Shadows and bones[dungeon core]

Tarnas ip Vell was the best sapper in the Imperial Corps of Engineers. He knew exactly how much weight a timber post, a vault, or a man could bear before it failed. Then the Emperor he once served buried him alive beneath the rebel city of Oakhaven. He wakes with no body, no breath, and no light. All he has is a crystal on a black stone pedestal, a hollow hunger he cannot name, and the cooling blood of the crew who died with him. Tarnas does not know what he has become. He believes he is a ghost fused to the bedrock, and he does what he has always done with an impossible structure: he measures it. Above him, the Silent, the Emperor's tongueless guards, are sealing the shaft with clay, slag, and iron ward-stones. They have not been told what lies below. Their commander, Rust-Eye, felt the ground shift under his boots and does not believe it was settling. In a world of bronze, iron, and ruthless engineering, magic is just physics no one has measured yet. And the man at the bottom of the hole is already calculating how to get out