Earth's Blood (A Dwarven Short Story)

With furrowed brow, Gor beheld the transparent figure of his grandfather. He had come to the ruins of Khazad Ulgan seeking the truth behind the destruction of his ancestral home. He had explored it from the highest broken watchtower to the lowest of the abandoned mines, but this was more than he had bargained for.

The dead dwarf’s haggard features and plaited yellow beard were traced in perfect detail, poised at the cavern’s entrance. It began to move. The solitary ghost creeping through the forest of stalagmites, where the miners had halted their search for the riches of the underworld one hundred years before. It moved stealthily, as if fearing discovery, clasping something protectively to its chest as it headed for the very center of the cavern.

Overcoming his initial fear, Gor slowly pursued the shade, a thousand questions on his mind. What had his ancestor been doing down here? In the very bowels of his home stronghold.

Muttering a hasty prayer to the Goddess, he followed the furtive spectre through the ice-encrusted rocks and across a frozen stream, finally stopping at a low table-shaped plateau. Here the shade knelt upon the frigid stone, delicately lowering a strangely patterned metal cylinder.

It was only as large as his grandfather’s fist, and appeared to be made of silver, with brass clasps at either end. On them were carved runes that were chillingly familiar to any veteran of the Artificer Wars. In those dark times, there had been those unscrupulous enough to embrace the forces of the abyss itself, unleashing dread Ulkar as the ultimate weapon. The entire city of Tor Korazh had been erased from existence by the same type of runic bomb. Gor shuddered at the sight of it.

The shade touched the runes, one after the other, before suddenly springing to its feet and bolting back toward the mineshaft.

The phantom raced past Gor and was gone, leaving behind a floating patch of pure darkness, hovering above the table of rock. 

And then it turned to meet him. 

The darkness danced with a black fire that somehow gave off light; a dazzlingly cold blue glow like the moon on glacial ice. Yet no reflection shone on the nearby surface of the frozen stream.

An unearthly chill settled upon Gor’s frost-covered beard. Colder than the screaming winds of the high passes and far colder than what was normal for an underground cavern. It was the cold of the abyss itself. Pure and terrible. Its very presence clawed and ripped at his body with talons of black ice; a thousand blizzards rolled into one as the shock paralyzed him. 

He stood rigid as the stygian essence flowed and twisted, moulding itself into a shape with arms and legs – a ghastly parody of the living things it so despised and at the same time thirsted for. By the ancestors, how had his grandfather willingly unleashed such a thing? Varn-Ulkar, an eater of souls; its malice a mockery of stone, iron, and all that was good and true in this world. Gor had never faced such a nemesis, but the memories of the ancestors did not lie. 

He could hear a voice that was not a voice claw its way into the deep corridors of his mind, as it had once entered the mind of Anya the Goddess in the Time of Wandering. It had been waiting for her then, thousands of years ago, hidden in the dark beneath the mountains. Just as it had been waiting for the grandson’s return, chasing his grandfather’s doomed legacy. The unintelligible words carried with them the satisfied grin of a predator that has cornered its next meal. It spread and widened, becoming a chasm of infinite depth, as the axe slipped from Gor’s frozen fingers, clattering uselessly to the cavern floor.

His flesh was numb, the blood half-freezing in his veins as the darkness expanded: its writhing tenebrous limbs reaching across aeons of time from the day when Anya had entered the Caverns of Surtur, forbidding even her brother Kurgan from following her.

The spirit of the abyss had trapped him. And with its bone-chilling touch came fear. It was a physical thing, strangling him in rings of shadow; its demonic call rising to a roar, bursting upward like a geyser of tar as he sank to a floor that was no longer beneath him.

Plunging downward, he could feel the hunger, the ravenous maw of the void that had devoured his ancestors and darkened their halls.

But there was something else too. Something louder, deeper. A primal command that could neither be silenced nor overwritten, even after ages locked beneath the cold earth.

Guard, Remember and Avenge.

The spiritual commandant of his nation, spoken by the Goddess in the Time of Wandering, crashed through Gor’s mind with all the fury of an earthquake and the rage of a volcanic eruption; penetrating the gloom of Ulkar with the molten fires of earth’s blood.

Forces beyond time guided his fingers to the weapon he had concealed in the folds of his jerkin. Scarred and calloused fingertips traced the sign of activation as he drew forth the cylindrical explosive that was his last-ditch defense.

With his final ounce of strength, he hurled it into the pulsating shadows. 

A blinding bright flash was followed by absolute darkness.

He did not know how much time had passed when he awoke. An orange glow tinged his aching vision and he felt its heat. The frozen stream was gone and a long vein of lava snaked from one end of the cavern to the other, tracing fiery patterns across the ceiling. He tasted ozone, his chest rising and falling like a worn-out bellows as he gasped for breath. The feeling in his limbs was returning, making them twitch uncomfortably as he shut his eyes against the pain, his mind reeling in confusion.

The burning scent of molten rock filled his nostrils. There was no way the blast could have wreaked such havoc on its own. By all rights it should have killed him. He should have been consumed along with the demon.

Gor found himself staring at walls of the chamber, for hard stone was where true memory resided. The place of stoic endurance that dwarvenkind had always looked to for guidance.

The patterns began unfolding almost immediately, faint glimmers of the past liberated from the blindness of Ulkar, and bathed in the steady glow of earth’s inner fires.

There were messages there, dozens of them, hastily carved into the bare rock of the cavern walls. As their lost words unfolded, so did their trembling hands, then their frightened faces, swaying in life’s final rhythms before darkness fell. Goodbyes, pleas for mercy, apologies to those they would never see again, and messages of sheer terror intermingled in a frenzy as the Shadow closed about them.

But they were nearly all punctuated with singular cries for vengeance against one dwarf. Snorri Furgillson, Artificer, infamous as Khazad Ulgan’s final overlord before the catastrophe.

Century-old messages spoke of locked gates, blocked shafts; how all the tunnels to the surface had been sealed, trapping the lower caste delvers in the depths of the hold with no way out. The ominous rumblings had sent them scrambling for shelter…only to find that the black tendrils were already rising through their walls and floors as the Abyss clawed its way upwards. 

Curses were showered on the well-to-do inhabitants of the upper levels who had sealed in those who could not afford the bribes to get their families to safety. Tearful mothers and fathers had left written apologies to their children for being so poor, the paltry wages of an old-time delver amounting to nothing in the eyes of a greedy speculator. Other parents apologized for losing their trade and falling into the rut of unskilled labor. Still others apologized for allowing their children to be born into a low caste existence with no hope of escape. 

There were finger marks on the stones, traces of hands clawing at the rough surface as they realized their supposed betters simply did not care about them. They were only tools to be used, worn out and replaced.

“The mountains show their grey backs, worn down in endless struggle against the elements,” read the lines of a poem, inscribed as a last will and testament. “Now cut with gaping wounds that have nothing to do with age or time. How many of the high sisters above Ulgan enclose in their heavy wombs similar riches to those that kill us, as they await the arid arms of the steam shovels that devour their entrails, with their obligatory count of lives swallowed in darkness?”

The ancestral memories stirred, revealing the author of the doomed work. Gor saw a young delver, his beard barely past his collar, and bearing the tell-tale scars of a hard rock miner. The sleeves of his rough leather tunic were rolled up, revealing the telltale mark branded into the flesh of his bicep. The rune that, in the time of the Artificers, marked one as Wanok, a dwarf condemned to penal servitude for acts of rebellion. His hands did not shake like the others as he carefully carved this final statement into the living rock that would hold and preserve it for all time, even as the demon of Ulkar claimed his soul.

Gor turned and again saw his grandfather; his ghost crouched with the infernal bomb in its hand, still shamefully repeating its final act. He saw the emblem, carelessly stamped on the side of the forbidden device, the gilded arms of Snorri Furgilsson himself. Furgilsson knew that the mines of Ulgan were nearing exhaustion. His once profitable investment would soon be gone and there were too many workers and machinery to re-locate. But if it were to be destroyed, the Elder Council would compensate him for his loss. All he needed was a willing accomplice, someone who knew the lower chambers of the stronghold like the back of his hand. His ancestor had sold his soul for Artificer gold.

The impact of the revelation was like a knife through Gor’s heart. Atrocity merged with treachery in his mind’s eye, and he knew that he would never be able to escape the shame of what had been done here. He had returned to his ancestral home to find the truth. Now he wanted to retrace his steps to Tor Nordia and hack at his grandfather’s tomb with a mattock until the name was cut away. But that would not save him, or his family. The memories would always find him.

He eyed the river of lava flowing through the sundered cave. It would be so easy to throw himself into the molten blood of the earth; giving himself up to the stone in despair. 

Guard, Remember, and Avenge. 

But who would come here after he was gone? Who would bear witness to the testament of these lost souls? Who would give them the dignity that they had begged for but never received in life?

He cursed the Goddess’s words as he pulled himself to his feet, wincing in pain. He would tell their story and bear their burdens. A lone memory might be forgotten, but not the collective will of a people or the commandments of their gods. Such things were as unyielding as granite and could never be foresworn even in a thousand lifetimes.