am I not miserable enough for your miserable club?”

His bit of snark was rewarded with a giggle that lightened his mood considerably, and she shifted closer to lean against his side, “It will be alright, even if you do end up losing your hand. Just promise you won’t leave it for too long and die on me. I mean, you had to almost die how many times before you kissed me? I dread having to put that kind of time and effort into some other boy because you went and got yourself killed. I’m not going to tell you to go chop off your hand or anything, if you want to wait and hope it gets better that’s fine.” She paused, “And I am in no way influenced by the fact that they would probably have me cauterize it for them. I doubt chopping bits off of my boyfriend and setting him on fire to stop the bleeding bits from bleeding anymore is the best way to keep said boyfriend.”

Her possessiveness sent a thrill down his spine, and he opened his mouth to respond to her, but managed to stop himself before he said something stupid. Really? ‘You can set me on fire any time’ is the first thing to pop into my head after she said that? Sure, she is plenty capable of setting me on fire whenever she wants, but that doesn’t mean I want to encourage that kind of behavior! Since he was drawing a blank he decided to respond by kissing her again.

All good things come to an end though, and in no time at all Kyle was calling for them to set out again. Back to the endless trudging through dark and dusty tunnels. Sebastian was hopelessly lost by this point too, which only added to his ever-growing irritation. Supposedly they were marking the tunnels as they went, and Kyle and his scouts had an idea of their general direction, working their way south and east in hopes of finding a way out of these god forsaken tunnels that led closer to civilization and preferably not into the bellies of random monsters.

Sebastian knew that none of the guards were any more pleased with their current situation than he was, and he admired their willpower and fortitude as they plodded along. He even tried to strike up a conversation with a few of the nearer ones, but gave up after a while. Sound carried strangely in these tunnels and voices could distort and echo back in ways that made everyone’s hair stand on end and ran icy fingers down their backs. It had a way of discouraging them from talking while they were on the move. It also had a way of encouraging them to camp in the areas they crossed that the effect wasn’t as strong in, so they could at least converse softly as they got ready to sleep.

They did that a few times during that interminable march through the tunnels, bedding down to catch a few hours of restless sleep, most of the camp would end up waking up for every guard shift as the echoed footsteps of whoever was on watch had them looking for an attack from the shadows. The whole ordeal was wearing everyone down as the days dragged on, although Sebastian wasn’t certain if it had been days, weeks, or only hours. Well, he figured it was more than a couple days, but he didn’t know if they were marching for a full day, sleeping for a full night, or anything really, since without the sun he had no bloody idea what time it was.

In an effort to counter his ever-increasing boredom Sebastian started to try different things to keep his mind occupied. First he tried working on his various ideas and plans in his notebook, he couldn’t write in it with his damaged right hand, but he could still thumb through it awkwardly and make mental notes of changes and improvements he thought of. He spent most of his time in a particular section of his notebook though, and eventually Sarah’s curiosity won out and she peeked at it.

“Why do you have a drawing of a hand in your notebook?” her voice startled him, and he jumped, smashing his head against an inconveniently low hanging rock and issuing a few choice swear words. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, I was just curious. Mostly because there is a detailed drawing of a hand in your notebook that you couldn’t possibly have drawn after you blew up your hand. Which makes me wonder if you always expected to blow up your hand at some point and were working out ways to replace it? Do you have a drawing of a brain too? One that won’t blow itself up often enough to need to plan to replace blown off parts? We should probably replace that part before we replace the hand.”

“Oh, ha ha, very funny. No this was something I was working on for something else, my hand is slowly getting better. The risk of losing it got me to thinking though, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to work out how to adapt something like this,” he tapped the picture with his finger, “into something that could be grafted onto a person. It’s basically a mental exercise though, I can’t even begin to make something this complex. Given a month or two with the parts made I could probably enchant it properly and have it function, but it would take a better blacksmith than I’ve ever even heard of to begin to make something like this a reality, and it would probably take years to get perfect. I’m just trying to keep myself busy, so you can’t complain about my complaining.”

They lapsed into silence as they got to another of those stretches of tunnel that echoed things back all distorted and creepy, and Sebastian put his notebook away. He fell to counting things as a way to keep himself distracted. Twelve guards walking in a line with them, seventeen rocks hanging lower than the rest of the ceiling in between those two passages, five rocks sticking out of the left wall between these two passages, four right forks before we take a left again, eleven guards… no, wait that’s not right. He counted again and got eleven again. Did I miscount the first time? Or did someone go missing?