Igni Ro Falen hopped off the wagon, landing heavily — and gratefully — on the exquisitely-dressed stone floor beneath him.
This was the courtyard of the Durdashak Hold. Well, it was called a courtyard, but the dwarves abhorred building anything under the sun. Instead, this was a large cavern, a square that was a hundred meters on each side. It had been expanded and reinforced and turned into a place for those brave human merchants who risked the ire of the Slaine Theocracy to trade with demihumans.
There was one entrance, through which he had come, and one exit, which led further into the Hold. All around him were ashlar walls, with torch-bearing sconces spaced every meter along their length.
He bade the merchant who had given him his ride here farewell, and savored the feeling of good, solid stone beneath his feet. Even through his thick travelling boots, the resistance and constancy of the worked rock reassured him.
They called him the Daywalker, one who had forsaken the Night Below for the sunlit lands, but that did not mean he did not take pleasure in dwarven things any more.
Igni was of average height for a dwarf, four feet of slab-like muscle and rock-like bones. His hands were callused things, suited for gripping a forge-hammer or wielding a battle-axe. He had never been suited to the former, and his hands now trembled every time he attempted the latter.
His brown beard was thick and bushy, as expected of a dwarf, and his eyes were a dark brown.
Within them glowed the embers of what had once been a fire.
Once, Igni had been a captain in the dwarven armies. It was after the 11th crusade, when they had not only failed to retake the hold of Kekataag, but lost hundreds, if not thousands of men to the Darkbrood. He and his squad had been one of the lucky few to survive, and they had been pulled back to tunnel defense duty as the dwarven armies consolidated to lick their wounds.
Their flesh of their bodies yielded easily to dwarven hold-forged steel, but their spiked limbs were like the pickaxes the dwarves used to carve through particularly tough segments of bedrock. They possessed incredible vitality and powers of regeneration; if not killed, they soon healed any damage done to them.
The black ichor coating their bodies was the same fluid that ran within their veins. This vile substance corrupted the stone wherever it splashed, pitting and weakening it to the point where a good punch could break it.
Worse, the corrupted stone no longer registered to the dwarven stone-cunning. Since that particular sense was as handy as vision to a dwarf, it was as though they had been blinded; a fatal vulnerability when the Darkbrood swarmed. For this reason, retaking a corrupted hold was considered nothing short of suicide.
It was like walking into a monster’s open mouth.
The only saving grace was the fact that the Darkbrood hated the light and froze briefly when illuminated, which was the cue to all dwarven warriors fill them full of crossbow bolts and hack them apart. Once killed, the horde would recede for a time, which was blessed respite for the beleaguered defenders.
The average dwarf’s life soon became one of quiet desperation; working nonstop shifts in the forges to build panoplies for the dwarven warriors who risked their lives to protect them all. No longer did they spread joyfully below the earth, but they huddled around their well-lit hearths and prayed that they would not be the next to vanish.
The Council of Elders agreed that they had to take back the depths, somehow. To that end, they squandered huge amounts of men and materiel on twelve failed reconquests of their cities, and in the end they settled for simply securing what few holds they still controlled with their depleted forces.
The situation was growing dire.
To that end, they issued a summons...