The lad is drawn gently into the shaft of light in the ceiling, and soon you hear the fluttering blur of adulation from his his companions. Another soul the gods put in your path for you to save, and with your heart beating in your chest for fear of what the place might have held, you did the good thing, and now he is saved.

You think of Vittorio, hiding under Gaulfredo's cart with Rocco standing vigil, while Gaulfredo stalked off into the woods to find vengeance on the goblins that stole his horse... only to return with you, instead.

Quote Originally Posted by Memory
When they arrived at that cart, Nameless oddly deferred to the mans judgement. This was, after all, his realm. If he appeared scared then she would be. But when that - dog!! - arrived and he showed nought but affection, so did Nameless. But then a boy emerged - a healthy boy! Not some wasted looking, pallid little miserable wretch, but an actual boy, with a vigilant father...this is what human children were supposed to look like.
But now you're here, and with no sign of your own tormenters, you indulge your curiousity and return to that wall and seek the truth of this place in the dark. When your fingertips touch the setting of rosy stone, all is made clear, even if for a moment.

Your nostrils fill with an scent you could barely describe - something like the ozone in the air after a lightning strike, but not so acrid and stinging. And then the chamber, the whole cavern, is bathed in warm rose-gold light emanating from the polished hub of rose quarts and many like it on the walls around you. Not rough stone walls, nor crudely scupted by the hands of slaves, but lovingly cut and smoothed by tool and skill of artisans long gone.

You are standing in a tremendous tunnel the act of whose manufacture beggars belief. From the tightly interlocked pavers on the floor to the smoothed stone ceiling above there is fifty feet of clear air. Above that, you know there is another thirty feet or so of earth, which heaped up in a pile beneath the breach enough that the boy, in his fall, landed with relative gentleness on churned soil instead of plunging to a death on hard stone. The rose quartz hubs are some kind of lighting you are forced to imagine is magical in nature, and touching this one has activated it and those up and down huge underground road, wide enough to march an army down, for two hundred feet in each direction north and south before the light tapers into dark again. But no sooner do the lights come on but they begin to fade. You have triggered some kind of illumination system that must have been predicated on care and maintenance, and remaining idle and hidden here it has drawn on the last dregs of its power to show you, for about three or four seconds, the grandeur that existed once beneath the earth.

Only dwarves could have made this. Nogrom did not speak overly much of his people's past, but you have picked it up in pieces; like the elves upon whose ruins so many cities in Tilea and Bretonnia are built, the Dwarves once had a great empire that sprawled through the mountains throughout the whole continent. This road must have run south from here into into the Irrana mountains, and north toward the cluster of mountains your map of the Duchies calls 'Massif Orcal'. But more than that, you are standing at what seems to be some kind of intersection. Off the side of the main tunnel is a smaller one, only thirty feet high, that would have run west if it were not collapsed in on itself. Large bolstering columns of stone have been left either side of this passage, but the one on the left is cracked and tumbled; and in the light you can see the spidering crack that has lead from there all the way to the middle of the main tunnel's ceiling where the earth finally gave way. The side passage's interior is collapsed in and blocked up with debris manually, comprehensively obstructed in what seems more likely to have been a controlled demolition than a precise accident. And above that passage, engraved on the twenty feet of stone between the archway and the ceiling, is a grand stone image of two figures. One is a dwarf certainly by stature, with a great winged helm that seems imperious and regal. The other is humanoid, though the outlandish height and plume on his helm and the graven scales on his male suggest to you this is some kind of elven lord. Both elf and dwarf have weapon in hand, but the spear and axe respectively are held in the hand furthest from the meeting. The hand closest on each side is extended in what seems to be a friendly clasp, and any who might have proceeded in this tunnel in its heyday would have passed beneath this icon of camaraderie.

There are no mountains west of Carcassone. Where did this tunnel go, or even intend to go if it was never completed? Did it veer away further west? Did it terminate in some underground dwarven hold closer to the coast? Did it, as the imagery seems to suggest, dare to strike out west and west, and further west, beneath the coast and beneath the great ocean and far into the fabled homeland of the elves that is supposed to lie beyond the waves? Would it even be possible? You have known your share of tunnels, and the rats keep well clear of the coast for fear of breaching the sea. The idea of a tunnel that delves so far beneath the ground it goes under the ocean is mindbending. No one can say what lies at the bottom of the sea, let alone beneath that.

Whatever success or failure this tunnel ever had, it has been sealed, and this greater thoroughfare has been abandoned. Likely, it is sealed off far enough north and south too, for it seems to have seen no use at all for... many, many years. For a few seconds, this tunnel under the earth, the product of labor and care of those dwarven artisans and engineers long gone, is showcased in the warm light of the stones, before that remnant magic bleeds away and darkness swallows it all up again.