"I dropped the last torch four turns back. Don’t know if it’s been hours or days. The walls are breathing now, I swear it. Something’s moving just behind me, never closer, never farther. I tried to scream earlier. The cave swallowed it."
The caves of Everwealth are not mere holes in the ground. They are the old wounds of the world, ancient, jagged, pulsing with secrets too deep for daylight. To descend into them is to be swallowed by history itself: a descent into a realm where time unravels, light dies, and sound grows teeth. Beneath the land lie miles of tangled passageways, flooded hollows, and hollow-bellied chasms carved by forgotten hands or things far older. Some are natural faults, formed by quake or water. Others bear chisel marks, rune carvings, or structures twisted by warped magick, remnants of the world before The Great Schism, pieces of civilizations lost to record forever. Not all caverns are dead. Some still breathe, home to blind beasts with tongues like vines, fungi that whisper, and glowing pools that show your memories before they drown you in them. More than one army has vanished trying to chart the Hollowdeep. More than one god is rumored to sleep below the world, still dreaming, still listening. Folk whisper of the "Echoing Below", a sound that comes not from echoes but from something calling upward. The Scholar's Guildcalls such notions superstition. But the Guild has never bled in the dark, alone.