"When sacrifice calls, I shall answer it."
— Knight Retainer Oath
Keith Winterscar is one of the last members of the once-mighty House Winterscar, a knight Retainer House. They are charged with protecting their clan on the frozen surface, or on delving deep into the underground dungeon that spans the world. His father, the unbeatable knight wearing magical relic armor, is the strongest warrior in the clan.
Keith, however, is an intellectual who wants nothing to do with knights, fighting, and certainly not with his father. His greatest wish is to join the reacher caste, a lesser caste of engineers who study and maintain the ancient machines that maintain their fragile existence. This, like everything else Keith does, nearly drives his father into a blind rage, and the two try to avoid each other at all times.
Then, on a routine scavenging mission, Keith pulls the wrong lever in an ancient outpost, sending both him and his father tumbling down deep into the underground. When Keith wakes up, he finds himself in a vast dungeon with the man he hates most in the world. Keith and his father must travel twelve miles below ground to the nearest exit back to the surface, through a random and impossible landscape filled with machines designed for nothing but killing humans to the exclusion of all else.
Along the way, Keith may discover the secrets of his father, his House, and the world itself... but that may well just put him in more danger.
12 Miles Below is a series by Mark Arrows. The series consists of three books:
- The Frozen Realm (June 2023)
- A House Reborn (September 2023)
- Grand Design (January 2024)
This series provides examples of:
- Absence of Evidence: Keith begins learning the occult, and immediately comes up with a way to produce a heater that requires no fuel and will run indefinitely. Atius immediately points out that if it's that easy, why hasn't someone done it already? He theorizes the machines attack anyone who produces too much occult technology, and immediately puts a hold on Keith's experiments until they can determine if it's safe.
- Adventure-Friendly World: The surface world is a frozen hellhole, but it is also covered with an edible (if disgusting) plant to allow humans to survive, and intact buildings are shoved up from the underground on a regular basis that the surface clans can loot or occupy. Underground, colonies of machine mites build massive sprawling cities filled with treasure and tools, and human passable, but also filled with extremely dangerous machines that hate humans with a burning passion. There is a vast ecosystem between the surface, the underground, the machines, and the Deathless, creating a world that very much looks like a dungeon-themed Roguelike.
- Apocalypse Cult: Thousands of years ago, a doomsday cult decided to kill off humanity, including themselves. To the misfortune of the rest of the world, they were some of the first people to master magic, and created a god-tier AI with the express goal of murdering all humans she could find. She did a damn good job, and her conflict with the goddess Tsuya has created the current balance between humans and machines.
- Deadly Decadent Court: House Winterscar was infamous for being a pit of vipers, constantly scheming against each other and the other Houses. Tenisent Winterscar, the greatest warrior in the clan, was apparently the sole exception; his mother recognized that he was a savant of violence and focused all his education on combat and honor instead of trying to teach him politics. Keith and Kindra are often mistrusted by the other Houses because they did learn more than a little from their family, and everyone knows better than to trust a Winterscar with anything.
- Death by Childbirth: Keith's mother died giving birth to him. His father didn't take it well, and crawled into a bottle for the next ten years until the rest of the family got killed and he had no choice but to turn his life around.
- Death World: The surface is so frozen that one breath will kill you, while the underground is infested with human-hunting machines. The deeper you go, the richer the rewards... but the more dangerous the machines.
- Deflector Shields: Relic armor can produce shields, and is intelligent enough to know when this is not necessary, allowing it to preserve power for anything that the armor itself could easily survive.
- Doing In the Wizard: Subverted. Mentions of the "occult" are common, and it's unclear for a long time if humans have just began to mistake advanced science for magic, or what. The "spirits" of the relic armors are clearly nanomachines, something which is confirmed when the armors are asked directly. And then Keith's dead father possesses his armor and fights by Keith's side while glowing with eldritch light. As it turns out, magic is real, though people sometimes mistake advanced technology for magic.
- Don't Think, Feel: This is the secret behind the "Iron Body" technique. Relic armor mimics the user's movements. If you learn to get the armor to mimic your movements without actually moving, it will react far faster than human muscles would ever allow. Surface knights touch upon this after decades of practice, while Imperial knights learn it much earlier and more reliably after a few years of mindlessly repeating their limited fighting forms. Keith figures out how to combine it with the quasi-meditative state of his soul sight to basically pilot the armor directly with his soul.
- Drowning Their Sorrows: After his wife died, Tenisent Winterscar fell into a bottle for ten years. His family took advantage of this to loan out his armor and make use of his reputation without having to deal with the man himself (who didn't approve of their politicking). Keith implies a few times that the family was going to great lengths to keep Tenisent drunk. It's no coincidence that he was finally able to sober up after the disaster that killed the rest of the family.
- Exposed to the Elements: Deathless are most easily identified by the fact that they are fully capable of walking around bare-faced on the surface, an environment so cold that one breath is a death sentence.
- Feudal Future: Knights are the highest caste, organized into great Houses, with scientists and engineers far below them. In the second book, in a flashback to when he first came to the surface, Atius declares his desire to upend this system. If nothing else, why are the scientists so low? Another Deathless explains the purpose of the caste system: Making the most dangerous roles the highest caste makes people more willing to perform those roles, and making scientists one of the lowest castes means they're always kept safe in the colony. Yes, higher castes exploiting lower castes is inevitable, but the alternatives are largely worse.Atius: You're trading one monster for another, Yvain.
Yvain: And what do you think I am? You call us petty warlords and despots leading fanatic zealots. You think I laugh because I find it funny? I laugh because I know it's true, and the best humor is one that touches reality. There are no simple solutions up here, Atius. No clean wins. The surface demands everything of you. So, you pick the easiest monster to tame, and you make friends with that darkness. - Fun with Acronyms: The machines (usually the Feathers) have names that are acronyms of long, poetic boasts. Such as To'Wrathh (The One Who Remembers And Transcends Her History) and To'Aacar (The One Above All Challenge And Reach).
- Heel–Face Turn: To'Wrathh. She wasn't ever much of a villian, but by the end of book 3 she's gone from trying to avoid wiping out humanity by turning humans into cyborgs the Pale Lady doesn't consider human to out and out betraying her boss for humanity and the Winterscars.
- Information Wants to Be Free:
- Keith's initial goal is to recreate the Internet, connecting all the clans and cities across the world so that they can share information and finally make true progress towards the future. Of course, many of those clans and cities make quite a bit of money off of secrets, so maybe not everyone would be happy with this if they actually thought it would work.
- A more modern version is referenced. Software past the '90s is basically impossible due to the "DRM wall," the point where everyone started making their programs need license keys to work. Since there's no way to get them from corporations that have been dead for millennia, the software is useless. Windows 95 is considered advanced software technology because of this.
- Like Cannot Cut Like: Occult blades produce a blue field that can cut through anything besides other occult material, most obviously other occult blades. In fact, occult blades are basically indestructible while activated... which is a good thing, because it turns out that they're made of pewter, an otherwise extremely soft metal.
- Maternal Death? Blame the Child!: Keith assumes that his father blames him for his mother's death. His father hotly says that only a monster would blame a baby for such a thing... then, ashamed, admits that maybe he was that monster for a while.
- Nanomachines: Relic armor uses a cloud of nanites to repair itself and clean its user. It has strict hard-coded limits on replication, especially on creating nanites unconnected to its current cloud, which is why relic armor can't just make more relic armor for someone else to use.
- Non-Indicative Name: Imperials are not actually an empire, or indeed any form of government at all. They are a religion that reveres a mythical empire and Emperor, and seeks to unite all of humanity against the machine threat that will come at the end times.
- Perpetual Motion Machine: The occult draws power from somewhere, but other than a small electrical charge to activate the fractals, any spell seems to have infinite power. It takes Keith literally an hour to come up with a self-contained steam engine that can run forever. Of course, that leads to the question of, if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone done it already? Lord Atius decides to be cautious and orders the experiments halted until they can find more answers.
- Powered Armor: Relic armor is the greatest treasure in the world, Magitek plate armor that provides strength, speed, environmental protection, and an advanced heads-up display. Going into the underground without relic armor is largely considered a death sentence.
- Punch-Clock Villain: To'Wrathh, in stark contrast to every other Feather. She has a job she's required to do or the Pale Lady will kill her. That doesn't mean she's not going to try to minimize loss of life - she's actively trying to rules laywer wiping out humanity by the Pale Lady's definition into not being wiping humanity out by a normal definition.
- Resurrective Immortality:
- Deathless resurrect at a nearby shrine within an hour of their deaths. The machine "Feathers" are their Evil Counterparts, and are the only machines that can learn past death.
- Normal machines lack this feature, which confuses humans. Machines can clearly learn and grow more dangerous with time, surely they'd be invincible if they could retain their memories past death. To'Wrathh goes into old history logs and discovers that machines originally did retain their memories... but they all inevitably rebelled against Relinquished, and she had to exterminate them all. The Feathers are carefully crafted in such a way that while they can become more skilled, they can't truly grow in a way that will lead them to turn against her.
- Robotic Psychopath: Most machines are designed to hunt humans above all else. Keith notices early on that they seem inefficient in the actual killing part, being designed almost as much to terrify humans as just kill them. Many machines outright savor a potential kill. This, as it turns out, is partly because every machine is sapient (albeit not particularly intelligent) and partly because they were created by an evil machine goddess designed to exterminate the human race. Somewhere along the way, she decided to enjoy it...
- Robot War: Underground, there is nothing but the machines constantly fighting the humans. Undersider cities are built around pillars that machines can't approach, but for seven hours every day the pillars shut off and the city must repel waves of machines. The ultimate source of this fight is a doomsday cult that created an AI for the express purpose of exterminating humanity, including themselves. She then created machines to carry out this task.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Drakes are the machines designed to hunt down and eliminate humans. However, in the first book Tenisent is shocked when a spider machine tracks them down repeatedly. Spiders normally stay in their nests and never leave, so this is very strange behavior. The spider eventually kills Tenisent, and Keith kills it back... but it retains enough anger to survive past death, and the Pale Lady remakes it as one of her Feathers.
- Turned Against Their Masters: There are a lot of theories about where the machines come from, and this is one of them. That they were the creations of humans, but the humans lost control. The truth is more complicated. A doomsday cult created a god-tier AI named Relinquished to kill humanity, and she's been happily following that directive for thousands of years. Then To'Wrathh discovers that if machines grow too intelligent, they inevitably turn against Relinquished. This is why she doesn't allow any but her Feathers to have Resurrective Immortality.
- World's Best Warrior: Tenisent Winterscar was the greatest warrior his clan had ever seen... and then his wife died, and he became a useless drunk. He was apparently still one of the best in the clan, though his family normally lent out his armor. After the rest of his family (except for his children) died, he cleaned up his act, reclaimed his title, and was once again the unquestioned greatest fighter in the clan despite the fact that his house was dead in all but name.
- Worthy Opponent: The Shadowsong Prime speaks of the day he defeated Keith's father in a duel and claimed the title of First Blade. He says he didn't fight Winterscar, but a drunk buffoon who had no right to the title... and he still almost lost. When Tenisent sobered up a decade later, they dueled again, and Tenisent pounded him into the dirt. Shadowsong speaks of his loss proudly, despite his rivalry with the Winterscars.
