"What are you doing, little dwarf?" Rhesis asked. The siren was still perched on a shelf of rock above the pool, gaze fixed on the forsaken's fitfully sleeping form. Her eyes were hooded, almost as if barely awake herself, but that was apparently deceptive.

Tali ran her fingers over the marks she'd made in the earth, then measured her cut bars of mushroom stalk. She'd found a builder of the right size and cut just enough to construct her current project. She was careful not to take too much, as such resources were precious. "I'm building a pack for Eiv," she said. "That way we can carry more food and water."

Rhesis stretched lazily. "That was not what I meant."

Tali focused hard on folding and tying the canvas that would form most of the pack. Despite Rhesis's good behavior, her purring tones made Tali want to freeze like an oami confronted by a hunting norvar. "What did you mean?" she asked, punctuating her sentence with a few clicks. Lekt still seemed to be asleep, which made her less worried.

"The abomination," the siren said, voice smooth and soft as tefia silk. "You would be better served killing him. It is what he will attempt on you when given the opportunity."

Tali started knotting the cord she had, tying the canvas to the newly constructed frame. It went some way towards hiding the trembling in her hands. "I'm a gemcutter, not a warrior."

"If you wish, I can end him," Rhesis said thoughtfully.

The young dwarf turned her face towards the sleeping creature. "He's too hurt to harm anything."

"The best time to strike."

Tali shook her head. "I don't want to hurt anything. That's not why I'm here."

Rhesis smiled. "You may find that you are not given such a choice. The Deep is not kind to those who lack the mettle to strike before they are struck."

There was a certain cold reality to the siren's words and Tali understood at least at a surface level that it was a mindset of necessity, what the warriors who guarded Dhuldarim alongside the golems believed. They made an incredible sacrifice to guard the Artifice, most of all in the way they offered up their hearts to harden. Someone had to be strong enough to confront the Forsaken or the lands of Tek would be overrun and utterly destroyed.

"I'm a gemcutter."

Rhesis laughed. "And what does that mean, little dwarf? You say it as if some magic charm."

Tali sighed, trying not to be irritated even though that anger pushed back against her fear. "You wouldn't understand," she said quietly. "You're not a dwarf."

"Oh?"

The dwarf knew she was being needled. She turned to face the siren. "It means that I was chosen and taught to add beauty to the world, no matter how ugly it seems. Gemcutting was gifted to dwarves to remind skyborn and stoneborn alike that Tek's love for them is eternal even without the song of his voice."

The answer, given forcefully, seemed to take Rhesis aback. "Here I had thought he was as cold as his metal."

"A fire burns at the heart of Tek as surely as it burns at the heart of the world," Tali said, as steeped in her people's traditions as any dwarf. The Heartforges taught that remembering such myths and stories was an integral part of holding their world together without Tek. If dwarves ever forgot their place in the cosmos, it would surely bring their destruction.

She turned at a noise to see Lekt both awake and far closer than she was anticipating. Tali flinched, almost leaping up. She stammered in her clicking for a moment before she settled her racing heart somewhat.

There was a strange look on the twisted creature's face. "What is gem?" the forsaken croaked.

It was not a question Tali had been expecting. She blinked. "They are the kinds of stone that show colors when they are cut and polished, precious and rare. Skyborn like to wear them. Have you never seen one?" She fished around in her pockets. Somewhere she kept a piece of diamond, usually to check the hardness of other stones, but it was beautiful enough polished as it was that she thought of it rather fondly.

Lekt recoiled, reaching for where his iron knife had been with a hiss. His eyes widened slightly when he felt its absence.

"Careful, monster," Rhesis said, twirling his knife in one hand. "Your poor manners can be quite lethal for you."

Lekt snarled, but his anger was diverted when Tali produced the stone. It was the size of the pad of her thumb, cut with spiral facets coming to a point on either end. It was a recent project, delicate and complicated enough to demonstrate how close she was to the end of her apprenticeship.

She held it up to catch the glow of the crystals above. The diamond glittered as she turned it, capturing and refracting the light. "This would be light blue if seen beneath the sun. It's a very rare variety because there are so few impurities. I'm surprised Geim let me even touch it. It's called vaarda."

Lekt watched her almost agape, able to track the changes in light with the same sensitivity that Tali could. He leaned in towards the stone.

"Vaarda?" Rhesis asked.

"River-song-stone," Tali explained, far more comfortable on the subject of stones. "Clear but touched by blue, like water." She hesitated a moment, watching Lekt. He didn't look angry, still watching the glitter as if hypnotized. It almost looked like he was trying not to smile. She hoped this wouldn't get her killed over the stone. In hindsight, not her wisest moment.

Of course, there was a way to ensure that didn't happen. She would craft another someday, so surely it wouldn't kill her to part with it. Besides, he had never seen a gemstone, cut off from Tek's purest symbol of love. Tali wanted him to have something, as much of a peace offering as she could make.

"Lekt," Tali said, capturing his attention.

He growled, but it seemed less warning and more acknowledging.

She held the stone out to him. "Why don't you take this?" she said. "When you go home, you can show it to anyone else who's never seen a gem. It won't do me any good down here."

The forsaken furrowed his brow, but reached out hesitantly towards the stone. After a split second, he jerked his clawed hand away as if it was painful to do so. "Why?" he growled. As he tensed, she could feel the shift in him like the tip of a stone about to crush her.

Tali shrank back. "Because I thought it might make you happy," she said with a voice that quivered. "I know that it makes me happy."

Lekt cocked his head to the side, angled ear clearly taking stock of her as he clicked. He seemed...taken aback. Gradually, he reached out a clawed hand turned palm up. Scars criss-crossed his rough skin, not so different from the hands of miners she had seen, though his were more damaged than any she had seen. Tali was by no means an expert, but none of the old wounds seemed as if they had been tended to.

Tali knew it was incredibly dangerous to get so close to him, but she moved closer by a few millimeters and placed the stone in the valley of his palm, resting along a deep, wide scar that stretched diagonally from his thumb to his smallest finger. Mercifully, his fascination with the stone seemed to quell whatever thoughts of mayhem he might have been entertaining. She watched as he placed his face almost against his palm before rolling the cut gem around so light flashed through the facets. The play of the mineral glow through the vaarda brought hints of a smile to the forsaken's face and his whole body seemed to relax.

Lekt looked up from his study of it for a moment, lowering his hand. Then he glanced back at the stone. "This is for me?"

"If you want it," Tali said hesitantly. "I know you call me a kinslayer, but I'm not going to hurt you, Lekt. If you want, you can stay here and we'll go. There's plenty of food and water here and—"

Lekt closed his clawed hand around the stone. "No," he said. Mercifully, it didn't sound hostile, though she still flinched. "You are...not." He looked confused.

"Not what?" Tali asked.

"I don't think he was expecting your bumbling naïveté," Rhesis said with amusement. "I know dwarves call themselves stoneborn, but perhaps stone-headed is more fitting for you."

Tali huffed.

A grinding sound told Tali that Eiv had shifted its attention back to them. The golem had been beside her the entire time, but on a rise enough to survey as much of the cavern as possible with the fungal growths obscuring the edges while still listening carefully to the back-and-forth. "Master, there is something moving near the edge of the cavern."

"More alashai?" Tali asked nervously.

"No," Eiv reported. "Fire-swimmers."

"Fire-swimmers?" Rhesis said, head turning to look in that direction. "I see nothing through the growth. Certainly no flame."

"Neither does Eiv. They can't be seen when they're submerged in earth, but they can be felt," Tali said brightly, levering herself up. "They're called fire-swimmers because they can swim through even deepfire without being destroyed. I think skyborn call them earth elementals. Come on."

Rhesis raised an eyebrow. "You want to get closer to them?"

The young dwarf was already moving enthusiastically. "They're good luck!"

Lekt made a harsh sound in his throat. When Tali turned to measure his expression more clearly, she realized that it had been something close to a chuckle.

"You truly are a mad little creature," the siren said with a despairing sigh, abandoning her nearby perch to follow reluctantly.

Tali sprinted into the mushroom forest, picking up the vibrations of the fire-swimmers moving through the solid stone. They hummed as they moved, boring and then filling tunnels as they passed with a rough sort of soil, full of the nutrients needed by forests like this one. If they were lucky—

The stone ahead parted like water as one of the fire-swimmers surfaced, answering Tali's hopeful prayer. A glossy crystalline eye emerged, surrounded by flint scales that covered the hardened amalgamation of fire-scarred stone that made up its serpentine body. It flexed, raising a viper-like head that would twist as it made its way through the rock. She had no idea how they worked, but they were Tek's second creation after Thuumdolahr, made before the dwarves, and still hummed with the energy of their creation more than a thousand years before. They were omens of good luck, bringers of life in the depths, and she'd never gotten to see one surface this way.

"It's beautiful," Tali breathed as Lekt and Rhesis fell in beside her. The neck and head raised were almost twenty feet long and probably four feet in diameter.

The creature turned its stone head towards her, tilting so that the largest of its seven eyes could study her. The slits running down its neck flared open, opening resonant chambers to capture and identify the noises they were making, which would let it decide how to react to them.

"I hope it's not hungry," Rhesis said warily.

Tali shook her head. "They don't eat people," she said. "Tek built them to consume ambient flows of power and disperse the remnants in the tilled earth. It balances the world beneath."

"It eats magic?" The siren sounded both fascinated and repulsed. "Quite the earthworm."

The young dwarf didn't know what an earthworm was. "Fire-swimmers don't eat what you call magic. They..." she paused, hunting for the right term, "...recycle it."

Lekt shrank down, watching it warily. "Gems," he muttered as he studied the fire-swimmer's seven eyes, though he sounded awed rather than terrified or hostile.

Tali didn't so much as flinch when the head neared them. She knew that they weren't creatures to bring harm. Rhesis moved back, but Lekt stayed beside the young dwarf and so did Eiv. "They say that the crystal that forms every Heartforge comes from the droplets of fire-swimmer tears."

The fire-swimmer studied them with its gleaming prisms, each large eye actually a composite of seventy smaller ones. Every movement brought a cascade of vibrations from the creature, dominating the worlds of the smaller flesh-and-blood observers. After a moment of scrutiny, the giant stone serpent descended again into the stone. It left in its wake churned earth and a single scale.

Tali approached it even as the ground beneath her rumbled and quaked, moving with not the worst balance given the humming that shook Rhesis nearly off her feet. She reached down, lifting the scale reverently. It was irregular, but roughly the size of a dinner plate and faintly warm. Her fingers tingled slightly where she touched it. "I've never got to actually hold one," she said as she turned to the others, beaming.

"Does it have a function, or is it merely a curiosity?" Rhesis said with a raised eyebrow.

"Everything touched by Tek has a use," Tali said brightly. "Like I said, fire-swimmers can pass through deep-fire without being consumed. An echo of that protection can be conferred on any who carry a fragment of their scale...though even with all the powers of artifice, it's more fire-resistance than fire-proofing. Vadr showed me once by pulling a hot iron out of the fire with his bare hand. Geim had an amulet made with fire-swimmer scale."

Rhesis studied the dull scale with a new appreciation visible on her face. "Can you make it so?"

"It'll take time and tools, probably better tools than I have, but I might be able to," Tali said. "I've never actually worked it myself. It's rare to even find it above, let alone get this close to one. I wonder if they're more common in the Deep." She turned to face Lekt. "Have you seen one before?"

A look of pain crossed Lekt's face. "Yes," he hissed almost sullenly, slinking back towards their camp.

"Perhaps one bit him?" Rhesis said.

Tali hesitated, watching the forsaken limp back to camp. "I didn't think he would come running. It can't be good for that bone."

"I think you will find him far more durable than you are, little dwarf," Rhesis said thoughtfully.

Eiv turned with a grinding of stone, focusing on the siren. "You told my master that you were unfamiliar with the creatures," the golem said in grating tones.

Rhesis clearly understood that the golem was still as dangerous as ever. "I know little. That is not the same as nothing." She looked at Tali. "You place yourself in excessive danger. It is becoming a theme. You trust too much."

"Probably," Tali admitted, feeling both foolish and exceptionally wary. "What else do you know about Lekt?"

"That the further down we go, the less you should trust the abomination," the siren said, surprisingly somber for a person more inclined to capricious laughter. "Darkness calls to darkness. There is something still in him, something I thought destroyed."

"What?" Tali asked.

Rhesis shook her head, looking unsettled. "That, little dwarf, is something I cannot even explain to myself, let alone you. Perhaps it is a question you should ask him...before you part his head from his shoulders."

"I don't want to kill him, Rhesis," Tali said.

"You may have to, little dwarf. What will you do if he tries to kill you when Eiv and I are not present?"

Tali hesitated a long moment, clicking until she caught echo of Lekt's retreating form. "I...I don't know."

Rhesis looked up at Eiv. "Then I would suggest you be a cruel chaperone, cinderblock. That abomination is dangerous and probably rabid."

A thought occurred to Tali. "Why do you call him an abomination?"

The siren curled her lip. "He is a thing that should not be, that should not be allowed. Whatever wicked hand wrought that one, it was unholy beyond measure. Evil though your sentinel finds me, I am nothing beside that one."

Even though she hadn't traveled with Rhesis long, she knew something wasn't being said. "Rhesis, I released you," Tali said quietly. "The least you can do is explain."

Rhesis sighed. "I know little," she repeated. "Give me some time to reflect. I can say this, though. I believe the creature to be demonic in origin. I have heard of some that care to twist and sculpt flesh."

Tali felt faint for a moment, gripping the scale so tightly that it hurt her fingers. Rhesis and her imprisonment was one thing, but she had not even heard of a dwarf who'd seen a demon in the last three lifetimes, not in Dhuldarim. They were creatures that could destroy golems, something she almost didn't believe possible. "Do you think one still owns him?" she murmured.

"Of that, little dwarf, I am most certain." Without saying more, Rhesis led the way back to their campsite as if nothing had been said.

Tali looked up at Eiv. "What should I do?"

"Golems do not command, Master. They only follow."

The young dwarf reached up, putting her hand on the golem's arm. "I'm glad I have you, Eiv," she said softly. "I don't know what to do with either of them. I think...I think the Heartforge chose the wrong dwarf."