Lower Works Overview
The Lower Works
Three years of excavation hidden beneath a functioning logging camp.
The concealed descent beneath the river bluff does not open into a cellar. It opens into an industrial excavation.
Timber braces march into the dark beside iron hauling rails. Chains hang from pulley frames. Drainage channels cut through the stone floor, carrying cold water toward deeper galleries. Canvas ventilation sleeves sag from hooks overhead, and abandoned carts sit where workers left them.
The farther the tunnels descend, the less the place resembles ordinary engineering. Black roots emerge through cracks in the rock. Some are thin as wire. Others are as thick as a wrist, glossy with dark sap and faintly warm to the touch.
The Lower Works are deliberately self-contained for this visit. Old side passages, the ventilation route, and unfinished exploratory cuts are blocked by cave-ins, braced shut, flooded beyond safe passage, or terminate at collapsed faces.
The party can explore every keyed location on this map, but there is no viable route that leaves E18. The surviving excavation path ultimately funnels them toward E18-9 — Eastern Tunnels, E18-10 — The Blightroot, and finally E18-11 — Deepest Dig.
The site confirms the Macridi investigation. Reiver's Right was a genuine logging camp, but its timber, labor, chains, carts, lamps, drainage equipment, and structural material were also feeding a large clandestine excavation.
The excavation is not a conventional mine. Work faces change direction without following ore. Survey marks repeatedly redirect crews toward a specific point beneath the Palakar.