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.