The town survives on the back of a horror it cannot afford to end.
A walled mining town behind sealed doors and guarded shafts. The iron is running out, but something else is growing in the deep — a crystalline ore beautiful enough to sell and terrible enough that the miners who harvest it sometimes don't come back.
Tarahn arrives disguised as a tunnel-crawler. The sealed doors, the guards who face inward, and the silence the town has built around its secret tell him everything he needs to know. Something vast and patient waits below. And this town has made its peace with the arrangement.
Something ancient coiled in the flooded dark beneath the mountain — fused with the stone itself, patient as geology, with eyes that do something far worse than kill. The miners who have seen it line the deep tunnels still. They are not dead. They are not alive. They are something in between, and they are conscious.
The mine foreman's daughter — a woman with ink-stained cartographer's hands and a mind that maps the impossible with the same precision she maps the tunnels. She does not confront Tarahn with emotion. She researches. And what she finds terrifies her in a way the beast below never could.
Killing the beast may destroy the town. Leaving it alive condemns more men to the dark. This is not a hunt with a clean answer. The town knows what lives below, and it has decided that survival is worth the price. Tarahn must decide whether they are right.
The hunts are never clean. Whatever he chooses, someone suffers. He walks away carrying the weight of a decision that had no right answer.