Though the journey was less than a day away, the bile in my mouth caused me to turn away from Oretta.
Even hours later, my heart panged louder than their pickaxes against the stone. My face blossomed hotter than the stone sloughing into pools below my feet. My mind felt sick and my gut felt frustrated.
Turning my back on those people. Understanding that helping them would only hurt them. That was more painful than anything I've had yet to endure.
My response was to do as Amun would and carve a network for anyone I wound up saving. Like an anthill of massive proportions, the chambers and rooms and pits and traps would keep anyone I saved comfortable and safe for years to come.
"And forever shrouded by the sun's light." I openly lamented.
As always, Jone was there to give her unwarranted opinion. "You know the solution." Came the frustrating answer. Frustrating only because I knew it to be true.
The solution, the answer, was to keep digging. Keep carving and distancing ourselves until it became unfeasible to give chase. So I carved, melted, and froze mazes and labyrinths that tunneled hundreds of meters into the bedrock to converge in a central hub. An annex that soon became my new abode.
The space became a ghost town made of stone that'd been shaped like metal or clay within a month. A pit stop was what it was intended to be, and so it contained nothing more than large barracks and inns surrounding the central platform housing rails that stretched to the far side of the mountain.
It was an endeavor that required more than just mining. The effort required an abundance of iron. More than I had in my storage, which necessitated weeks of mining, scrapping, smelting, and casting.
An easy task with my thermal magic, I felt before I started. But even then, it wasn't until four months had passed that I returned to the light of the surface with my work done.
The maze led me to the outskirts of Oretta, my initial destination before my months of construction began. The city was comparatively larger than Colis, though I'm sure that too had grown considerably since my last visit.
Oretta stood some thirty kilometers to the northwest of Crag Lake as a rugged mining town with high walls of piled stone and many short, grisled-looking guards, but nothing that resembled the presence of nobility like I saw in Colis. And thankfully, no slaves.
Still, I was reluctant to just waltz up to the gate at sundown. So I kept to the brush and skirted around the perimeter, withdrawing small puffs of sound magic to mimic the calls of the many creatures of the night as I went.
It was a gamble, I knew, but I had a gut feeling that these people weren't as sensitive to mana as the woman on Crag Island. Though she was still an enigma to me, I knew she was protecting someone or something. And with her ability to sense my presence from hundreds of meters away, I had little doubt she needed any assistance in accomplishing it.
Thankfully, my gamble paid off. From what I heard and saw, none of them sensed me. The people of Oretta were simple folk who talked of exporting ores and importing or hunting for more food. There was little talk of injuries or healing, only complaints about a drought or the heat and a few ill words towards the crown, but I knew a mining town like this would have more than a few accidents on a regular basis.
With the sun deep on the horizon, I felt it safe to distance myself from the city and pull my paraglider out of storage. That and my glasses, which enabled me to peer through the impregnable darkness and witness the landscape in a million shades of gray.
As I saw on my way in, some six months ago, the landscape was but an endless forest of rolling hills and stone outcroppings mingled with the occasional lake or rift or sinkhole. Given the choices, it was the sinkhole that wound up my destination. It was but a kilometer east of the city, near the main road that led out to the heartland.
Two hundred meters was its width and it was but forty meters deep, just voluminous enough for me to fill with ice and turn into my witch hut. Better yet, there were no grumbling sounds of a slumbering beast looming from the pit, so I felt at ease as I slipped from my chair and fell.
Down and down into the pit, I fell and eventually slowed under silent torches below my feet. When rock touched my soles I canceled all my spells and couched into the darkness to listen. For one minute unto five, and then ten, I waited. Listened in on the chorus of bugs and rodents above and the soft drips and trickles from below.
There was water below this sinkhole. A considerable volume, trapped in a chasm that rhythmically grew and fell in temperature, but only to such a point that the scalding water reached into the cracks spreading adjacent to the pool. It needed more heat energy if it wanted to breach the hole as it was so desperately trying to. And heat was something I had in excess.
Heat, and water.
Uncaring of the steam rising around me, I swam through the earth until I breached the water-filled cavern and pulled the viscous magma shut behind me. Then, with ice flowing from my body, I fell into the waters, quickly sank to the depths, and let the wave of crawling ice spreading in my wake encompass me and spread into every nook and cranny to exist in this hole.
And then came the heat.