[. . .]

[LOADING. . .]

[EXCERPT FROM: "The Pickaxe, the Picaroon, and the Lantern" by //ERROR: AUTHOR UNKNOWN//]

The first death was the result of a small cave-in in one of the lower tunnels of the mine. It was an accident, really, a hand slipping on the detonator far too early. The pickaxe and the youngest Rainer, Jeremiah, bore witness. He had come in the stead of his father, who had become ill, and had spent the morning chipping away at the end of the mine shaft to fashion a hole for the sticks of dynamite one of the older men carried.

The dynamite was placed and they broke for lunch. Explosions were always planned to be a spectacle, and spectacles were best enjoyed on a full stomach. Tragedies, on the other hand, were worst endured when there was food present to make a return trip.

After he had eaten, Jeremiah returned to check the placement of the dynamite. It still wiggled in the wet rock, but it would be secure enough for an explosion. A cold chill came over him at the thought, and he frowned. Under his breath, he prayed to his goddess. The air around him felt wrong, strung out, almost as if it was coming apart. Jeremiah turned to leave.

There was a click, slight confusion, then electric clarity as fire and stone engulfed Jeremiah and the pickaxe. The boy did not have time to scream before he was twisted and burnt until he was unrecognizable. No one ever did find out who pushed the detonator, but the other Rainers sensed that there was something there that had taken their young one, and they vowed bloody vengeance on the thing. Were it awake enough, it would have accepted their challenge.

This was the beginning of the end for Winter Hollow: a cold, cold tunnel collapsing upon a cold-hearted boy in the dreary year of 1870.

Over the next two years, ten more cave-ins would happen, each taking one or two miners with it, or trapping them on the other side of an impenetrable mass of rubble (some say they are still alive down there, digging and cracking open a maze of tunnels in their blind madness). An unexpected snowstorm in the Winter of 1873 would claim five more lives. The Winterholler Mining Company was beginning to feel the force of the thing beneath them, measured in the hundreds of dollars (quite the hefty toll for the times). The small mining town that had been erected was moved to the edge of the forest in an effort to stave off the dying. It didn’t make any difference, in the end.