CHAPTER 28: Ravencair's Struggle
The Deep Holds of Ravencair – Heart of the Mountains
The air in the Ravencair holds was thick with pine smoke, damp stone, and the heavy breath of too many bodies packed into ancient tunnels. What had once been mining caverns now pulsed with a thousand small miseries—coughs that echoed like gunshots, babies wailing with thin lungs, and the low murmur of fear cloaked as prayer.
Elara, elder of Oakhaven, moved slowly along the narrow walkways, a woven satchel over one shoulder and a child's cold hand gripping the other. Her bones ached from the mountain journey, but it was her silence that made her seem older than her years.
Young Horin walked beside her, clutching a bundle of damp firewood. His cheeks were hollowing with hunger, but his eyes still held a flicker of the boy he had been.
"Think the Sovereign will send help soon, Elder?" he asked. His voice was quiet, almost afraid of its own echo.
Elara didn't answer immediately. They passed a mother wiping blood from her child's nose with the edge of her tunic, a miner sharpening a rusted blade for no good reason, and two farmers arguing over a half-rotten apple.
"The Sovereign has his own battles, child," she said finally. "We must be strong here, in the mountain's heart."
But even she could hear the doubt in her own voice.
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Food had become a memory. The stockpiles gathered from the lowland villages were dwindling too fast, and the autumn hunt had yielded little. The early snows had closed the upper passes, leaving them sealed in a stone womb with too many mouths to feed.
The Ravencair miners, rugged and taciturn, tried to keep order. They shared their salted meats and hard-won root stores, but hunger bred suspicion. That morning, a farmer from Greyleaf accused a miner of hoarding smoked hare in a hollowed shaft. By nightfall, fists flew beside the central fire pit. No one was killed—but blood was drawn, and more importantly, lines were drawn.
"We fled from blades," one woman muttered afterward. "Now we'll bleed in the dark."
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In a broader cavern lit by oil lamps and a single guttering brazier, Horin sat with a cluster of children and young teens. They whispered stories like spells: that the Empire's army was a thousand thousand strong, that the Emperor had dragons, that Duskwatch had already fallen.
Horin said nothing. He kept his arms around his little sister, Sella, who had grown feverish in the cold.
That night, while the wind howled like wolves at the high vent shafts, Elara climbed a crumbling stone stair to the upper ridge of the hold. Alone, she placed a hand against the cold granite wall—once carved by her grandfather's chisel—and whispered:
"Kael. We gave you everything. Don't let it end in silence."
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Days bled into weeks.
The mushrooms ran out first. Then the root-stew. Then came the quiet—less from sleep, more from despair.
They had escaped the fire, yes. But now they faced the mountain. And the mountain did not care for rebels, for emperors, or for Sovereigns.
In a far corner of the hold, Horin fell asleep beside his sister, dreaming of Duskwatch—not as it was, but as he imagined it: warm stone walls, blazing hearths, and Kael Ashmark standing tall, crowned in ash and armored in light.
He woke to cold rock beneath him, and a hunger in his belly that felt like a hollow sword.