The corridor opened into something vast.
The ceiling arched high above, lost in shadow. The walls flared outward like the ribcage of a dragon, cracked open from the inside.

Every surface gleamed dark and wet—stone scaled with veins of ore, glistening like skin stretched over a sleeping god.

The floor dipped into a black, glassy basin. It caught the lamplight and warped it—like flame reflected on oil.

Massive columns rose around them like broken teeth. Ladders and scaffolds clung to them in fragments, abandoned mid-bite.

“Looks like they started digging and never stopped,” Elias whispered.
“Or stopped too late.”

Nat’s boots clicked softly on the stone. The sound didn’t echo—it was swallowed.

From somewhere above, a pale green flicker trickled down like breath.

Magda stepped forward, sweeping the chamber with her eyes.

“Who built this?”

“These braces look ancient—older than Dry Gulch. Maybe older than memory.”

That’s when they saw the ore-veins—laced through every wall, every pillar.
They pulsed.
Not with heat. Not with light.
With breath.

It wasn’t just a mine.
It was a body—something once divine, long-dead, but not empty.
The ore pulsed like nerves, still dreaming in the dark.

A god, rotting into myth.

Then, from the far side of the chamber, they saw him.

A tall, gaunt figure—arms outstretched like a priest, bathed in green light.
Still as prayer.
Serene as decay.

“Jonas,” Magda breathed.
“The Gravedigger.”

Moonlight knifed down through a fissure and lit his face—pale and lined, like bone turned to wax.
His eyes were empty blue.
His smile was soft. Too soft.

“Welcome,” he said, his voice echoing in their minds as much as the cavern.
“Y’all have come as I hoped.”

He called it the Cathedral of the Hive.
He spoke of rebirth through death, of a mine that breathes, of Magda’s father, long thought dead, who had become “the First.”
His body gone.
His soul, part of something larger.

“The ore lives,” Jonas said.
“It pulses with memory. With purpose.
You call it a mine.
I call it the womb of the world.”

Nat raised his pistol.

“We didn’t come to kneel,” he said.
“We came to end it.”

But Jonas didn’t resist.
He only smiled.
And pointed into the dark—
where the mine began to hum, and the earth itself… woke.