Expedition Codex
Compiled from surveys, guild records and the private notes of previous Awakeners. Entries are current as of the last legible report.
Entry I
It has no other name. It has never needed one.
Built around the shaft mouth, generations ago, by people who found something worth digging for and never fully said what. The village survives because someone keeps going deeper. Every trade, every roof, every winter is paid for in what the expeditions carry back up.
Ask the elders when the digging started and they will name a year. Ask them why it started and they will name a different year. Nobody names the same one twice.
Entry II
They dig. They do not explore. They are very clear about the difference.
The guild that cuts and shores the galleries, keeps the winch turning, and maintains the maps, where maps remain maintainable. Tunnelers work in silence below the third stratum. It is a rule. None of them will tell you whose.
They are paid better than anyone in the village, and they spend it like people who do not expect to need savings.
Entry III
Someone has to decide who goes down. That someone is you.
The office is old, and the duties are simple to state: keep the Crucible working, assemble the expeditions, and account for what returns. The previous Awakeners kept meticulous records. The records stop being meticulous at different depths, but they all stop.
The village treats the Awakener with the particular courtesy reserved for people who do necessary things nobody else wants to understand.
Entry IV
Nobody built it. That is the first thing to accept.
A vessel, a furnace, a memory. The accounts disagree, and the accounts were written by people standing in front of it. What is certain: the dead placed in the Crucible's keeping can be called back from it, whole, capable, and willing to descend.
The Crucible asks for nothing. Long-serving Awakeners agree this is the most unsettling thing about it.
Entry V
Heroes, to the children. Assets, to the ledgers. Ask them what they are, and they pause first.
The recalled. They remember their lives, mostly. They remember their deaths, precisely. They fight better than the living, sleep little, and stand at the shaft mouth on their nights off, looking down.
An Awakened who is no longer needed may be sacrificed and returned to the Crucible's keeping. The rite is brief. Some go gratefully. The records do not have a column for the others.
Entry VI
The surveys use the word 'caverns'. The surveyors, in private, do not.
The immense depths beneath the village: galleries, crypts, warrens, and further down, strata for which the guild vocabulary was never adequate. The air circulates without wind. The warmth increases without fire. The creatures respond to intrusion less like beasts and more like an immune response.
Every expedition brings something back. The Awakener's office exists, in part, to decide which of those things get written down.
Further entries sealed by order of the Awakener