Harvest Festival

Content warning

Kidnapping, slavery, torture, light body horror

Not long after Threshers passed the threshold of the gate of the second Hall, they stopped. The Harvesters checked their maps and looked around the surroundings. Out of the darkness, another group of them emerged, these ones were equipped with pickaxes and more traditional carts. It was time for the Harvest Festival.
The leader of the caravan gave a hand signal to his people, and one by one, they pressed the buttons on the sides of the threshers. Suddenly, the silence of the Hall has been disturbed by scared screams and painful moans coming from inside each of the carts.

Despite their innocently sounding name, Harvest Festivals consist completely of cruel and greedy ways the Harvesters build their wealth and power using the suffering of others. It was long ago that the people who became the first Harvesters discovered that exposing people to the Darkness in the right Halls might produce valuable things. When a Hall steals something, it grows a little by incorporating it into itself. And depending on the Hall, the manifested part might be a resource that is very rare in this realm. Metal plates that can be melted down, structures that could be used somewhere else, and materials already processed without the use of specialized machinery. Of course, excavating anything from the Hall forever prevents its rightful owner from recovering it, so even though the resources could benefit the people stuck in the Halls in many ways, the process of gathering them is heavily frowned upon by most communities.

Execution

Kidnapping

So stupid, how could he be so stupid? When Alexy encountered that talkative stranger, the first person he saw in this hellish realm, he thought his luck started changing for the better. He was deceived by the promises of food, community, and safety. He should have known something was wrong, especially since he hadn't felt any hunger since the day he was spirited away here.
And now, he paid for his naivety.
Tied up and locked in a cell with other fools like him, he didn't know what awaited him. One of the prisoners screamed something about the "Harvest festival" but he was too scared to answer anyone's questions.
There must be a way out of here.

— Earlier, part 1

First, the Harvesters require the sources of the new resources. They tend to target people new to the Dark Halls, the ones who travel on their own, the sick or wounded, and sometimes they become braver and attack caravans, especially the ones that transfer people. The people who lost the least to the Halls become their prime targets as the most can be harvested from them. Similarly, their "catchers" will first try to take advantage of the naivety of others, lull them into a sense of safety, and lure them away from others either to knock them out without bringing them harm or to bring them right into the hands of other Harvesters, convinced that they are about to join a friendly community, only to wake up with binds on their arms and legs.

Boarding the thresher

They threw some kind of smoke bomb into the cell. One that made everyone start losing consciousness; some kind of sleeping gas. When he awoke, Alexy was strapped to some kind of bed that was pushed into what looked like a mortuary rack. He tried to scream, but his body was too weak. When they locked him in there, he barely had space for his chest to move with each breath. He could hear sobs, moans, and screams of other prisoners, all around him. He couldn't move his head too much, but he saw that on the bed right next to him a small kid was strapped just like him. The kid was crying and calling out for their parents. Alexy tried to cheer them up.

— Earlier, part 2

From then on, their captives are kept safe until the number of them is big enough for the harvest to bring more benefits than risks. Once their numbers are satisfactory, they are boarded on the threshers, bound to the bunks, tight enough so they can't move. Like that, rows of them are loaded as live cargo, ready to be "harvested". Each "piece of cargo" lasts about three different trips on average, after which its body is too weak to continue and it either falls apart or turns to dust on its own (depending on the type of Hall it happens in) or it needs to be disposed of by simply being thrown away and left to die.

The Harvest

They were transporting them somewhere. The vehicle the beds were loaded on didn't move too fast, nor did it turn too often. It seemed that the route was pretty simple. Still, Alexy couldn't focus on that too much, as the inside of the vehicle was constantly bathed in light that burned his eyes, even when he tried to close them. Was there no end to this torture? Still, he tried to talk to the kid, little Sam to make them feel less afraid. Even if by a little

— Earlier, part 3

Once the "cargo" is loaded, the threshers will be escorted to the Halls that are most optimal for the Harvest, be it the ones that produce something useful or valuable whenever the Darkness in them takes something away. Each time, the harvesters try to set the safest and most optimal path to keep their "cargo" alive for as long as it could be possible without risking their own lives too much. Whenever a particularly useful Hall is present, the harvesters might create their outpost within it, where the "Gathering teams" await the next Harvest Festival. Once it is the right time, the two teams meet together.
During the travel time, the prisoners are always covered with powerful light, protecting them from the Darkness of the less valuable Halls.

Thresher team

The vehicle stopped. Alexy would almost be happy if not for the damn light still burning through his eyelids. He didn't know how long they stayed there, it felt like an eternity, but at some point, the light disappeared, bringing the comfort of darkness. For a moment there, the vehicle resounded with a choir of relaxed sighs. That was until he and everyone else started feeling something in their mouths, biting at their teeth. A few moments passed and he and others felt a sharp pull in their mouths, only to realize they had lost one of their teeth. That's when the panicked screams started.

— Moments ago, part 4

Once the threshers reach the target Hall, the caravan stops and meets with the gathering team. Next, the surroundings are checked for the presence of any possible threats or hostiles. When those are dealt with, or the thresher is relocated into a safer place, it is time to begin the "Harvest". The lights inside the threshers are turned off and the light-powered engines are turned on, consuming even more light in the area. The thresher team moves away from the area of influence of said engines, waiting the researched amount of time for the Darkness to take away as much as it can from the living cargo before it starts to damage their bodies or minds in different ways. When that is done, the light-powered engines get turned off, the light inside shines again, and the thresher team moves to another Hall to continue the Harvest.

Gathering team

Once the Harvest starts safely, the gathering team moves away, going for the next probable area where the Darkness will incorporate what it took away from the people into the growth of the Hall. There, they gather the new resources until they are depleted again and load them onto the vehicles that will then move them back to the settlement they come from.

When the blinding light came back on, Alexy just lost his second to the last tooth. At that point, no one was screaming anymore. The vehicle was mostly filled with the sounds of sobbing. The vehicle started moving again. Even though scared and weakened, Alexy still tried cheering the kid up.

— Now, part 5

Primary Related Location

Dark Halls

Related groups

Harvesters

Average thresher crew (per thresher)

2 drivers, 2 scouts, 4-10 guards (depending on the length of each thresher), 1-2 engineers

Average gathering crew

An equal number of gatherers and guards, 2-8 porters depending on the size of the group, 1 lantern-bearer for every 4 people in the group (only if the Hall has a high requirement of light to protect the group), 2-4 scouts

Unregulated growth of Halls

The Harvest Festivals that occur too frequently in the same Halls quickly lead to their unregulated growth in size, leading to the "birth" of the new Halls in the spaces between the Halls that form from said growth. This often causes many safe routes to suddenly be filled with new, unknown Halls that potentially might be way more dangerous than the ones that existed there until then. The second worrisome result of such fast growth is the transformation the exploited Halls go through once they reach the big enough size and become Spaces. Compared to normal, walled Halls, the Spaces can potentially be infinite in size, and finding exits leading out of them might prove extremely dangerous, especially if one entered them expecting them to be normal Halls, without any preparation.

Harvest festivals and Archivists

Archivists are protectors of the Halls, mysterious creatures, that for whatever reason decide to help the people who lost something in their Hall retrieve it (though they don't really understand that people can't move through the darkness or overcome the obstacles the way they do). It is no wonder then that people who harvest those lost things, forever depriving their rightful owners of retrieving them while also scarring the Halls with their excavation sites, make their metaphorical blood boil. Once an Archivist realizes there are harvesters in their Hall, they will try to hunt and kill all of them. They even recognize threshers as parts of the groups of harvesters and so they will often try to disable them. It is no wonder then that before even trying to take on a Harvest Festival, harvesters will try to kill all the Archivists on the route they will have to take or they will pick the routes through the Halls where their threat has already been dealt with.
As such, traveling through the routes known to be taken by harvesters always will come with increased risks. Not only because of the chance of encountering a group of them but also because those Halls are seldom protected from various monsters the Archivists would deal with.
There is a story of an Archivist who once immobilized a thresher and killed its escort. While most of its kin would simply leave it at that, returning to their own "responsibilities", that one seemed to recognize that there were some humans inside the vehicle. It freed just enough of them that they could free all the rest of the prisoners and then led them safely through its Hall. But what happened to them after that and if the rumor is even real in the first place remains a mystery.

Tin can openers

It seems that the harvesters went through their Harvest festivals so often, that the fauna of the Dark Halls started adapting to them. Some creatures quickly found some ways to provide feasts for themselves once every few excursions. Just after the harvesters turn off the lights within their threshers to begin the Harvest and to refill their generators by using light-powered engines, they have to move away from the affected area, otherwise, they would risk staying in the darkness caused by said engines. During that period of time, it is really hard for them to protect the carts. And so, some smart predators with long, spiky limbs or beaks managed to find a way to quickly run into the newly created sphere of darkness and pry open the lid of the thresher, revealing helpless treats inside.
This has started being a hit to the profits and gained resources of harvesters big enough that they started researching various ways of dealing with said creatures. From fake threshers, through utilizing the minefields around them during each Harvest. These solutions proved to be too resource-heavy and time-consuming. Finally, the harvesters found a perfect solution in creating a mechanism with spring-loaded blades that shoot outwards if the lid of the thresher isn't opened in the right way through the use of a console and multiple locks. Though who knows how long it will take before some other creature of darkness finds a way to bypass this type of security.