It had been about a week since Ral Dingwahl had received orders. The young sorcerer was beginning to think, in the private bits of the mind reserved for those things not yet consciously committed to but already deeply understood, that the war had ended - lost, since the alternative would have resulted in parades and definitely not the eerie absence of communication that accompanies only utter defeat and decades-old marriages. The war on the surface concluded, every elf and man who knew the name Ral Dingwahl dead or scattered and unable or more probably too busy surviving in an occupied barony to let him know about it all these miles underground. Fleetingly, Ral entertained the fantastic notion that he would have preferred to die fighting alongside his comrades than survive through a combination of fantastic secret-keeping and dirt-poor organization, in a secret outpost at the bottom of a mine shaft marked on the few maps that included it at all as 'collapsed'. This delusion of courage lasted only moments under the crushing weight of a lifetime's pattern of evidence that spoke plainly, if not to cowardice, than to a marvelous commitment to remaining alive and intact through careful avoidance of unnecessarily dangerous circumstances. On that record, Ral had been selected with near unanimity as sole guardian of The Device.
The thing was enormous. Ten meters around, at least, he guessed. Estimating his arms' length and taking paces 'round the brass and alabaster sphere, awkwardly hugging the thing was his only means of measurement, but having quickly discovered that at the base of an abandoned mineshaft there was little to do by way of entertainment, he had resorted to figuring at the dimensions of the artifact in his care at least twice to stave off the urge to simply take another nap and hope for news of the conflict on the surface upon his waking. Six days ago, that news that had been filtering to him by scrying pen had run out.
Rather than allow his mind to erode in isolation, Ral had given himself a rigorous routine to follow throughout the day, measured out in increments of six hours a'piece. Upon waking, he would spend an hour checking and rechecking his stock of staple supplies, fresh water, hard tack, dried meat, candles, ink, and paper. After recording the tally carefully, he would spend the next hour in meditation, followed by exercise, meal, and finally elemental geomancy practice in whatever discipline he found most difficult to remember that day, lest infrequently used skills go slack, before allowing himself two hours of sleep and rising to begin the cycle anew. After every four such cycles, he would mark the desk deeply once with his beltknife.
Staring at the long line of ever-less-precise gouges in the various edge surfaces of the thoroughly defeated-looking desk, Ral wandered back from his reverie and attempted to return to passing the time until... until what? He wondered. His orders had never been clear regarding the reason for sticking him down in this hole, nor the real nature of The Device he had been charged with babysitting. The last news from above had not been good; major population centers evacuated, last stands and uncountable enemy reinforcements bounding enthusiastically out from holes in thin air every day. All that he knew was that this giant ornate ball in his keeping was important, that the enemy could not under any circumstances be allowed to discover it, and that, in the event of such a discovery, Ral was to be sure by means of earthshaping, that the mine tunnels everywhere between himself and the surface would no longer admit anything larger and more substantial than wishes, or possibly a very motivated fruitfly, to traverse them.
As to his feelings on being buried alive, Ral had been clear with his superiors, and the offworlders who showed them how to construct The Device as a 'failsafe' should 'things go wrong' with the campaign on the surface. While his superiors had regarded his concerns solemnly and begun to say something typical on the subject of nobility and sacrifice, it was the expression on the face of one of the offworlders that had given him the certainty of purpose that he now felt. Something in the mix of understanding and rock-hard anger at things those eyes had witnessed had allowed Ral to be persuaded that being trapped under untold tons of rock with no real expectation of escape would still be imesurably preferable to the alternatives he would face in a scenario of capture during what the stranger would only describe as 'doubtless a very difficult summer.'
In his months of solitude as the campaign foundered and no doubt eventually failed overhead, Ral had managed with some feeling of certainty to reassure himself that even in the event of total failure - planet-wide conquest - this unremarkable little mine would be overlooked and he might live out his days quietly as a half-mad subterranean hermit, growing mushrooms and finding underground streams to subsist on. Not the way he would've planned his career when he started out on the path of elemental sorcery, to be sure, but it held a certain charm in that it placed him in a league with a number of famous wizards of old; underground sanctum, isolated eccentric practicing magic in the dark, guardian til death of a puzzling arcane treasure. One could do far worse with ones self in the magical vocations, he mused half-aloud.
He was just starting to chide himself on the habit he'd begun to develop of engaging himself in multi-sided conversation when a noise - an actual noise, not one of his own imagining - caused his slackened perceptions to snap to attention. There were echoes, boot steps, in the mineshaft. Guttural language, rendered incomprehensible by echo and foreign-ness reached his pinch-tipped ears, and he hastily extinguished the wall-torch between two of the sandbags by the door. He had never heard interlopers approaching in the mine, having been alone since his arrival, but he estimated correctly that they were still some distance off and moving cautiously. That was good. Ral needed time to spread out his influence into the earth and stone in order to do any more than cause it to shiver.
He could see them now, in his minds' eye, aided by the veins of silver lacing through the caverns. His mind flowed along them now like a current, spreading throughout the whole of the area. There were eight of them and two slaves, elves both, moving pitifully on all-fours and chained about the neck with leg-irons not of this world. Old rusted things, held confidently in great green hands by masters who had done this no doubt many times before. The chains matched the boots, steel-soled and hard, and made for the singular purpose of war and the subsequent grinding down of the surviving populace. They showed no concern for safety, moving about as one might if surveying a dilapidated property inherited from distant relatives, thoroughly safe and disdainfully eying everything only in terms of what little it might be worth in a yard sale. But orcs - that was what the offworlder with the convincing eyes had called the invaders - did not have yard sales. They had only expansion, taming the defeated, eating and religious devotion to imaginary gods devoted to similar themes. Not all orcs, he had been quick to stipulate, but these that were coming he called Beastmind. People of the scythe. He shivered, and as he shivered so too did the silver vein, causing pebbles and a few larger loose bits of ceiling to rain down on the interlopers heads.
Seeing with some satisfaction that this had caused one of them to bleed, the vein of silver and the elf-mind inhabiting it swelled with satisfaction - they are vulnerable! The satisfaction lasted only moments longer, as new shapes, previously unseen, slipped into the torchlight to avoid the falling debris. Black and sinuous things, bristling at the shoulder with abundances of the long raven-toned fur that covered their wolven bodies, the three graceful shadows of lupus-kind turned their heads in unison, sniffing toward the silver vein in the wall where Ral's mind was watching from. Magic-sensitive hounds, they had with them! They would know the way clearly now, Ral's mind worked furiously to leech out from the silver to the rock and soil embracing it. He would need to work much more quickly now without the labrynthine tunnels above to slow his hunters surefooted advance.
Ten minutes later one of them, the second-to-largest of the Beastmind Clan hunters was lifting his body by the throat, but Ral Dingwahl felt nothing. He was aware of an increase to the weight of an orc in the chamber, correspondent to his own body's mass. He felt on his skin, now the walls of the mine, echoes of the triumph-sounds made by the poor dim creature's companions at having discovered his sanctuary and its prize. He felt with satisfaction the strength of his silver limbs and bedrock flesh, and savoring for a moment the sensation of purpose and scope that he had only ever found in the workings of magic, he allowed his new body to relax. Tunnels, passages and shafts no longer tasked with the burden of integrity, simply bowed to welcome gravity, ending years of defiance that the earth might play host to air and little men. Ceilings buckled, walls became floors and then gave up even that distinctiveness so as to be indistinguishable from the fellowship of surrounding material from which they had lain from too long separated. Ral Dingwahl sighed with the relief of it all, manifested only by a singular plume of dust issued by the settling closed of the once-mine's entrance. His heart warmed then, as he felt the little green bipeds swept up and crushed in his earthen embrace, and with the warming of his heart, so too did his body warm, flow, and fuse solid as its cooling marked the satisfied passing from earthly life of the elf that had been until moments earlier a mountainside.
Deep within the bedrock, undetectable to any mortal who might walk above, mage or commoner, in a sphere of air twelve meters by twelve meters around, rested an orb of alabaster and brass containing the heart of its world's magic, kept lovingly safe by the expiring Ral as the world fused around it, a hidden poison pill meant to end a world-eater. "It is done." The angel Tal'aen remarked through the lips of the offworlder female Elania as plainly as if he were commenting on the weather. "He acted nobly." The angel Galen said just as flatly through the offworlder with the convincing eyes. "Time to call the bastards to dinner." Said the same mouth in its natural voice. It was met with grim nods from some of the survivors, now refugees on a foreign world, and twinkles of vengeance from most. Before long, Thon was sure, some of them would join the fight on other worlds.
