Someone had told Joseph once that fire needed air to breathe, just like a living thing. That explained why it felt like there was no air in the mines. The flames below had consumed it all.

'Man, someday I'll be a mine designer,' Beldin sighed, as he pushed the heavy mine cart along its steel tracks. His voice was high with nerves, and his eyes were wide in his pale sweaty face. 'They must never be sober. 'You know what this godawful boiling hot hellhole needs? A bloody river made of lava!'' He laughed, but it wasn't convincing.

Joseph rolled his eyes. Pretending to be calm might make Beldin feel better, but it was too hot for jokes.

'I don't think they get designed. I'm pretty sure they just tell us to dig randomly.' Even talking was an exertion.

The lower levels of the Nashkel mines had never been pleasant, even before the so-called crisis that made iron dissolve in their hands like stale bread. Not that he had ever been down this far before. The miners typically stayed in the upper levels of the mine. They had before the crisis had sent them searching lower, anyways.

Higher up they had needed torches; down here, the walls were lit with a seething red glow. The passage to their left ended in a cliff. Below, a stream of molten rock flowed sluggishly under a narrow stone bridge. The heat made his face feel raw, as though it had been raked with animal claws.

'Sounds like Emerson,' Beldin agreed. He rubbed his bare arms, shivering despite the scorching heat. 'Gods, I don't want to be down here. You know some of the boys think there's a dragon?' He leaned nervously towards the cliff, peering over the edge. 'Maybe that's dragon piss.'

Joseph had heard the stories too. Everyone he met seemed to have a version of what had happened to the miners who were sent below to look for uncorrupted iron and never returned. There was the one about the dragon, and another one about ghosts. Last time he had seen his wife, Doreah, she had told him a highly improbable version she'd heard at the market involving some kind of Elven burial ground.

None of them would bring back the people they'd lost, though.

'Well, the faster we fill this cart, the faster we can leave.' He spotted another discarded cart ahead on the tracks. Its operators were nowhere in sight.

Emerson's word for what they were doing was 'salvage'. The lives of the vanished miners could be spared, but the equipment was apparently too precious to leave behind.

Beldin walked over and started digging through the chunks of rock that filled the cart. 'Ugh, this is all shit too.'

He held one up to the dull light to show Joseph. It was black and greasy-looking, and left a sticky residue on his hands.

'Let's just act like we didn't notice.' Joseph started unloading the rest, sore muscles protesting against the weight. The tunnel ceilings were lower down here, and the wooden supports seemed to shift and groan under the weight they carried. Every breath he took felt stale.

Beldin hoisted a boulder, then suddenly dropped it. It hit the floor with a crack. 'Fuck!' His eyes were huge and bloodshot, widened in shock. 'Joseph!'

'What is-' With a rush of adrenaline, Joseph leapt around the cart. His eyes followed Beldin's shaking finger and his heart lurched.

'Oh, hell.' Two skeletons were lying near the wall, half-buried in the rubble. They were dressed in the same sort of rags that Joseph and Beldin wore themselves. The bones were blackened and scorched, and the hollow eye sockets were dark and mocking.

Joseph tugged Beldin's arm. 'Come on.'

'What?' The other miner looked at him, aghast. 'We're staying down here? What the hell, Joseph! They're dead!' His hoarse voice cracked.

'Those are old, Beldin,' Joseph said, willing his voice to stay even. 'Look at 'em.'

Beldin looked, and Joseph forced himself to look too. He had seen dead bodies before, he told himself. People died in the mines, in accidents or cave-ins. This was no different, and paranoia would only make them more likely to have an accident themselves.

Besides, the bodies were old. Too old to be the men who had disappeared last week. 'They're picked clean.'

'Picked clean?' Beldin yelped, turning green. 'By what?'

'Come on.' Dirt and sweat had combined between Joseph's fingers to form a sort of paste. He wiped it off on his pants, having discarded his shirt long ago. His palms were stinging oddly where he had handled the ore. 'Stay calm.'

'I can't deal with this.' Beldin closed his eyes and pressed his hands over his ears, grimacing. 'It's too hot and I can't breathe. I keep thinking about all that rock above me, you know?' He opened one bleary eye and looked at the ceiling. 'All that weight. One cave-in and we're fossils. I swear I can hear dogs barking in the walls.'

'Thanks, Beldin. You've really got this calm thing down.' The dogs were just one of the odder products of Beldin's overactive imagination, but the weight was real. The canyon yawned to their left, an open red gash in the rock. The stalagmites which lined the cave walls resembled jagged teeth. The stone was inviting them further into the tunnel, smiling with open jaws. 'Just think of something else.'

'Right. Something else.' Beldin shifted nervously from foot to foot. He ran one hand through his sweat-caked dark hair. 'So, you been to the carnival yet?'

'Yeah.' The cart was getting full. Joseph pushed against it, the metal handle biting into his calloused palms. It lurched forward with a whine. 'Went with Doreah last week.'

Everyone went to the carnival when it came. It wasn't as if anything else worth talking about ever happened in Nashkel.

Unlike most of the miners, Joseph had eschewed the gambling and drinking tents and taken his wife around the merchant stalls. They could hardly afford anything there, but she seemed to like looking.

There had been a stall filled with magic jewelry, and another lined with dusty potion bottles. Doreah had admired a scarf which the trader woman promised would pick up the highlights in her dark hair. She had looked so pleased that Joseph had offered to buy it for her, but Doreah had declined, saying it wasn't practical. It wasn't, but he would have bought it all the same.

'I was there yesterday,' Beldin said, giving the cart a half-hearted push. 'Day off, right?'

That at least explained the comment about dogs in the walls. 'I thought you smelled like lotus smoke.' The drug might be illegal in theory, but a whole corner of the carnival grounds had reeked of it. Just one more escape from real life.

Beldin grinned, the flickering light turning his narrow face into a skull. 'It was brilliant. There was this wizard, the Great Gazib, with this ogre that kept exploding into fire, right? And finally it decided it was all done with that, so it impaled its keeper-'

'Was this before or after your visit to the lotus tent?'

'No, seriously!' Beldin protested. 'There were these warrior-types there. Adventurers, right? And they fought the thing in the middle of the circus grounds!' He gestured wildly, trying to get a reaction. 'Then they brought that statue back to life- you know, the one that mad halfling was saying was some kind of warrior priestess?'

Joseph started. 'Really?' he asked, trying to sound disinterested.

He had seen the stone priestess, of course. The halfling man who claimed to own her wouldn't let anyone pass without getting a look. She had been beautiful, tall and fierce, with flowing hair rendered faithfully in stone. It was hard not to look stoic when you were a statue, but looking at her proud face you had the feeling that even alive she would look unshakeable.

Doreah had wanted to look at the woman, but Joseph hadn't. He hadn't wanted to see them next to each other, the real wife he loved and this relic out of legend. They didn't belong in the same world.

Still, she had been beautiful. He had seen that.

Beldin looked cross. 'If you don't believe me, ask your daughter,' he griped, folding his ropey arms.

'She was there?' Joseph asked, surprised. Doreah had told him that their daughter Merika would not be visiting the carnival. Probably expressly for reasons such as exploding ogres going mad and killing their keepers.

'Mooning over some bard type who got his pinky scratched in the fight,' Beldin told him, nodding. 'He was trying to come up with a rhyme for 'Oopah'.'

'Gods. Now she'll never let it go.' Joseph tried to keep his frustration masked, but his jaw was clenched. He made a note to talk to Doreah about where she was letting their eldest child spend her time. There had to be some work Merika could be doing around the house or something.

Beldin looked baffled. 'She's obsessed she's going to be a warrior,' Joseph explained. 'You know, like in one of those godawful songs. Stands around outside all day, practicing with a stick.'

He had tried to explain to her that country kids who went off to become warriors didn't turn into heroes. They ended up mercenaries if they were lucky, and bandits if they weren't. And, sooner or later, they all ended up dead. 'All those stories are rubbish, but to ask her you'd think-'

'Hm.'

'Hm what?'

'Just wondering,' Beldin answered innocently. 'Do you hate puppies and smiling children as well, or is it just heroic songs?'

'It's not the stories,' Joseph said, rolling his eyes in exasperation, 'it's the...' He frowned. 'No wait, it is the stories.' He pitched his voice high, miming panic. 'Oh no, a dragon has appeared and razed the village! Fortunately, some muscle-bound blockhead with a destiny has shown up to slay it and save the princess!'

Beldin laughed, but Joseph didn't. He could feel himself winding up into a full-scale rant, but for once he didn't care. He had never been able to relax and enjoy tales the way everyone else seemed to. Logically he understood the function of the burned village and murdered peasants. Without some danger, there would be no drama.

It was the casual way ordinary lives were tossed out in those stories, like poker chips to raise the stakes, that made his teeth hurt. All those normal people given to the fire, just so hero could be forged.

The worst was when the hero called their special destiny a curse. His daughter always found those ones particularly enchanting. He failed to see how being able to defend yourself qualified as a curse.

'No mention of what happens to the village,' he went on, ticking off point on his fingers. 'No mention of how anyone gets any food with their farms all burned up, or even what they do with the dirty great dragon corpse-'

'Well, that's obvious.' Beldin examined one of the stones in their card. It was shiny with blackish oil. 'They eat the corpse. Problem solved.' With a shrug, he threw the rock over his shoulder. It thudded against one of the wooden beams that supported the mineshaft.

'And what about that sculptor outside? The one carving faces in the rocks?'

'Prism?' Beldin grinned. 'He's great. Totally mad. Makes lunch breaks far more interesting.'

'He's not happy though, is he?' Prism was entertaining - the miners often watched him clamber up and down the cliffs when they were aboveground. He talked to himself constantly, and had once accused a pigeon of defiling the memory of his true love. It had been funny, but it had been less funny when Joseph realized the man had been crying as he said it.

'His elf girl - whoever she was - she's ruined his life. She probably doesn't even know.' His mind flashed back unbidden to the stone priestess at the circus. The halfling peddling the scroll had gone on about an untouchable warrior maiden, beautiful and powerful and cold.

Except for that to be true, there had to be someone like Prism, some poor idiot who was miles beneath her notice but pined after her all the same. Someone like him.

He twisted the greenstone ring round his finger. Doreah had given it to him, as a wedding gift. Greenstone was made in lava, wasn't it? But it cooled, and became something that was practical as well as beautiful. He wished he could explain that to his daughter.

The metal wheels of the cart screeched to a halt. He dug his heels in and pushed. It was stuck on its tracks.

'That's the way it really goes,' he told Beldin, crouching to get a better look at what was jamming the cart. 'Except no one ever mentions the collateral. All these bloody stories with their bloody heroes with flaming swords and having stars for jewelry.' He stood and gave the wheel a savage kick. It didn't budge. 'Don't mention how everyone else gets burned.'

'So...' Beldin crossed his arms and frowned. 'Your main concern is that don't want your daughter to have stars for jewelry.'

'Hell no! They're made of fire!'

Beldin clapped a hand on his sweaty shoulder. 'You sure you haven't been to the lotus tent, mate?'

Joseph sighed and wiped his forehead. His breath felt cooler than the air. 'I just don't want Merika getting it into her head, alright? She's seventeen and she thinks it's romantic. I don't want her doing anything stupid.'

'Oh, my head.' Beldin massaged his temples, eyes screwed up in hungover misery. 'I can hear the bloody dogs barking again.'

'Well, it's your own-' Joseph froze. 'Wait. I can hear them.'

'What?'

' The dogs.' His voice echoed in the narrow tunnel, but not all of the answering sound was from him.

The two men fell silent, listening. The walls seemed to thrum with their own heartbeat. Joseph was about to say he'd imagined it, when he heard it again. A low growl, followed by a high yipping bark.

The sound was coming from the tunnel where they'd found the abandoned mine cart. Joseph squinted, but the mineshaft was empty.

Except it hadn't been empty before.

'The skeletons,' Beldin whispered. 'Joseph? Where did they go?'

The rhythmic vibration was stronger now, shaking his boots. A drum. He heard another bark, followed by a scratching noise. Another bark from above him made him jump. They were inside the walls.

'Run!'

Beldin bolted, faster than Joseph would have thought possible. Joseph abandoned the cart and raced after him. His feet pounded the rough stone floor, faster than the rhythm of the drumbeats behind him.

Something cracked into his head. He stumbled forward, reeling. Spots danced across his vision. Beldin was still running, a blur at the corner of Joseph's vision, back towards the air and the surface.

Another blow slammed into his shoulder and he felt his bones shudder. His kneed buckled, and he fell.

A corpse looked down at him. Standing, on its bony feet, still held together by scraps of desiccated flesh. Its empty face grinned, and it raised its axe again.

'No.' He held up a hand to shield his face. A pathetic gesture, he realized. On his finger the greenstone ring glinted, the red light picking up flecks of silver through the stone.

A smaller creature loped up, followed by another. Monsters. It settled back on its long feet and tilted its head. Its thick tongue hung from its pointed, doglike face. It wore a quiver slung over its back, filled with arrows that smoked. Panting, it raised its short bow.

'Please. Don't.'

The last thing he was his greenstone ring, once more in flames.

Thank-you so much for reading! This was written for the 'Heat' prompt on The Attic, and in honour of the hideous heatwave that finally seems to have faded from this area. I apologize for the lack of joinable NPCs/PC in this fic... I tried to come up with something a little more game-relevant, but all that came to mind were stories with extremely minor characters like these two.

I was always upset in BG when there was a situation I couldn't fix, and I remember being oddly crushed when I investigated for Joseph's wife and found out he was already dead. What was the point of heroically accepting quests if there was no good ending? Also, why was there a river of lava? That was a bit weird.

This is my first shot at writing for a prompt, so I would very much appreciate any advice. Again, thanks for reading!