From Entry 1 Thirty of us escaped from that wretched place, and earth has closed behind us. We escaped like none ever had, but left behind treasure, a treasure too heavy to carry. Here we shall build our town.
*From Entry 24 The brightest gems are found the deepest. This we know. This we have known, and have seen with our own eyes. And we shall take them. *
From Entry 39 Silver from the mine, connect to the silver in us. The pure belongs to us.
From Entry 47 The tunnels collapsed overnight with my hope. They seal us off.
The Last Entry We have failed. Soon age will take me. Alas, I am reclaimed.
And as the years passed, I drove my team deeper into the mine. I had dreams that filled my mind at night. Dreams of silver below, stretching farther than I could ever reach, to the core of the earth that burned hotter that I could even stand.
I had explored all of the deepest regions of the mine but could find no new silver. All the regions but one.
“Today we investigate the softer tunnels,” I said, staring out at my team. The majority of the members had families stretching back as long as mine, though there was a click of outsiders who had only been on the team for a generation or two. At my statement, one of them spoke up, his voice crumbling like fresh dirt.
“The soft tunnels? The one’s prone to collapsing, without enough stone to hold them steady?”
“Those are the ones. The last time they were touched was a hundred years ago, at the opening of the mine. Technology has advanced since then, and we can reach what our fathers could not.”
“It’s too dangerous, even now.” He said, and the other outsiders murmured around him in agreement.
“We press on, whether you come or not.”
Five of the outsiders left our team that day, and our numbers dropped to thirty five. We began carving into the soft tunnels.
Progress was fast as the rock here was already broken apart from tunnels that had fallen in years before. And as we dug deeper, we found bones in the rock, bones that looked far too much like my own and were accompanied by mining helmets and tools. On the hard walls I could see where pick axes had once bored into the stone, until even those fell away and the hard rock returned. But then, five weeks into digging, we broke into soft rock again.
On these walls I could see the marks of digging utensils unlike I had ever seen. They looked like five prongs rakes, and it took me a day to realize they matched the contours of my own fingernails, and appeared as if they dug up, not down.
Then we found more bones, though these were accompanied by no mining gear. Their ends were scorched, burned into ash that flaked away as we removed them.
Dissent grew among the outsiders, and two more quit.
“I don’t like it,” Said one of the remaining three, “How’d these bones get here? Ain’t nobody been this deep. Maybe fell through in an earthquake?”
“I dunno,” Said the other, his headlamp flickering, “Maybe they ain’t human. Maybe something else lives down here. Some other creature.”
The the third whispered, in a voice that echoed down the cave walls and caused even my best men to stir in their boots.
“Maybe we should stop digging. Maybe we weren’t meant to dig this far.”
Then the writing on the walls began, and though I locked the gates each night, I knew one of the outsiders snuck down into the tunnels after dark to try to scare us away. The first appeared, written in charcoal at most recently unearthed portion of tunnel.
Return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. And the first of the three outsiders quit, cursing his way up the tunnels and back to daylight. We were thirty two.
Another week passed, and I found myself sweating so much from the heat that puddles formed in my boots. Then the second message appeared chiseled into the wall.
Punishment to the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.
“It’s Exodus,” breathed the second of the outsiders, before he too departed. We were thirty one.
Then the last message appeared in silver writing.
Greed brought you down here, and greed will bring you back.
The last outsider left, and we were thirty.
But even as the air grew thinner, the tunnels warmer, and the earth looser, I commanded my men to dig deeper. Today I struck iron, and we dug about it, revealing an archway embedded into the rock. There was no writing on it, and I cannot be certain it was human made, but I have never seen something so well formed in nature.
Tomorrow we mine through the archway, and we find silver. I feel it in my bones.