Skyhold - Annals of Opal

Deepbull - Cavern Lily - A Cat - The Serpentine - Massacring Hordes by Fire - Annelidman Invasion - A Captive's Story - Tyranny of Composite Lifeforms - Memory Runes - The Heart of Skyhold

I have taken to roasting deepbull over the open fire. This is the most delicious thing on or below the earth; I defy you to defy me, and invite you to test your theory. Come upon my weepingwood door and I will roast deepbull for you; bring ten friends and there will be unanimous agreement. 

But surely you serve it as part of a meal? In some thin stew, or baked hard as plaster to be served with oodles of watercress in a great mound of honeyed sweet potato? Ahhh, no. I add one thing: refined rock salt. That is enough, and it isn’t what makes the meat. Proper sizing, turning, and timing makes the meat! 

There are, however, several addendums that I may proffer in the indulgence. The first is butter, every bit of deepbull accompanied by soft, cool butter, as much as half the size of the piece of meat, up to matching it if you have a powerful lust for butter.

The second is a particular cavern lily I’ve discovered, one that grows only in mucous of mercury (a rare natural reagent found in pools in absolutely lightless caverns). Mucous of mercury is itself very useful, and beloved by beasts of rock and metal, which is how I discovered this lily in the first place (picture a spined, many-limbed starfish made of moonlight). I bit it to test the texture and found it imparted a curious effect that I’ve since utilized in my cooking. A piquant flavor that almost stabs the tongue, accompanied by a twisting of the mouth and a watering inside the cheeks; a slight burn all around the mouth and in the chest when you’ve eaten it, followed by an amusing numbness across the face which makes it a great pleasure to rub one’s own forehead. The combination of the savory beef, the richness of the fat and butter, and the curious piquancy of the garnished lily make for an experience more simply delicious than any frippery cooked up by the coatimen.

It also may impart extreme lust, but I haven’t been able to tell if this is a symptom of the lily or of a very-needed side of deepbull.

—

A cat has been coming to my door lately. He doesn’t meow or scratch at the lacquerwood, which would see him ending up in the fire, but simply sits upright so that when I open it, he is peering coldly into my face. 

At first I tried to please him with bits of melon, which are grown at Saunasea Meadow by a friend of mine (who shades them using little straw hats). The cat loved the melon so much that he would wait quietly for me to check the door, but then grow animated as a botfly and begin jumping up and down, literally screaming as soon as I begun to cut the melon, so consumed he was with lust for the fruit. He would devour it, purring while eating like a mechanical buzzsaw on the other side of a water aperture.

Well, this lasted until I was testing my deepbull recipe for a dozen runescribes and initiates, when I got a premonition and decided to check the door. There was the cat, eyes more animated than I had ever seen them before. You can guess the rest. I put down a dish of roast, fatty deepbull beside a dish of diced melon. He went straight for the deepbull and didn’t let up till the remnants were slathered across my tiles. He licked his own face for… thirty minutes?

Nature has rendered judgement. 

Several of the initiates roasted melon over the fire after our deepbull. The coatimen would be prouder of that than the ancestors, I can tell you that! 

—

The serpentine has bought our civilization another thousand years of artisanry and delving. The physical and psychological effect it has on invaders has to be seen to be believed, particularly when they’re targeted across a relatively steep slope.

Once, a bunch of goatmen came to raze our surface crops (using their mouths) and were caught by guards in an idyllic crevice with a standing pool; they were all poised on a cliff face, standing on little cracks and protrusion, hopping down slowly as they do, and the team carted out a serpentine loaded with grapeshot and blew the goatmen off the rockwall.

I’m told that the echoing from the steep walls of the crevice, combined with the mighty bleating of the goatmen, gave the impression of being carried by a divine mosquito; a hair-raising beast-chorus that gradually grew more melodious as the goatmen died away, with spikes here and there when a guard stuck his bill threw a less-wounded goatman. Finally there was breathing, hissing, like the pool was a hot spring, and then there was nothing.

A horde of well-armed goatmen, dispatched with a single blast of a serpentine. Obviously they were caught at a disadvantage, but in my grandfather’s time it wouldn’t have gone that way; he couldn’t have hidden a trebuchet in the crevice even though a giant square stone would have squished plenty of them. A bolt-repeater could have picked them off, but the best ammunition would have been alchemical glassball starshot, which is unreliable and far more resource-intensive than the powder needed to discharge a serpentine.

Deep hordes make a fine meal for a serpentine as well, though less-so than a whole bunch of enemies on a hillside. When you blast an oncoming horde, the ones up front are turned to sauerkraut, and their bones become munitions, razoring through people behind them; you can see them spiking out of bodies like little stalagmites, all painted red by the front rows; you get a very good mowing effect along the front of the horde, which tends to arrest its impetus.

Goblins don’t care if their companions get mulched, but an animalman attack can be bent in half by a single good blast, assuming they aren’t antmen or something else unholy. The first ones get obliterated, and then the balls that went high fall all over the horde behind them, knocking them down in a nice teardrop; alas, if enemies are fighting in shallow ranks, a lot of the blast is going to go into the ground in front of and behind them (though it’s something to see a shieldwall after a blast and the survivors are staggering their with their shields splintered all through their bodies).

That’s to say nothing of the bombard; we need to get it so that we can target big, mobile beasts with a bombard, but so far they’re more lobbers than point-targeters. Bolt-throwers are still the weapon of choice for many kinds of engagements, such as when you’re shooting it out with goblins on distant gorgebridges or cardinalmen are trying to surround you in a canopy.

—

The annelidmen have established a toehold in one of our subsurface river pumping outstations; I’m not sure what they expect to achieve. Our rangers haven’t seen them attempting to use the pumps or wheels. They’re attempting to fortify the station with ichor-bile, but so far the guardpost personnel who’ve converged on them have handily kept them from fortifying by pouring warm caulking oil down the nearest stairwells. The annelidman gut resin melts quite easily, and I’m told that the annelidmen who are sent to re-establish it are blackened and curled up by the invisible heat of the purple-burning caulking solution.

A few annelidman teams have tried to ascend the stairs to attack the caulking positions, but have been killed without a fight when they encountered the poison fumes and choking smoke. An engineering force is on its way, and they’ll have to determine whether they’ll be able to redirect the local riverbranch network to flush out the annelidmen, their ichor, and the smoke damage, or whether we’ll have to march in on them.

The concept of having a shorter life than we dwarves do is ghastly to me, because it seems to beckon people into the kind of sacrifice the annelidmen are undergoing, when they should be savoring what little life they have.

—

An annelidman was captured by crafty rangers; they set up a complex trap with aid of their runescribe, catching the lead annelidmen in a force matrix while dumping and igniting the caulking solution on those that followed, though I’m told it was a hair-raising flight to get back up the stairwell network before the force bands were undone by the heat and poison smoke.

Despite their apparent fanaticism, the annelidman was more or less immediately willing to talk if we agreed to dispatch any annelidman witnesses; whether to believe his narrative is an open question, but at the very least, perhaps we can infer something from his story.

The annelidmen of the Twelve Teeth (twelve holds in stalactites and stalagmites) recently excavated statue-pylons thought to have been erected by their ancestors, representing forgotten gods of a bloodier era. These were, in fact, either shapeshifters or colonial forms of life that had been congealed from all of the varied antediluvian advisors in the three-thousand year history of a precursor, non-annelidman civilization that inhabited the same zone, forming, essentially, three averaged antediluvian potentates embodying the most extreme traits of their composite forms, both physical and mental.

The first was the extremed average of a sphinx, a wraith, and a sentient wicker man.

The second was the extremed average of mudbull phytogore, a great volcano worm, and a brain accumulator.

The third was the extremed average of a polymana gembrain dead, a dryad, and a yehwe zogbanu.

These three quickly co-opted the Twelve Teeth and their annelidman subjects with the wicker sphinx wraith taking five, the mudbull brain worm taking six, and the gembrain dryad zogbanu taking just one. The wicker sphinx wraith has been fighting an apocalyptic war with the mudbull brainworm while the gembrain dryad zogbanu has sealed the Twelfth Tooth off from the rest of the civilization; no one has been able to penetrate the confines, which are defended by tendrils breaking through the rock itself, sucking the moisture out of interlopers, but the starved corpses of annelidmen have been observed at the outskirts.

Most of our captured annelidman’s friends swore themselves to the mudbull brain worm immediately, respecting strength, and he went along with them, but was horrified by the carnage incurred in their internecine war. He was a member of the petit bourgeois and had neither an interest in a radical change of status quo, nor of selling services and power to the mudbull brain worm’s regime, and so he sent his family out in a refugee exodus caravan that was attacked and destroyed by annelidmen in service to the mudbull brain worm, who then added the neural tissue of the entire caravan to their master’s body.

Our captive survived by simply not talking about what had happened, but grew to hate his civilization. When his band of assignment (marked by mandatory anal tattoos) was ordered to launch a probing attack on our underbelly, he knew he was doomed and simply sprung on the only sliver of daylight when he was captured.

Is it true? If there is a mudbull brain worm, it would be clever enough to send in a mole to help destroy us; what is certain is that we can’t allow any dwarf brain to fall into the segments of the annelidmen or their cat’s paws, lest it reveal anything about Skyhold. For now, the captured annelidman has been moved to a heavily-trapped outstation in case he’s serving as some kind of beacon for his forces.

He’s been provisioned with furs, cheese, and a book of tablets containing the stories of dwarven heroes to keep him occupied, but I have a friend who’s a maintainer for some of the runic traps, and he says the annelidman is so bent up about his family’s brains being added to the tyrant, about his suicide mission, and about betraying his comrades, that he’s practically catatonic. 

—

Runes can pour forth memories of places. It’s like opening up a spigot to what’s welling up in the walls, the past that’s flowed through the room. Spirits pour forth, or their hallucinated echoes. Sounds, screams, secrets dying to unbind themselves like ethereal kidney stones. You can paint them anywhere but a remote fissure might give you something unintelligible, mixing a passing conversation between colony-bodied magiforms from 15,000 years ago with the sounds of fifty types of claw, pseudopod, and snailfoot. A room will tend to give you the most lurid details first. Prepare for illicit lovemaking, blackhearted deals, demented rambling, and every kind of death.

The good news is that among all this unearthing, what you need to know will tend to present itself to you with a degree of urgency; that’s what it’s been waiting for. I once needed the code for a very eccentric runescribe’s vault, and I went to a walkway where he would meet with his fiancé, the temple of the Sleeper’s Guardian on one side, a great chasm on the other. I deployed the rune and of all the memories the runescribe and his beloved had made there, the first that came out was him reading a love poem to her. This contained the encoded solution to his vault. He’d put away both jewels, and tablets enumerating some of his misdeeds, for her to find after his death. 

We had to listen to the poem very closely, because in the spectral background, the Seventh Vault Quarryguard was hurling a goblin raiding force into the abyss.

—

The runes are like the music in the heart of Skyhold. 

Everywhere there are stories, admonitions, litanies of warding; a child is never alone, always in the presence of heroes, goddesses, and avuncular runescribes like yours truly. Our messages pour down the columns and soar on the vaults. Our poems are in the least of places. Move a crate and find a three-part limerick in the corner. Clean out a latrine and find a thank-you note that’s dirtier than what came before. A calligraphy poem etched in the outline of a split-up fallen foe.

Not all nonmagical runes are trivial.

Walk down an embarkation tunnel and see warnings and deeds in ceiling-steps, annals of the monsters that have been seen that way and the heroes who have slain them. See great formulas encased in single characters on the lead-shod walls of an alembic reagent refinery. And the ever-present grave sigils; look none-too-closely and see an etched drawing of a scene of valor, or love, or invention. Look closer and see the tiny lines are runes tracing the history of a dwarven life, forming the scene of a crowning moment or place of duty for the memorialized one.

We runescribes live close to death, in our battles, in our experiments, and in our responsibility to immortalize the dead. We see the ways they go and the things that made their lives. There is great care and honor written into the walls of this place, and when parts of it are crushed, it is like part of our bodies have been scratched away, and yet it is growing, adding souls, expanding all the time, like a living thing in flower. 

Skyhold - Annals of Moonstone

I am the envy of warriors.

Eyes, tongues, skins, bones, noses, hands, and teeth have fallen at my blow.

The edge of my ax is adamantine, steel-blue, as glossy as gemstone, burning the eyes like lightning when it flashes amongst fire. The head is sinew-steel, wrought with images of heroes graven down to their last hair, as if I held a mausoleum on the flat of my ax. They bathe in blood, and witness my deeds. 

There is Alangar, he pulled the tentacle-tongue from the beast at Blasphemer’s Barrow.

Here’s Granjar, he twisted off the Poacher Lord’s head and ensured one of his stolen bulls defecated it in the morning.

And Assandin, who cut the tensioned sphinxgut of Earthsever, a trebuchet which stood half our mountain’s height. It was the centerpiece of a skinkman invasion, and when Assandin cut the cord it bisected, decapitated, or eviscerated three hundred skinkmen. We could see the guts in great pools like green and purple alchemy.

The haft of my ax is bound in spiderskin, and the shaft is a stone so light and strong it was a blessing, and not a work of nature; I found it in a trance and have never been able to locate it again. I have engraved every surface with runes, falling into the spiderskin in the manner of cascading magma, and when I rub my thumb along them I hear poems, chants of courage, and sullen, brutal, iron-hard spite-verse to gall a universe which has levied so many hordes against our domain. 

It is the month of Moonstone. I am Ineth-Solam Gostzugob-Allaseror, runescribe of Skyhold, and these are my annals.

Doors of Weeping Wood - Accidental Explosion Runes - An Adderman Kingdom - The Living Roots of Skyhold - Torturers in the Deep - Giant Geodes - Illuminated Chasms - On Splitting Skulls - At War with the Annelidmen - Our Bombard Makes Slick Slopes - My Golden Wounds - Aping Annelidman Art - My Love Sasanna - Wine-Thief - Punishment: Lubricator - Lubrication: Goblins vs Mothmen - A Most Peculiar Human - Not His King, but His Thing - A List of Conquered Beasts - Reciprocity with the Mushroom Men - Dwarven Armor - The Flesh Fortress Rune

My domicile stands behind two doors made of lacquered wood. I wrought the planks by the river-pools at the hem of the mountain and carried them up to the Gates of Cave Ivory, camping beneath them at night. When I cut the trees they wept and almost moaned, and their natural lacquer still shines, guiding guests to my door in the darkness of the purplestone, even in times of lean resin.

I see this gleam when I walk to my workshop, a circular chamber I built so tall that I cannot see its upper boundaries. I channel, channel in silence and noise. I believe that something swirls in my chamber like a dowsing rod, a magnetstone, a stellar body. Things are born in the heart of a storm, and this is the room where my finest runes come into being.

My most practical runes arise from necessity. Like many runescribes before me, I invented my first explosive rune by corrupting another one.

Skyhold has its roots at the bottom of the earth, outstations where pressure and heat force a sojourner to call upon the might of heroes to go on. These hells cleanse the soul, they bring seasons of dew and melody into your bones just by dint of transcending their agony.

I was once called to go with the fire-aligners to one of these depths and make sure the ley was not spasming under our newest pressure forge.

As it happens, fissures had broken into the rock, great flat kingdoms where addermen basked in permanent ecstasy, isolated from all existence. They baked in a fissure-oven a meter tall and a thousand leagues in width, but when they smelled us on the wind of the sulphuric flues, they came on in numbers comparable to the grains of a pulverized rock.

The stairs up to Skyhold were narrow. I bade the fire-aligners pull the magma up through the rock to us and they did. The addermen in front were pushed on by the surge behind them no matter how they tried to stop and were roasted with the most delicious scent and a sound that still makes me smile to this day. The burning addermen fell so thick and fast across the magma that the rest were able to push across them to us.

The fire-aligners prepared for self-immolation, but I sent them up behind me, drawing runes of the welcoming song on the walls; a missed note or two in my inscription might have simply given them bad dreams, but I made it so discordant I thought it would drive them to devour each other. In fact, it blew up so irately, razored adderman bones danced across the chamber in both directions and left very few capable of slithering before the ceiling collapsed.

We drew ranks and hewed down those who remained on our side of the cave-in, and then headed back to Skyhold, savoring the thought of the addermen roasting like chasmtrout on a hot stone as the magma wept up into their little kingdom.

We were, however, chased by the dust of pulverized rock, which I blew out whenever I sneezed for a few weeks after

This stairwell was one tiny branch of a vast venous body of walkway chambers that dangle beneath Skyhold. These things go unpatrolled for aeons, for the most part, allowing all kinds of oddities to wander through or take root.

There are psychiatric beasts that grow like vent-fed fungus on the nightmares of monsters and the zealots and anchorites of the underworld fastnesses.

I believe that channeling by sapient ore gives birth to such beasts, fed into existence as a defense mechanism, or perhaps as an actualization of their highest purpose.

Our enemies in the deep visit tortures upon their captives far worse than those on the surface. Finding the aftermath of their deeds might blind you, or drive you into a berserk that you will never leave. Expeditions intended to deal with such things must be led by dwarves who are old, hard, and grimmer than stone. This is the use of sullen, unspeaking old tyrants.

Not all minerals are taciturn or filled with evil thoughts. Giant geodes make for wonderful chambers. Their exteriors can be surfaced with engraved or polished tile, but the roof of such a dome maintains its patina of natural expression, a reminder that you are not witnessing an artifice but something transcendent, given meaning by its presentation.

There is little of that in the vast chambers of natural night, unless they are illuminated by beastfat, for example. Then they shine like a heaven of prisms. This is a sight that cannot be replicated, and any time a new gulf is to be analyzed for harvesting, you must go and bear witness if you haven’t seen such a thing before. Ten thousand colors and as many textures, upright skeletal fossils, spines of crystal, dripping liquid gemstone, dripping life from the flues transforming whatever it touches, oceans of metal, silver or copper, standing rods of titanium or plutonium; the majesty of things cloaked from the eye can defy description. Of course, it is also a riot of skittering, starving things, which elucidates the loveliness of a polished geode; it presents the unstructured expression of nature without the aspect that must be destroyed. 

There are good things in the deep besides minerals and fungus, of course, good things even in dangerous places. At some point I will tell you of my molluscman torc, or the giant gharial cloak that I brined, gilded, and wore for many years… and the associated toothmarks that I wear to this day (also gilded).

Ah… I have split the skulls of so many creatures.

Ravenmen stick their tongues out sideways when you cleave their skulls in twain and make an electrifying squawk, even after you’ve already chopped their brains. How they fall over with their legs sticking awry is comical, and makes them easy to hurl into their oncoming comrades. Goblin skulls tend to collapse when you cleave them, and the brains often do come out the ears, even when the head is cloven and not struck through with a mace or some such. Their red eyes bulge out like meadow cherries and their purple brains spill from their ears with streams of blood, and if you cut their heads off after, the split halves will often drop on either side of the body.

Goblin helms are cast iron, and can be dented by fissuremetal warheads, more rarely by steel. My ax, of course, can cleave them like I’m hacking at salmon. Goblins often present themselves to you in full armor as if to say, “So there!” They then carry themselves back to their lines limping once you give them a swat through their breastplates, and their comrades hiss and throw things at them before they fall and perish.

Avianmen are cleverer, much flightier, and will skirmish you to death if you don’t have a way to reach them. I have seen great-hearted dwarves bleed out their lifeblood out under tiny darts and stars of metal, and it is a criminal waste if there ever was one. Any expedition to the surface, or to caverns with even a hint of wind, must be equipped with bolt-throwers and serpentines, ideally with naphtha gas. You can crush avianmen with your bare hands, but not if you can’t reach them. 

Serpentmen tend to lose their eyes and stick their tongues way out when you chop their heads, but other creatures just go blank and sort of gape at you. I once cut a pangolinman, of all things, and he just looked as if he’d been hypnotized. No sign of blood, just my ax standing a hand’s breadth deep in his head. I don’t know if he was a mercenary or an auxiliary, but he was with a motley group at the bottom of the mountain. That was the first time I was dropkicked by a hareman and I do not recommend it; that was also the first and only time I tumbled uphill. A worthy memory, though I couldn’t laugh without agony for a month.

—

I’ve just returned from an encounter with the annelidmen. it’s impossible to tell them apart from their pack animals except by their size. The whole affair of witnessing them emerge from a cavern is like seeing parasites come out of a goat after it’s been treated with skyrwort. Bundles of twisting rope hanging and pouring from an overburdened portal.

The annelidmen create works of ravishing beauty, intricate three-dimensional maps of their domains that are like golden trees lacking definite trunks, apples of moonstone and quartz marking their fortifications and nurseries, but the creatures themselves writhe and wave around like newborn pupae. Their significant personalities wear golden and azure armor which lessens the effect, but the common infantrymen wear segmented bands of mail that slide across themselves, adding to the impression of seeing severed tendons or flatworms emerging from a creature’s biology.

The fact that they are so close to the ground when in motion presents a tactical problem. I laid down a blasting rune, and the shrapnel of their bones and armor maimed or slew a few who ran along the ceiling, but by and large the impetus of the blast was lost in the open air.

On the upside, a warrior can wind up for a mighty slash before the annelidman can get upright, retrieve their weapons, and cut him. I was summoned from a bath in a mineral stream and fought wearing only sandals and salts in my hair, but whenever a foe reared up before me I chopped him and and generally cut his weapons in half along with his body.

I was so covered in their blasted ichor that I nearly lost my ax, but the spiderskin gives wonderful traction. One of them wrapped me up, hoping to bind me and stop my ax-work, and he had iron barbs on his legs that cut me in two hundred places and made me rain blood, but Uzzazaz laid a pole serpentine across my shoulder and blew my compressor’s head off (nearly deafening me in the process!). His smokepowder held troglodyte bile and the annelidmen bundling up in front of me melted like overburnt candles, armor and all; they still tried to wave when they were almost flat, all and then they held their peace.

By the end you couldn't differentiate them; perhaps this is how new layers of flesh naphtha are born in the earth? 

The annelidmen didn’t last much longer; when they tried to retreat, the great mass bound up in the cavern got stuck (reminding me of myself after too much pupacheese), and we gave them some help with a bombard some dwarves had hauled from a nearby chasmbridge; when the thing went off I thought the blast had broken my jaw, but the giant glossy globe we fired punched a hole the size of the Graingate through the trapped annelidmen and rolled down across the ones behind, who’d been trying to pull their comrades free; it created such a slick of squished corpses that a bunch of the young dwarves went and slid down the tunnel over and over until one cut himself badly on a piece of armor or a weapon. He had to be sealed up with trundler paste, which was unfortunate, because you can do better than that; I’ve been sewn up with so much silver thread that I’m beginning to look like part of the decoration. Gilded wounds, silvered stitches, sapphires in my earlobes; if I run into opal men they’ll think I’m a long-lost cousin.

There is a place beneath the Morningwatch Shoulder Bakeries where we’re working on a project similar to the tree-maps of the annelidmen. Surfacers make globes of the earth, but we are refining a vast square of pure marble into a map of the underworld at its seventh depth.

You see, the milky night in the rest of the marble makes for a wonderful no-man’s land, and it is being refined away as we discover new features that branch out from our outstations and expeditionary redoubts; already, the Sea of Twelve-Winged Bats has been molded in burnt emerald, and the Ice Spire of the Marrowdrinkers has been tapped in with a long shard of quartz. The Fissures of Gloaming, which is the habitat of the Burrowdock Fireflymen, has been painted using polysolvent and resurfaced in amber, and the fortress of the Bridgecutter Goblins has been dutifully rendered in a big lump of cast iron with some flutes carved onto it. Hopefully we can remove that before too long...

My love Sasanna died in the collapse of the Tremarian Echo; something spoke into the Tremarian cavern, and the force of the echo dropped bedrock onto whole metropoles of Skyhold. Mining that realm out again will take ages, as fallen constructions are more prone to collapse than almost any natural rock. Treasures can be recovered, adamant weapons, but how much gild would it take to fill the broken walls and restore them to beauty? Yet we clear it out, length by length. We cannot discard works of the heart, let alone those belonging to the dwarves who were crushed in the echo. 

I go for mushroom wine.

—

Wine, wine like berries. It drenches me when it flows. When I was a lad I had a caper. I snuck into a distillery, past the giant basins and alembics of rotgut (like copper snailshells), past the beer barrels (though when our beer is young it's wonderfully sweet, tender newborn stuff like drinking veal) and on to a great plain of round stone pits where wine was making ready.

There are many such pitfields in Skyhold, some for brewing solvents and reagents and lubricants, (though our finest ingredients tend to come from the wilds, for example we cannot replicate the naphtha pits of the blacksand desert that lies beneath Chasmarix Volcano, nor the astral-pearl dyes belched by the Cloudmallow Slugmen, bless their hearts). I was looking at more wine than I could possibly drink even if I were given months to just lay in it, gulping, a prospect which even to this day makes my mouth water. I stood by each pool and smelled it until I found the ripest; can you imagine blackberry preserves made into the smoothest liquor? That was the scent of this wine, like it was buttering my nose with it.

I lay on my belly and drank, drank, drank. The pool was vast, but I swear to you I lowered the level a bit. I felt as if I was wrapped up by the fire, blessed by a goddess, filled with oracle, and fed with the finest fruit all at once, but there's no hiding a beard dipped in wine. On my way out, I was caught by the larder wards- you can imagine some caution had fled me- and I spent the next few months seconded to a lubrication crew as their gofer.

Do you know how they used to grease the gears and axles under the Forges of Grath? They had a technique... at that time, we were at war with the mothmen of the Seer's Cobweb. Now, mothmen produce a certain natural resource. Music, you say? They do, I know a ranger who would go out just to listen to them at night, but I’m not talking about the music. It was their cutworms!

Mothmen are not fatty creatures relative to, say, a pig, but their larvae are quivering with it. Seething with it! If you see a cutworm split, you can't believe that it had so much of mucous inside it! They make tempting companions for a nap, I tell you, just to lay down with your head and shoulders on it... but anyways, the mothmen would often get away when we hit their roosts, but they couldn't get all of their cutworms out, so we had a surplus.

The lubrication crew were lazy bastards, but cunning. To lubricate the machines, they just... dropped the cutworms into them. Pllssh! It was a real waste because half the fat would just drip down onto the floor, and who do you suppose had to bucket it up? Nasty stuff, not delicious like most fat, it smelled as though grass could rot badly, and their skins were damned difficult to pick up after they'd been squished between two giant gears or wrapped around a spindle fifty or sixty times; you'd haul it up and it would rip in a dozen places, delicate as gossamer but not quite as pleasant.

By the end of my service, the campaign against the mothmen was over and they had to switch to using goblins for lubrication; they're much easier to pick up after being run through a gear assembly, and it was a good way to get introduced to their insides before my first battle with them (I was in the viscera smiling away while some of my companions were turning green), but of course goblins can’t compare to cutworms as lubrication.

—

We had a human come to visit us once, and he told me something very curious. This man was a renowned swordsman and had a very long voulge that could reach the organs of gigantic beasts and hew up gangs of smaller foes. I thought, he must be fighting for his king, his country, his people, his gold. How could he be so talented without those causes at his heels?

Well, he told me something that he might not have admitted to his own people, or even to me if we hadn’t been buckets deep in fluefungus rakia: he lived to fuck supernatural creatures, especially ones of a feminine persuasion. That was all he wanted to do; go about and lay with magical creatures, assuming there was some avenue of making it happen.

I said, “Why?”

I don't think he could exactly explain it, but he told me of a single aspect, the reason he was a master swordsman; once he could defend himself, one might think his time would be better spent learning forgotten languages, or the lore of fallen empires, or of hidden fae and fairies, or of the gods and their wayward, monstrous children- or at least honing his poetry! But the thing he'd learned early on that magical beasts are not necessarily impressed by poesy and elegance alone; what they want (more often at least) are the ability to destroy magical beasts. If the warrior is also a poet, all the better, but being a warrior is the anchoring principle. So, he'd found his reason to become a mighty warrior. It wasn't his king, but his thing, as he put it to me.

Among the magical beasts he'd enumerated having sex with:

-A giant butterfly with no humanoid features (had he been able to communicate with it? He didn't say)

-A sphinx (taking it from behind while unable to see its face seems like bestiality to me)

-A dryad (splinters?)

-A ghost (he’d found a glade where the moonlight, reflecting off particular flowers, made all things ethereal, even the trees and grass)

-An icewyrm (I suspect he did it for the story rather than because he really wanted to)

-A gang of naiads who subsequently stole everything he had, even his clothes (naturally he proclaimed that it had been worth it)

-A mermaid (she simply sucked him off because it seemed she had no other suitable orifice)

-A serpent-bodied medusa-woman (unlike the mermaid, she did have at least a suitable orifice, but he said it was very awkward; they couldn't make love in missionary position because if the gaze didn't get him, the snake-hairs would)

-A female minotaur; apparently finding her had been the real problem

-A tentacle beast in a deep cavern; more of a tugjob

-A harpy; he showed me scars 

-A golem (outercourse)

-A kind of giant spider woman. He talked her into mummifying him with webs, leaving just a single part of him exposed.

I asked him if he'd ever been with a dwarf maiden, and he was very polite but said he had not had the pleasure but would of course not presume that such a thing was in the cards during his visit; honestly I don't think he was interested, which somehow both irks and relieves me. 

—

There are many things that I don't even speak of, even to other dwarves. Being a runescribe involves much introspection, attunement to things that are outside of oneself and flowing through oneself at once. Moreover it involves delving into places guided only by intuition, which is easily disrupted by companions. It's common knowledge that certain mushrooms can induce a berserker state, etc, etc, but it is less known that some mushrooms may plant mycelium in the flesh when touched, so that if you hold one for long enough, it may meld into your body and disappear.

It becomes a part of you, and suddenly your survival becomes more important to fungal entities. I have walked among them and spoken to them. They do not begrudge our mushroom wine more than we begrudge fungus beneath our toenails; just a little, and such is life. Nor do not begrudge our presence beneath the earth any more than we begrudge fungus on cheese; a genesis of useful things. 

—

One of the most important qualities in a suit of dwarven armor is that it be able to resist pressure.

The darkness is like an ether that will kill you if you breathe it in long enough. There are whole kingdoms, living and dead, in the fissures, caverns, gorges, and seas. Both living and dead kingdoms are sources of danger; danger when we mine beneath them, danger when our fingers hunger for ancient gold, danger when our shining halls burn the minds of the dead and spite the souls of the living. They come for our gems and relics so they can hide them in the dark, diminishing them to a level that they can stand.

There are creatures that were bred to be weapons of terror, bred by nature or by masters too weak for the battleline. A weapon is dangerous in the hands of a warrior, but even the twitch of a beast’s body can carry enough power to liquefy a dwarf. I have seen a potent hammerdwarf in chainmail slapped by the tail of a cholerawyrm. The next I saw of him was his heart beating free upon the stones, three dwarfs’ lengths from where he’d been hit, among his other organs. His body was made limp, limbs broken, turned inside out with all his fat chained in shattered links like the torn flesh of a fatty fish. This is a fate all too common in the darkness; while armies might march beneath banners and torches, the absolute dark is the domain of the true predators.

True dwarven battle armor is sealed and braced so that a dwarf cannot be flattened by a blow. Bones broken? Yes. Limbs twisted? Yes. Burned, acidized, gassed, powdered, drowned, mind-controlled, teleported, disintegrated? Yes. But preventing the flick of a great beast’s body from turning you into pâté opens routes of reprisal; suddenly, your adamantine ax can sever a tail, shiver a limb, or cut open a soft belly and let you climb inside, cutting and biting your way through alien guts and organs. More importantly, warrior-masters like the hammerdwarf I saw spilled like a slit bag can live, slightly brain-damaged, but wily and cautious in treating with things in the dark compared to greenhorns. A party led by a veteran that slays a great beast can spare us decades of casualties.

—

I tested a new rune today, in principle the transmission of the concept of a fortress into the skin.

We are familiar with armoring the outside, but what of pouring armor within, so that a portion of flesh becomes a fastness, a place of operations, and perhaps the source of attack and observation all at once?

The first thing to do is fuse, burn flesh, cauterize it that it is carbonized, ready for re-latticing into new forms that are flexible and porous yet strong, so that the living sinew and its motes might re-permeate the transmuted flesh, afflicted though it may be in the imposition.

This fastness-in-flesh must be shaped for its purpose, lest the body and its humours mistake the fortress for a blade being driven in, or a latrine or abattoir or bordelo-to-be. Once the rune has been shaped with bastions and ports, it is riven in, hot as fire, and its gates are opened, allowing the flow of flesh and its infinite souls into the structure. Fires are lit within, burning torches that glow from the rune and the wound, and this is how one knows that the graft has been successful.

Should a sword blow strike the top of this structure, it may crack, but it will likely hold, the flesh around it mere dirt to be plowed in comparison. A dwarf permeated by fortress runes may feel like a kingdom unto himself, his body a temple, his mind a torture chamber and where he boils up death-plans to wreak upon the enemy in his bloodily-impervious state.

But is a fortress complete if it has no means of attack? I have installed micro-runes betwixt the crenellations and found that these are apt launchers of every kind of hell-dart and evisceration-blast. Tiny shards of a metal that devours the soul across years? Yes. Heatmetal that grows in a foreign body? I tested it upon a pig, and when the tines had grown in a star throughout its flesh, I picked it up and set it upon my fireplace (though my yetiskin rug was ruined). A squirt of universal solvent? This was challenging and I began by accidentally dissolving myself to the bone just above my elbow, but I managed to capture it in a matrix of magnets running along the inside of the tower keep, and by installing a repulsion rune masked by the shielding rune at the bottom of the superstructure, I was able to create a launching mechanism by dissolving the shielding rune (and my prized alembic for making toad garum in the initial squirt, but such sacrifices are levied upon every runescribe). 

The true challenge was the automating of these runetop weapons! There is an ancient rune, from times when disease-laden fungus inched throughout the surface of the world, that when stood upon, sent the body into a lather of self-defense. No disease may touch a dwarf when stands upon the rune, though alas, protracted exposure may cause his body to devour himself until the rune is disrupted by his weeping blood. However, I found that upon standing on this rune, the fortress-fixtures in my body could be induced to target poison frogs that I had unleashed across the room. We only had a few of these since our last macawman caravan, but it was proof enough that true threats would be targeted, even outside of the body. Now how to mobilize this principle so that it can be carried in the runes of my flesh fortress…