Starspawn in the Abandoned Mine

Starspawn in the Abandoned Mine

The old mine coughs at night, a hollow creature of rock and rust that remembers the names of miners long dead and the promises they broke. Mothers tell stories of stars, but the men who worked the tunnels told a different truth: the earth remembers things we never learned to speak. When the shaft whined and the lanterns threw shadows that moved, I knew the place wasn’t empty. It kept its own kind of breathing, slow as a heartbeat, a rhythm you could feel if you listened long enough between the clang of the pick and the distant drip of water.

I came with a crew who believed the rumors of a vein that glittered with something cold and impossible. We descended on a rope that squealed like a tired animal, the air thinning as if we were passing through the husk of a fevered stone. The deeper we went, the more the mine smelled of rain on iron, as if the walls remembered storms that never happened above ground. When the tunnel widened into a chamber, the glow started—not from a lamp or a mineral, but from a lattice of pale, glassy threads that pressed softly against our skin, like a whisper brushing the back of your neck.

Something watched us from the dark, not with eyes but with a presence: patient, patient as a star deciding to blink. The thread-work stretched along the ceiling and floor, a geometry that did not belong to any map we owned. It hummed in the bones, a sound that tasted metallic and sweet, a note you could almost swallow. We measured it with a tape, but numbers dissolved into a strange, green luminescence that grew brighter the longer we stared. “Careful,” someone said, but the warning came too late. The mine had learned our questions and began answering in another tongue, a chorus of small, glimmering voices that pricked at the edges of our hearing.

We feed on the quiet between breaths, and we remember the nights you never spoke of here.

Signs multiplied with quiet persistence:

• The air grew cooler around the bones of old ore carts, as if the mine itself leaned in to listen.
• Faint footprints of something not quite human appeared in the dust, threads of light weaving themselves into patterns we could not decode.
• The drum of distant steps synchronized with the slow pulse of the earth, a mechanical lullaby that dragged us toward the heart of the mountain.
• Names we never learned surfaced in the mine’s breath, whispered through the phosphorescent veins that ran like veins of ice.

When the first scream rose from the deeper shaft, I ran, chasing the last glow of the threads until the tunnel narrowed to a throat that refused to swallow us all. I crawled into the outside world with the cold kiss of those star-born lights still on my skin, and the mine exhaled as if to say it had finally remembered us. We left one of our own behind—someone who did not fear the dark in the same way—and I carry the memory of their eyes, the way the sky itself seemed to tilt, as though the universe had leaned closer to listen to what we brought back from the underground. The abandoned mine remains, and somewhere in its heart the Starspawn wait, patient as a constellation waking from sleep, waiting for the night to listen again.