The four friends reached the castle shortly. It was a large edifice, with walls that were easily over forty feet high. It was surrounded by a moat, but the drawbridge was down. Upon entering the grounds, Ashleigh noted that the place was eerily quiet. "Where is everybody?" she asked. "We don't know," said Grunge. "This castle used to hold hundreds of people," said Grunge. "Then Morlock and I went away for a trade mission, and when we came back, most of the people were gone, including our families." "The rest disappeared over the past two months. Now there is only Grunge and I left," said Morlock. " What makes it worse, said Morlock is that the last to disappear were all locked in their rooms when they disappeared, and their was no sign of forced entry." "That is weird!" said Daddy, "Can we see the rooms?"
Grunge let them down a corridor to a hallway with many doors. "Here is where the last of them lived before they went away." said Morlock. Daddy and Ashleigh went into a room. All was silent. Immediately, Daddy and Ashleigh began knocking on the walls. "What are you doing?" Grunge asked. "We are looking for hidden doors" said Ashleigh. "You're wasting your time," said Morlock, "We checked magically." Just then, Ashleigh sprang a lever and a door appeared in the wall. Morlock and Grunge looked stunned. "Of course! Someone has hidden the doors from magical interference! Why didn't we think of that!!" said Grunge. The door opened on a stairway heading down. Daddy closed it gently, and said "Let's check some of the other rooms." In all, they checked twenty five rooms. Each one had a hidden door. The next day, Daddy and Ashleigh decided to go through one of the hidden doors and follow the stairs down. The stairs circled down for more than five hundred feet and ended in a long hallway. Hundreds of doors led off of the hallway, and Ashleigh said "I bet all of the hidden doorways lead to this hallway." Daddy agreed, and they slowly began to walk up the hallway. After a while, there were no more doors, only the long hallway leading off into the darkness. The further they went, the louder it became. It started low, almost imperceptible; a low kachung! kachung! sound that got louder as they walked. Ashleigh began to get frightened, but Daddy consoled her. "We must go on to find out what happened to those people," he said. Soon, they reached the bottom of a grand staircase. The noise was coming from the top of the stairs. Slowly, Ashleigh and Daddy crept to the top of the stairs and peaked over the railing. In front of them were hundreds of elves and dwarfs, all swinging picks and hammers at the walls of a huge cavern. The loud noise was coming from a huge machine in the middle of the cavern that the dwarfs were feeding the rock from the walls into. They had found the missing population of the castle!
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