The Call of the Crag

[Bad_skeelz 1]

1312, the Amber Cold.

The King was generous, that Fasolt could not deny. Accosted on the streets of the city, the King had courteously agreed to stay and hear him out, an insignificant Wilds dwarf of inconsequential name and means. When Fasolt made his proposition, the King had listened attentively and patiently, there in the inner gates of Kal’Urgaun. When Fasolt finished explaining that he wished to offer his half-delved mountainhold of Butcherblock to the Kingdom as a colony, to better secure Dwarven interests in the west, the King gave him all and more respect than a Wilds dwarf deserved. He also gave Fasolt the answer he deserved.

“A noble dwarf would remain here and help make Kal’Urgaun great. Aye, every Dwarf in the Wilds can be King in his own hall. But only here, in this city, can the Dwarves together build a community. A nation.”

Fasolt could not help but agree. Dwarves were meant to stick together and help each other, that was the first lesson he had learned. Before he learned the tell-tale stench of cave gas, before he learned to pinpoint an approaching ghoul in cavern blackness by the echoes of its moans, he had learned that Dwarves cared for one another. The loose clan of Deep Miners were in many ways a people apart from the rest of Dwarven society, but isolation in the deep caverns of Aegis taught them to rely upon one another. “Don’t be going off alone to brood and fiddle,” his father Hemdall had ground out between swings of his mining pick. “Those that go alone, they’re dead. Cave-in, ghouls, pitfalls, hundred ways. And then, when someone they could of helped down the line is in trouble, well, they’re dead too. Dwarves ain’t meant for being alone, no more than we belong in trees, or deserts or in huts tendin’ sheep.”

Fasolt then didn’t know what any of those things were, but knew from the tone of his father’s voice that they were nothing Dwarves were meant to truck with. With a clatter of stone the mining pick broke through and the wall crumbled into a cavity. The juvenile Dwarf peeked over his father’s shoulders as the latter knelt down to collect some redstone chunks and examine the new mine. Something in the torchlight cause his eye and gave him pause. “Come here, lad. You see this stone?” Hemdall tapped his on the stone floor, a gray-streaked and black stone, to no visible effect. “Even if this pick were of diamond, no harm would come to it. This is Godstone, lad. Put here by God the Father to seal his Covenant with our forefather Urgaun. No pick can break it, and it is only by the Grace of God and Urgaun that the riches of the earth are allowed to pass through the Godstone. Mining here be the limits of our ability, lad, even we the greatest miners in all of Aegis, but this be where the riches and the glory be. Down here, next to the Godstone, is where Dwarves belong.”

Slowly making his way towards the outer gates of the city, Fasolt paused in his recollections to lean against a railing lining the road. This was a safety measure, hastily thrown up around the sudden crack that had recently appeared in Outer Kal’Urgaun, swallowing homes and roads. “The Crag,” it was called.

Gazing down into the destroying maw, Fasolt thought of another calamitous crack in his life. For despite his father’s faith and sermons, the veins had not remained true at the Sacred Godstone. Ore veins would peter out in time, forcing more and more miners to slant their tunnels upward in search of materials as base as coal and iron. And one day, they dug too high. Fasolt reflected that the Orcs were probably as surprised as they were, both sides bellowing in surprise and fright as the shaft opened into daylight within the Orc encampment. Two warlike peoples, suddenly thrust together with nothing at hand but confusion and weaponry; bloodshed was inevitable. And like all fluids, blood flows down.

The Orcs pressed relentlessly into the Dwarf tunnels, forcing their giant frames through chokepoints with brute determination. High galleries that had aided in the excavation of ore now served only to ensure that the Orcs did not knock themselves on the head. At last the mining camp itself was threatened, with all its riches and the kin of the Miners to young or old to be on the front lines. Over the clang of battle and the distant, shouted pleadings of his son, Hemdall’s pick broke through the damwall with the sound of thunder. A river of magma, freed at last from its industrious confinement surged across the warring tribes. Only Fasolt and the other short-beards were given time to escape before the tunnel was sealed. Left alone by the sacrifice of their elders.

Fasolt had sworn that day that his father would not spend eternity graveless and unhonored. Braving the burning sun, he had gone to the surface and devoted his energies to building monuments dedicated to his father’s legacy. First there was the Hemhall, now abandoned beneath the urban sprawl of Kal’Alras. Then in the far west, beyond the lands of the Halflings, he delved his life’s greatest achievement: a mountain converted to a fortress, a mountainhome. The Butcherblock. But alas, Kin Algrim had no use for the selfish, isolated monuments of a clanless Dwarf.

Fasolt kicked a pebble down into the Crag. He had promised the King that he would stay awhile before returning to his western exile. But what was there in Kal’Urgaun to entice him? At the Butcherblock he owned a mountain. In Kal’Urguan, he would be lucky to afford a cubbyhole. The few mansion halls, proper homes, within the mountain itself were long since claimed by more noble lineages, leaving only the half-timbered homes of Outer Kal’Urgaun of any appreciable size. Now even these were being swallowed by the Crag as surely as the magma had swallowed his father. These houses, constructed in debauched imitation of the works of Man must surely fall.

With a start Fasolt’s gaze refocused itself on the Crag, just as his thoughts refocused on the words he had shared with the King. “Yes,” Fasolt told himself. “There is nothing here to keep us on the surface. In the space where you build a hundred houses among the woods and fields, you could delve a thousand within the earth.”

He vaulted over the railing, landing with deftness among the rocks and debris of the Crag. It was all so clear to him now! This was no mere crack in the ground, a happenstance of geology. This was a Sign From God. “My father’s doom found him when he strayed from the Covenant between God and Urgaun,” Fasolt intoned as he stripped off his clothing and began to pick his way through the rubble. “It was from the surface that his doom came. It was on the surface that I built my vanity of Butcherblock. But I see clearly now, as if the darkened cavern was suddenly illuminated with the light of a thousand torches!”

Among the victims of the Crag was the tent city of the Dwarven Army. Great sheets of cloth lay torn and splattered amid the chaos of the Crag. Quickly finding a suitable length, Fasolt fashioned the dirt-stained material into a robe. “We have all been mistaken for these years. Myself, the ten years spent in error at the Butcherblock. For my people, for the Sons of Urgaun, it has been centuries. God meant us not to walk beneath the Sun!” He raised his fist to the sky in defiance, his voice rising also. “The Sun! That fickle star, that daily cedes its reign in heaven to the ghoul-smile Moon! Harbinger of evil things! God has other strong sons to fight for the face of Aegis. It falls to us, the Dwarves, to battle evil in her heart. From the caverns whence we came, to the caverns we must return. To the Sons of Urgaun falls the task of carrying light to the places within the earth where the Sun is never dreamed of. The Call of the Crag must be heeded! We must cease our blasphemous imitations of God’s other sons and reclaim the realm that was given to us!

“HEED ME, Sons of Urgaun! The dawning of our glory is close at hand, if only we brave the endless subterranean night!”

[Flynn 31]

Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.

[Vinnyvedivici 45]

((great read!))

[Starsweeper 1]

((your an amazing writer, ever think about it as a job?))

[Thrym 188]

Friend. I agree with you whole heartedly. Meet me some time in Urguan. My name is Thrym and I would talk more of this with ye. We were not meant to live on land. To journey on the surface is needed now-a-days for trade and business and war but not for living. We Dwarves are meant to live in the Earth not in imitations of what men build. ((great read))

[williewonka01 45]

*King Algrim reads fasolt's book in the library*

*He then sends a man to bring this note to Fasolt.

A great read lad! Ye made many points, one of which being the need to live in the great caves of Kal'Urguan! Their are many clans, and blood relations, but we all have one thing in common. We are all decedents of Urguan. His plans fer the dwarfs nation of Kal'Urguan were to continue to expand the great caves within Aegis. As the crag expands we feel no close relation to the above ground town, and let it fall. I will be looking fer someone powerful, with great magic. He shall bring the above ground back to its original state. We then enter the great halls of Kal'Urguan and work together, to conquer our mines, and work together. Yer writings inspired me to be a greater King! Come to Kal'Urguan with us ye will find a place their. I know the problems these days are lack of jobs, and lack of minas. I will be attempting to fix both of these. Spread the word, all dwarfs shall come together within our great halls of Kal'Urguan!

[Boomack21 124]

Moved to the Great Library. It shall be sorted into appropriate category shortly.