Toben Ashling commands Chimea's Second Legion, the force that holds the Blood Mountain occupation, and he runs it out of Gilla, the administrative town the empire built to coordinate the mines. He is Fieri, from the molten deeps under Hell Creek, and the posting suits a man who grew up reading the mood of a lava flow. The Blood Mountains are not his people's fire, but they are underground, and Toben understood the dark of them faster than the surface-born officers the empire kept sending up to die in it.
His job, as Chimus writes it, is simple and brutal: keep the gems moving south. The Blood Mountains are an occupied mine, the gem flow funds the capital's display, and a century of imperial doctrine holds that the Aureum resistance and the Bloodlings are both just the running cost of holding a rich seam. Toben was sent to pay that cost without complaint. For most of his command he did.
What changed his arithmetic was the Bloodlings. The vampiric gnomes of the deep caves had always taken miners at night, and the Second Legion had always written off those losses as the price of the dark. But over the past few years the Bloodlings stopped behaving like a hazard and started behaving like a third party in the war. They take Chimean mine-officers and Aureum tunnel-runners with the same disinterest, they go deeper than either side will follow, and they answer to nothing on the surface. Toben lost three officers in a season to something he could not punish, garrison, or buy.
So he did the thing his orders do not allow. He opened a line to Orenna, who leads the Aureum resistance he is supposed to be crushing, because she was the only other power in the range who understood that the deep had become its own enemy. They trade what each can spare: where the Bloodlings have surfaced, which levels have gone quiet, which runner or officer did not come back. It is not peace. Toben still holds the mountains, still ships the gems, still answers to Chimus, and on paper Orenna is a target he has simply failed to close on. He has not told his superiors. He tells himself the truce ends the day the Bloodlings do, and he tries not to think about whether he believes that.