After a long journey you reach your destination...

Your journey as a convicted criminal being escorted to his place of imprisonment takes an unexpectedly long time.

For the next month, you are **** to endure hunger, cold, and humiliation at the hands of the dwarven warriors who accompany your wagon.

The van is moving along the roads to the north. Every day the van stops a couple of times in one of the oncoming villages. These stops usually occur during the day and evening so that you can eat and drink, and so that you can shit and pee. These are the only reasons you can leave your van.

You are never left alone; dwarven warriors always accompany you to prevent the possibility of your escape. Most of the time your hands and your feet are shackled. The shackles are only removed for a couple of hours a day to restore circulation to your limbs.

Sometimes, during stops, you try to ask something from the dwarven warriors who are escorting you. However, the usual response to your requests from dwarves is to stab you in the stomach with the blunt end of a spear.

Regarding your diet, we can say that it is quite meager: you are usually fed some vegetables that have a sourish-bitter taste and fish soup.

The important thing is that the further you and the dwarven escorts move north, the colder the area becomes. As a result, for most of your journey, you looked out of the van's metal-barred window at vast expanses of forest and hills that were covered in white snow. Your body was shivering from the cold, despite the fact that one of the dwarf warriors had given you an old fur coat. You understood that the dwarf did this not because of a sudden attack of empathy towards you, but because the duty of this dwarf (as well as the duty of the other dwarf guards) is to deliver a convicted criminal to the place where he will serve his sentence. Delivery of a living convicted criminal. Not a frozen corpse.

So, your journey has continued for many days. You were exhausted and you had little idea of exactly how much time had passed. It must have been almost a month while you were on the road.

You were wrapped in an old, moth-eaten fur coat, and you were shivering because of the cold wind that came through the window of the van. You looked out the window of the van and you saw the foot of the high mountains, which was covered with forest. These mountains themselves, which were covered with snow, rose so high that you could not see their peaks even from a distance. The peaks of these mountains were hidden between bushy clouds, slowly floating across the endless expanse of the grayish northern sky.

You felt the road along which the van was traveling began to rise higher and higher. You realized that the van will now be driving through mountainous terrain.

In the evening, you saw through the window how a van arrived at some small mountain settlement, which was fenced with a wooden palisade. Among this wooden palisade, you saw a wooden gate that slowly opened, emitting a nasty creak. The van drove inside the settlement and drove up to some squat stone building.

Then, you were taken out of the van. Dwarf guards escorted you inside this building and locked you in a small solitary cell.

The good news for you is that you were given more filling food than usual. In addition to vegetables, fish soup and water, you were given some beef jerky. You ate this beef jerky with relish because it was the first piece of meat you had been allowed to eat in a very long period of time.

Since it was already late evening, after the meal you lay down on the bed (although it would be more accurate to call this thing not the word “bed”, but a combination of several fastened logs) and you fell asleep inside your new cell.

The next day you had a very early awakening. A series of blows from the blunt end of the spear to your legs and your stomach was the fact that prevented you from continuing your sleep.

The dwarven guards took you out of this cell. Then they took you outside. You saw that the central object of this settlement is the entrance to the mine, which is located among an array of stones near the mountain that is adjacent to this settlement.

The dwarven guards **** you to go to the entrance to the mine.

You went inside this mine and you walked, along with the dwarven warriors accompanying you, along long corridors that were carved into the rock.

You have approached some strange device. You've never seen anything like this before. This device looked like a metal cage connected to some kind of machinery. Standing next to the mechanisms was a dwarf who was not wearing armor.

You thought, "This dwarf is probably one of the local miners."

You, along with the dwarf guards, entered this cage. The dwarf miner began to twist the levers of this strange mechanism. The cage began to slowly descend somewhere down. You realize that you are moving down a deep vertical shaft. After twenty minutes of movement, the cage stopped at one of the underground levels of this mine. The dwarven guards removed the shackles from your hands and your feet. They took your fur coat. Then the dwarf guards left the cage, leaving you inside the cage. After that, you saw how another dwarf miner continued to turn the levers of the mechanism, which are located near the cage.

The cage continued its slow downward movement. But now you were completely alone. You had to wait about half an hour.

Finally, the cage stopped at one of the deep underground levels of the mine. You are out of the cage. Vast spaces of underground caves and man-made tunnels opened up to your eyes. On the walls of the caves and on the ceiling of the caves you saw strange mushroom-shaped growths that emitted a bluish-purple or yellowish light. Thanks to this light, you could see that there were some huts at a distance of about a couple of hundred meters from you. A small group of creatures was approaching you from the direction of these huts.

Soon, you got a better look at these creatures. In this group there were: a dozen people, five dwarves, a couple of half-orcs and one ogre. All these creatures were male. And they were all dressed in some dirty rags. But so are you. You'll notice that many of these creatures have pickaxes in their hands.

These creatures approached you, they surrounded you. The fat ogre, whose arms were covered with scars and burns, demonstrated his status as the leader of this group with his entire behavior. This ogre was twice as tall as you. His face with large sharp fangs, with a scraggly, dirty beard and a cataract on his right eye - caused nothing but disgust in you. The ogre was dressed in dirty and torn pants, which were made from the skin of some animal.

The ogre looked at you impudently and grinned disgustingly. He said, "So, there's some fresh new meat in our fucking hole that's deep inside Icebane Mountains' asshole! This time the meat has a greenish tint to it! Ha! Ha! What's your name, guy?"

You answered briefly: "Ulkin."

The ogre said: “Welcome to our community of doomed **** row, greenish meat! My name is Khagon the Ripper and I am in charge here! If you ended up here, it means that you, like all the other guys here, are a criminal who was sentenced to lifelong hard labor! Forget about what you saw on the surface. Neither of us will come to the surface. Of course, there are some advantages here: thanks to the underground hot springs, it is much warmer here than on the surface. Ha! Look at this cage in which you came here! What do you see, green-faced bastard?"

You looked around. You noticed that there is no lifting mechanism next to the cage (however, there was such a mechanism at the previous levels of the mine).

You told the ogre: “There are no levers here that the dwarves turned to make the cage go down...”

The ogre laughed darkly: "Wow! You're smart! Ha! Ha! Your brain will probably taste good! Ha! Ha! That's right: there is no lifting mechanism. This means that the cage only goes up when the fucking dwarves who sit their asses in the upper levels of the mine want it to. They usually lift the cage once a day. We load the ore we mined into the cage. The dwarves lift the cage and take the ore. Then they load food, water vessels, and sometimes pickaxes into the cage. And the cage is lowered towards us. Than The more we mine ore, the more food they send us. That's why we are **** to do mining work. And that's why I have a gift for you! Catch!"

You notice the ogre's hands moving quickly. An object flew towards you. You reacted at the last moment. If you had not had time, this object would have hit your head. But you were able to catch this thing with your hand. You saw that your hand was holding an iron miner's pickaxe.

The ogre clapped his hands and said in a mocking tone: “Wow! You are not only smart, but also a nimble guy! So you will be useful to us for ore mining! However, if you had caught this pick not with your hand but with your head, then your corpse would also be useful to us! We could have some delicious fried green meat for dinner today! Ha! Ha!"

The ogre patted his fat belly.

Then he said to the people around him: “Show this green-faced bastard a place where he will sleep and eat! It’s time for me to get down to business!”

Having said this, the ogre left towards one of the tunnels.