In the heart of the weather-bitten mountains, a spine of stone twisted under the Earth, lay the forgotten mines of Eldridge’s Hollow. These mines, they say, were swallowed by silence centuries ago, abandoned after a catastrophe that only the whistling winds dared speak of. Yet, it was in these skeletal remains of tunnels, where the tin roofs creaked under the burden of age and the earth-held secrets dark and deep, that Marlowe and her band of misfits found themselves.
Harris was the first to hear it—the hush-hush in the hollows—like the mine whispered its misery and memory to any who dared tread its forsaken paths. It was an intoxicating lure for Marlowe, a young historian wielding her curiosity like a blade. Kip, with his eyes like smoldering coal, silent but sharp, harboured a heart that hungered for forgotten gold, and Mags, an old soul in a young body, heard the call of ancient stories carried in the skeletal branches of dead pine trees.
“There’s something down here,” Harris murmured as they rappelled into the gaping mouth of an abandoned shaft, their lanterns casting shaky shadows on walls that wept stones.
“It’s just the old tales twisting your thoughts,” scoffed Kip, his gaze a flickering match in the cavernous dark. But Marlowe felt it too—a murmur in the marrow of the mountain.
They descended into the gloom, each footstep a punctuation in the long, unspoken sentence of the mines. It was Mags who first saw him—the specter, at a fork in the tunnel where the air grew inexplicably colder. A miner, his apparition smeared with the soot of his undone toil, eyes deeply pocketed, yet alight with a glimmer of unrest.
“Ye seek the curse of Eldridge, ye do,” the ghost groaned, his voice the ache of unoiled gears. “Follow not the folly of greed.”
But Marlowe, with her scholar’s pride, asked, “What curse? Why is this place forsaken?”
The phantom’s laugh scratched the air. “Ye’ll see. The earth hides what it cherished most.”
So they followed, deeper into the earth’s belly. Whispered histories fluttered like moth wings against their ears—the tale of miners who once unearthed a vein of diamonds so bright, they seemed to hold the very stars captive within their icy embrace. But these were not jewels to be admired. Each stone was cursed, cradling a greed that twisted hearts, turning brother against brother, friend into foe.
Driven by an insatious longing that had led to bloodshed and sorrow, the mine had been sealed, its riches buried like a heartbroken secret beneath layers of remorse and rubble.
“You seek what should not be found,” warned the specter, his figure dissolving into a cloud of dust and regret.
Yet, it was too late. The sparkle of cursed diamonds caught Kip’s eye, their call as clear and perilous as ice on glass. “Just one,” he murmured, hypnotized by the lethal beauty of the stones that promised everything and nothing all at once.
As his hand closed around a gem, the mine shuddered—a growl from within the earth. Walls groaned, timbers snapped, and darkness threatened to consume them. Panic clawed at their throats as they fled, the ghost’s last whispers haunting their frantic escape.
Emerging under the starlit sky, breaths ragged and bodies nearly broken from the onslaught of their greed and the mine’s refusal to be plundered, they looked to Kip. His hand was empty, yet his eyes were not his own—a deeper darkness had claimed them.
Marlowe, with heart pounding, knew then that some treasures were meant to remain lost, buried under the weight of their own dreadful histories. They returned home, carrying with them not diamonds, but a newfound respect for the whispering ghosts and the old miner’s warning.
And as for Kbody, the mountains reclaimed him one mist-soaked evening, swallowed by the shadows of pines whispering secrets only the wind dared remember. Harris, Mags, and Marlowe never spoke of cursed diamonds again, but sometimes, when the night was thick and the air turned cold, they could hear it—the soft, sorrowful sigh of Eldridge’s Hollow.