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Things moved in the dark below.

Nagrak heard them scratch and scatter in silence, something cautious in their rhythm, or perhaps something lurking, something that waited and watched. He could not see them, even though, by now, his eyes had adjusted to darkness. It was not full darkness. He could see for several armlengths, the faintest traces of pale glow filtered down from the opening far above — a weak, reluctant illumination that gave the ceiling in a dull, sullen hue. It was barely noticeable, yet it made all the difference in the world. A feeble light swallowed by the vastness of the void below. Below, there was nothing but blackness. Blackness and depth, and the swelling sounds of the unseen things that scuttered somewhere far beneath him in the hollow.

At first, when he had landed, when the shock still rang in his bones and the bruises had not yet hardened into full pain, there had been silence. Nagrak had not noticed it right away. Understandably, he had been quiet preoccupied with the stinging in his ribs, the raw heat in his shoulder, the struggle to breathe through clenched teeth and frigid air. But once he had stilled, once he had settled into the protruding curve of the cavern ceiling that had caught him, and his breathing slowed, he had realised: there was no sound. The moment he noticed the silence, it hit hard.

Simply put, Nagrak did not know silence. Oh, he understood quiet all right, but not raw and true silence. As an Albweiss ork, he had lived all his life amid the unending fury of mountain wind and blizzard, where the storms howled day and night. To live in the mountains was to live with a constant roar in your ears and a constant tremor in your bones, to feel the air tearing at you even when you slept. The wind was always there. Its voice filled the gaps in thought, smoothed over memory, and made the rare moments in which the storms settled just before shifting directions seem like fleeting dreams.

Now, sealed within this stone chamber, surrounded by rock and weight, all of that noise had dissipated — Oh, the wind still screamed above, and you could well hear it within the cavern, but compared to the battering that the common Haraak endured in the open, it was muffled to what might well be absolute silence to Nagrak's standards. He had yet to experience true, unbroken silence.

But the silence did not hold.

Movement began below. Soft at first. Subtle. Almost unheard — just the barest shuffle, the rush of something quick-footed yet hesitant. Nagrak strained to listen. Suddenly, a thump, light but distinct, like something striking the stone floor, far below where his feet dangled. Another followed right after, this one disturbingly heavy.

Scuttling came next, fast and unguarded, no longer suppressed. Right after — an explosion of screeches, a burst of sharp, aggressive shrieks that crashed against the walls and shook the air. They vanished as fast as they erupted, leaving behind all but echoing silence.

For a moment, this silence wrapped around Nagrak once more.

Then, the many came.

They emerged in sudden, erratic patterns, swarming with a restless urgency. Whatever they were, they had been stirred, and now they shifted and swelled and spread. They brought with them a series of warped echoes that twisted the space into something deeper and stranger than it had been a moment ago. It sounded as if the cave grew new passages – side caverns, hollow spaces, tunnels perhaps – though how far they stretched or what they contained, Nagrak could not say.

The swarm swept through the cave, flowing past and then falling still. Nagrak listened harder. Though the silence returned, it had changed — no longer simple, no longer calm. Faint sounds lingered at the edges; soft scratches, tiny impacts, the slow drip of moisture. Some of these noises ran away as if chased or caught, while others lingered and settled in one spot, thick and stubborn, claiming the space.

The screeching had ceased. Whatever had first fallen onto the cavern ground had decided to go quiet again.

Why?

Nagrak's guess was as good as anyone's —

then again, not really, since he did not actually have any guess at all.

Well, whatever they were doing was one thing.

What he would do, that was another.

Nagrak was stuck. He hung there, muscles clenched and spasming from the cold that bit deeper with every ragged breath. His body trembled, not in panic, not yet, but in that slow, creeping way that exhaustion brought on when the body began running out of heat, out of blood, out of options. His arm was entirely numb now, not just from the awkward angle or the weight pulling at it, but from the frostbite steadily creeping upward — or rather down, given his freefall position.

He needed to get free. If he was going to get out of this, it would either mean dropping into whatever waited in the dark below, or hauling himself back up and through the ceiling above. Unfortunately, both directions presented the same core issue: there was nothing. No handholds. No edges. No grip. Just cold stone above, slick with mist, and a darkness that stretched in both directions, up and down.

He had already run through every idea that might have worked if he had so much as a decent tool to his name. But his staff — gone. His belt — gone. The dagger — gone. Even the pouches stitched to his trousers had torn free during the fall, leaving him with nothing but frayed fabric and empty loops. Among the things he had lost, perhaps the worst was the frostheart — a mere pebble by some standards, but to Nagrak, it was so much more. It was the most valuable thing he had ever owned. It had been a promise. A splinter of the mountain itself, entrusted to him by the orichs, who in turn had been chosen by the Albweiss to wield its unfathomable power and will, just as he would.

Of course, Nagrak's frostheart had been nothing like the gems Bayazak or Tergak had embedded in their staffs — no, theirs glowed, pulsed, yes, beamed with magic. His had only shimmered ever so slightly, cold and quiet. An ember of power waiting to be stoked, as Bayazak had said. Just like Nagrak himself, he had said.

Well, Nagrak would very much like to feel a little warmer about now.

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Thinking about his gems and the orichs made Nagrak's thoughts loop back to the things he had gotten from the other Haraak, specifically to his last exchange with Balthagar. The Speran Ember — where had that gone? Had it dropped before he did? Had it slipped from his grip during the fall? Or had it fallen into the cave below? He did not know. And in the end, it did not matter. With no tools, no weapons, no gear at hand, the difference between having a piece of Haraak heritage or not was more philosophical than practical.

So it came down to what was left, which was nothing but the empty hand by itself. Precisely, one half-frozen hand and whatever fingernails remained unshattered.

Nagrak tried to shift, slowly at first, then with sharp jerks — anything to see if the jammed joint might pop free this time, but every attempt met the same stabbing resistance from his shoulder. He clawed at the rock for a long time. One by one, what remained of his nails cracked. Split. Peeled back. He kept going until none were left. With his fingers rendered useless, he tried pounding the rock with his fist, over and over — again, nothing happened. Not to the stone, anyway. His knuckles swelled. The frozen skin tore, until it was all but bone that struck the ice. Eventually, the pain turned to dull thudding and then to something like heat; not warmth, but that burning numbness that signalled severe, irreversible damage. Well, no shit. Nagrak did not need a warning. But the burning sensation gave him another idea.

He attempted to piss on his own arm – the trapped one, obviously – the logic being that the warmth might loosen the grip of ice or slick the stone just enough for him to slip free. It was not exactly a dignified effort. Given his position, he could not reach without making an utter mess. After several awkward contortions and attempts to flick his cock upward at just the right angle to make the stream hit, he settled for urinating into his hand, then lifting the piss and splashing it onto his trapped limb.

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It did not work.

Which, in hindsight, was not all that surprising. To be more precise, it was an utterly stupid and equally futile thing to do, given that his blood had not done the trick either, and piss was not exactly known for its magical ice-melting properties. But then again, Nagrak was not in a position to be picky about his ideas, literally. You might argue that a bad idea in a bad situation is still a bad idea, but it was not like there was anything else to do. He was, after all, just hanging around. And, well, maybe … just maybe … the next splash, that next droplet of warmth could just be the one that made all the difference.

So for a while, that was his task: collecting and applying piss in tiny offerings to the stone, all while suspended over the abyss like some stubborn icicle praying for summer. Eventually, though, even that grew too annoying, and he gave it up. Also, ran out of piss.

Nagrak was, in fairness, as much a trial-and-error kind of ork as any other — with the distinction that he oftentimes skipped the reflective part of the exercise, the bit where one recognised an error as an error, or even just understood that the trial was over, in general. The result being that, where most would pause to acknowledge defeat and rethink their approach, Nagrak simply kept trying.

And so, once again, he pulled at his arm. Twisted it. Yanked it in every direction a socket was never meant to go. And, yes – predictably, for those who made a habit of reflecting – the arm was still stuck. Very stuck.

The jagged rocks had done their work. His arm was shattered and wedged deep between a cluster of outcroppings, with the stone biting into the flesh down to the bone. It was frozen so numb he could only tell he was bleeding by the sticky heat he felt spreading across his other hand. Not that it stayed warm for long. The ice drank it up, hungrily.

There were no footholds to help him shift his weight. No nearby cave wall to brace against. Nothing to push off from, wedge into, or use for leverage. His legs dangled uselessly over the void, kicking from time to time in instinctive spasms. He could taste blood in his mouth too. Thick. Bitter. The fall had probably loosened a few teeth — at least one of his four upper canines felt disturbingly mobile, shifting with each breath, pressing against the inside of his cheek in a way that made him want to spit it out, if only he had enough spit to spare.

Still, he struggled. Not constantly, but in fits and starts. At first, it had been bursts of effort punctuated by rest. Now it was mostly rest, with occasional flickers of struggle. He felt light-headed. Well, he always was, in the mental sense, but now it was physical. Fatigue had moved in like a fog, thick, clinging, and hard to see through. Time blurred around the edges. He was not sure how long he had been hanging here. A long time, surely. Long enough for the blood to crust, the piss to freeze, and the silence below to settle back in.

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His awareness returned when he was struck by a flash of genius.

Though it was not a flash of genius per se. In fact, it was not a flash in any literal or remotely jolting sense. Not an eye-opening bolt of clarity, nor a sudden illumination slicing through mental darkness. Nothing so direct or dramatic.

No, what occurred in Nagrak's mind unfolded with geological patience — less like lightning and more like a reluctant glob of mud slowly forcing its way through layers of compacted rock. The thought did not spark. It oozed.

You see, where most gathered insight by the bucket, dipping into some innate, pre-dug well of common sense, Nagrak's mind was not so well established. With a foreseeable amount of effort, the average person could draw from an average mind an average amount of such metaphorical water — sometimes a little stingy, sometimes a bit murky, but in general perfectly fine for drinking, yes, perfectly serviceable thoughts. For Nagrak, though, insight did not come in such steady streams. It did not even come as a trickle. No, his thoughts were more like droplets — small singular, and rare.

In short, he was not well-minded. His mental landscape was rock-dense all the way around, mostly filled with metaphorical mud in between, thick, slow, and prone to stagnation, wherefore no-one had bothered to build a well to begin with. Thus, he could not retrieve ideas at will.

The few notable insights he had did not start as buckets of brilliant notions ready to be hauled up whenever thirst arose. They started as thick, sediment-heavy water, trapped somewhere far below the surface. Most of these masses of mental mud never made it anywhere. Some, however, managed to ooze through the stone, dragging behind them confused associations and half-formed impressions. They wormed and filtered their way downward, pressed by time, individual experiences, or sheer coincidence.

It was not quick. It was not efficient. It could take days, months, even years. But occasionally, a thought did make it all the way through the dense layers of Nagrak's mind and into his consciousness — a vast, cavernous expanse, trapped in the centre of it all and mostly hollow, save for a few stalactites of half-formed, crystallised ideas, some memory stalagmites, and countless echoing chambers repeating the same dull refrains of stubbornness and frost. For all the overwhelming mass of rock and mud that dominated his mental terrain, this cavern offered room for thought.

And from time to time, a droplet of insight appeared. After all, all that skipped and pent-up reflection had to go somewhere.

It was the rarest of occurrences. But when such a droplet formed, it was of the purest clarity — something distilled through pressure, time, and maybe just dumb luck. And if it managed to run all the way down one of those mental stalactites without drying out or merging into the calcified crust of all the other half-formed ideas that almost made it, it would finally gather at the very tip, suspended at that impossible point where instinct and reflection just barely touched.

And eventually, it would fall.

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The droplet now said this:

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The more he resisted,

the more the mountain held on.

The more he twisted, the deeper it bit.

The sharper the stone became.

The tighter it clung.

He had fought the Albweiss

as if the mountain were the enemy.

And that — that was his mistake.

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Perhaps that was why he had lost it. The <img alt="image" height="21" src="https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WERISS-2.jpg" width="49"/> — that divine connection to the mountain.

Or rather, he had walked away from it, fallen from grace, blind in discomfort and disorientation, not recognising the cold as something sacred. Not understanding that this, too, was the will of the Albweiss.

So now, he stopped. Nagrak stopped resisting.

The mountain obviously wanted him to remain.

So he hung around and waited.

The scuttlering silence below waited with him.

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Time passed and went slack, uncoiled from any reliable rhythm. It stretched and sagged like the sinews in his injured arm. His legs dangled. His back ached. Blood dried. Frost climbed. Breath came shallow, then deep, then shallow again.

And still, he waited.

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