Ir'alith was both pleased and displeased.
She was displeased because the humans had behaved exactly as she had expected. Almost immediately, a large group of them had moved to the far end of the city, thinking themselves unnoticed, and begun to inscribe the runes for a massive, powerful spell.
She had recognized the runes.
They were the same ones that had trapped her for an untold time in that prison which had nearly driven her to madness.
These humans were not powerful enough to enact such a spell, but they seemed unaware of that fact.
She had not grown enraged, however. Her fears had been conquered, her thirst for blood had been sated, and she only viewed the attempt as the minor affront that it was. Her playful mood had not waned, and she had allowed them to nearly complete the working before she started to kill them one at a time, testing the limits of the new battle form that she had found herself in when her madness had finally subsided.
Ir'alith was pleased, however, because she had managed to kill all of the humans without feeling even the slightest bit of madness returning.
She was whole once more.
A few hundred had been permitted to escape so that they might spread word of her decree to the other humans, but then she had set about the city and methodically exterminated the remainder.
"Stay where you are, monster, or I'll gut him!" shouted an armored human, holding a sword to the back of a black-bearded dwarf.
How tiresome. They are capable of dishonoring themselves with such ease. The final human's head and hand separated from its body simultaneously, cut precisely by the manifestation of her will.
"Er… Thanks," grunted the disheveled-looking dwarf, eyeing her with caution. "You that Ir'alith?"
She grinned widely. "I am."
"Huh," the dwarf said, his eyes turning up and over to the giant hole in his tiny home's wall that she'd crashed through a moment earlier in pursuit of the last human she had detected within the city. "They made an announcement a couple days ago. Told us you were dead."
"I am not."
"Can see that," the dwarf said, now reaching down to lift the body off the floor.
Ir'alith raised the human's body, turned it to ash, then sent the remains to scatter on a wind outside the dwarf's home. "As I have said to others, I apologize for not reaching Khir Turuhm sooner." She inclined her head slightly to the stunned dwarf. "Be well," she said before bounding up and out through the hole in the wall that she had created with her entrance.
The suns felt brighter and warmer than they had the day before.
I must speak again with that one… She searched the city, locating the astral essence of a certain dwarf she had rescued from several humans, then skipped across blocks of compressed wind energy in his direction. The humans must be prevented from retaking the city.
The red-bearded dwarf was already at work hustling a small team of dwarves towards the gates in the massive wall surrounding the city.
Ir'alith dropped down near the gates. "The humans have been eradicated, Valgud," she called out.
Cheers erupted from the dwarves following along with him as well as some of the more curious ones who had begun roaming around already.
"What about the explosives?" Valgud Flintbrow, some sort of leader among his people, called back. His squad reached the gate, and he waved them by. "Utdrick, Glastrim, take the one by the base. Lokrugit, Westrer, the one near the top. Hurry!"
The question and his attitude caused her to grow more alert. "Explosives?"
Valgud nodded quickly, his expression turning to worry. "I figured you could sense that sorta thing. The humans, they set up devices to explode throughout the city, ready to be detonated by spell from afar. We didn't know if we'd found them all, so we could never—"
"Humans," Ir'alith snarled, feeling regret at allowing any of these ones to leave. She sprang into the air once more, spreading her senses deeply throughout the city with the intent of detecting any and all magic in use.
The city was too large to cover so completely while she maintained her focus on the barrier that covered her homeland, however, so she settled for half.
She scowled. Three. Two were present here, so one remains.
A gate opened.
This was not the time to be enjoying the feel of the suns.
She dropped through the gate and into a building, immediately spotting a box that had some form of enchantment upon it. I should not spend my time carelessly. She created a simple barrier of compressed earth around the box, surrounded it with her will, then filled the inside with fire.
The explosion was contained and its sound muffled, but Ir'alith had already begun shifting her astral sense to the other half of the city. Three others remain.
She repeated the process, harmlessly triggering each of the devices in turn.
Too simple. The humans are more clever than this…
She considered the possibility. The city had three bombs in each half of the city, with two in the entrance gate and the remaining four forming a square. There were no others within the city.
On the surface.
Ir'alith gated in at the part of the mountain that the city stretched inside. It was the limit to how far she could see, and there was nothing farther in that she could use to position herself.
Dwarves had begun milling about now that they were no longer overseen by their human taskmasters. Some who were nearest stopped to point at her, some let out cheers, and others ran in fear to nearby buildings that were constructed of stone and hardened clay.
Ir'alith ignored all of this, searching only for one of the mine shafts which led below the surface. I grew careless! She strengthened herself, increasing her speed, and darted up over the heads of the astonished dwarves and a building to reach the hole in the ground that she had detected. She propelled herself down the shaft with a powerful kick off another block of compressed wind energy.
A platform containing several dwarves was rising below her.
She fell through a hastily-constructed gate, continuing to stretch her senses out as she delved deeper.
There.
Another gate formed below her, and she exited into a dimly-lit tunnel, landing with her tail to make herself instantly ready for combat.
The familiar dinking sound of bullets erupted.
"Humans!" she called out, her eyes glowing green.
----------------------------------------
She had slain the humans remaining in the tunnel, who had been too inept to detonate the much larger device that they had been attempting to trigger when she arrived, then gated herself back to the surface using the spell she had placed on the severed head as an anchor.
Another discussion with Valgud had yielded a few minor tasks with which she was capable of assisting.
First, she had opened the cages for all the dwarves who had been imprisoned for insurrection. It was a simple task for her, but one which would have taken the dwarves some time to manage given the sheer number of those who had been caged.
She would never allow any to remain trapped or imprisoned as she had been.
Second, she had, in an equally simple task, reshaped the city walls to encompass the massive fields outside where the crops and cattle that provided sustenance for the dwarves were kept. The walls were tall, raised by a great number of human mages working in concert, but a matter of this nature was trivial for one not bound by the need for mana or other such ridiculous limitations.
She chuckled as she recalled a wide-eyed dwarf flamecaster following along after her asking how much mana she possessed and whether she was tired from manipulating so much magical energy.
She was magic. How could her own existence cause fatigue?
Third, the workshops. The humans had constructed walls and cages and supervising platforms to facilitate their monitoring of the dwarves as they toiled. She returned them to the ground and melted them into scraps for reuse. Now the dwarves could work as they pleased where they pleased.
If they pleased.
Now she was again beside Valgud as they walked through the burgeoning city.
"That's probably about all we need your help with right now," the dwarf said. "We've already got the forges running again at capacity to smith more guns and bullets and other weapons for defense."
"It will be enough?" Ir'alith asked, holding her helmet under her arm.
Valgud, seeming considerably more composed than he had the last time she had left him, ran both hands through his braided beard. "Should be. We're trying out a new process in the workshops to further improve efficiency now that our crafts're our own again."
"Process?" I know little of dwarven crafting. Papa had only said that they created the strongest weapons and armor for us in the past before their cities fell, but those times were before the gun and the car.
"Foreman, I have the estimates!" called another bearded dwarf that had just rushed over, whom, despite the deep voice which seemed typical for dwarves, Ir'alith suspected to be female.
"Oh, done already, Lod? What do we have…" Valgud accepted a small stack of papers and skimmed through them. His thick, red eyebrows rose, and he began nodding. "This is—"
"We extrapolated based on the last fifteen minutes of operation," the other, blonde dwarf said.
Valgud let out a whistle. "That's fuckin' fast!"
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Ir'alith stared down at the papers, unable to read them. "Good news?"
He let out a laugh. "At this rate we should be able to hold against a good-sized force after a couple hours. In a week, they'll need a hero or two and an army."
Ir'alith frowned. "How can you be certain?"
"Nice work, Lod," Valgud said, passing the papers back. "I'll be back to the workshop soon. You make sure and let everyone know—"
"Rest if it's needed, aye," said Lod, blowing upwards on her mustache. "Nobody's gonna be restin' any time soon, Valgud. It's been decades we've been wantin' our shops back. Old Thuzzukara's over with her home brew now, toppin' everyone up."
Valgud tugged on his beard and seemed to grow annoyed. "No drinking in the workshop!"
"Don't be such a wetbeard," Lod said with a harrumph. "Nobody's lookin' to get sloshed. We're just celebratin' a bit."
Ir'alith smirked. Yes, Papa spoke often of this.
Valgud waved the other dwarf away, then ran his fingers through his mustache. "Can't be too hard on 'em," he muttered.
"What is this process of which you spoke?" Ir'alith asked again, her curiosity piqued. The capability to create such a level of defenses in such a short amount of time is impressive.
Valgud slowed, then stopped his walk since they had again reached the main gate. "It's, uh…" He looked up at her. "How much do you know about mechanics?"
"I know nothing."
Valgud nodded. "Probably not much use for it with you," he muttered. "Well, it's like this: when you're making something like a gun, it's not like a sword or a spear or an axe. There's a lot of parts that go into each one, and they need to be assembled just so, or it won't function."
Ir'alith nodded. "The concept is easy enough to understand. Each of your craftsmen gathers a group of the needed parts and assembles a gun."
Valgud nodded again. "Just like that," he said. "That's how we've been building things for years under the humans. But then, a couple years ago, I, uh…" He scratched at his beard seeming embarrassed. "I ended up getting sent away to a castle in Charus to teach this human girl. A princess."
Ir'alith understood. "She tortured you."
The dwarf nodded along absently for a moment, then looked up and shook his head quickly. "No, it wasn't like that," he said, holding his hands up for emphasis. "This girl was smart. Smarter than me by half, I'd wager, maybe smarter than any dwarf I've ever met. Anything I taught her, she soaked it up like a dwarf in a keg. Then she'd start improving on it. After a while I started teaching her about some of our crafting techniques, just bricks and ingots here and there to see what she'd say. The day after I told her how guns were made, she came back and asked why we wouldn't speed things up by having a system where the parts were separated out along a line of dwarves, with each one assembling a specific piece along the way."
Ir'alith tried to imagine such a crafting process.
"She called it a line of assembling," Valgud said, shaking his head. "Genius. We were always just doing things how we'd done them for years, and she thought of that in a day. Now we can make guns for ourselves ten times faster."
Ir'alith continued to think on it. It seems as though there should be some drawback to such an impersonal method of craftsmanship, but…
"When I left, she was imagining some way to combine a steam engine with magic as its fuel source," Valgud mused. "Now that's a crazy—"
"A magic-and-steam-powered engine?" Ir'alith interrupted, the description reminding her of something. "Not a car?"
"Could be used in a steamcar if it existed," Valgud said, shrugging. "She just came bursting in while I was packing on that last day, started talking my ear off about it. I told her it was a waste of time—no way a steam engine could withstand that kind of f—"
"She completed it," Ir'alith said, feeling certain. There could not be two such vehicles from his description.
Valgud blinked.
"I have seen this car," Ir'alith said slowly, remembering once more the rush of excitement that the car's speed had granted her. "I have gone for a drive with it."
Valgud blinked again.
"It was fast," Ir'alith said. "I had fun." She grinned, and her skin turned slightly pink.
Valgud frowned mightily and began combing his hands through his beard. "Fuck me in a vat of molten—"
"What?"
"Er, nothing." He blinked again, then one more time. "Just…"
"Is it so impressive?" Ir'alith asked.
"I'd love to know how she managed it," Valgud said quickly with growing excitement in his voice. "I taught her about thermodynamics, and aerodynamics, and all sorts of things, but how did she manage to keep the engine from exploding? And how would a steamcar like that stay on the ground with so much wind passing under it, and how could it even be driven at such a speed without blinding the driver, and—"
"There were crude glyphs of reinforcement spread across the car," Ir'alith recalled. "I know not how she drove it, but I created a simple wedge ahead of the car using wind energy, and—"
Valgud sighed in disgust and threw both hands into the air. "Of course," he said, shaking his head in annoyance. "Fuckin' magic solves all the hard problems."
"It does," Ir'alith agreed.
The dwarf let out another, deeper sigh. "Right. Well, I've lost interest in the idea, but give her my regards if you—"
"I cannot," Ir'alith said, shaking her head and feeling certain that she had now rectified a significant misunderstanding in her mind. "She is dead."
Valgud's eyebrows raised. "She… But how? She—"
"I was told that she was killed by a queen," Ir'alith said. "If she was a princess as you say, then perhaps she was slain by her own mother." Her lip curled in disgust. "Humans are ever the most wretched of creatures."
Valgud put a hand on his forehead and closed his eyes, turning his head down. "Fuck," he said quietly. He remained silent for a short while. "Isemeine Charus was her name," the dwarf said, picking his head up again, a look of anger in his eyes. "She treated me with the same respect that any of the forgelings here would, not once making me feel that she saw me as less than herself—than anyone. If her kin have truly killed her, then they'll know our fury well beyond what we already owed them." He clenched a fist in front of his beard, and it shook from his rage.
Ir'alith nodded slowly. "Isemeine Charus. I will remember this name."
"Fuckin' idiots," Valgud muttered, "why would they kill the smartest…" He sighed again and went silent, frowning down at the ground.
He held great respect for this human. Would that I could have met her. "Is there nothing more with which I can be of help?" Ir'alith asked, growing eager to be on her way if her presence would yield no further benefit.
A car drove towards them over the smooth, stone-covered ground and stopped a short distance away. It was larger and more block-like than the car Ir'alith was now certain had been crafted by and belonged to Isemeine Charus—Mina—and it moved much more slowly, but she recognized the form of such things now.
"Foreman Valgud, we—" the newly-arrived, black-bearded dwarf called, cutting off and clamping…his mouth shut as he stared up at Ir'alith. "Ah, um, I…"
"What is it, Gramruck?" Valgud said, seeming suddenly tired.
"Er… Nothing," Gramruck said.
"Don't make me swage you into telling me," Valgud said, giving the dwarf an annoyed look.
"Well, uh…" The dwarf looked up at Ir'alith again. "We were trying to break into the storehouses like you said, but the warding's more powerful than we expected."
"Storehouses?" Ir'alith asked.
"It's not a—"
"No, I would be pleased to assist," Ir'alith said.
Valgud and Gramruck exchanged a look.
"It's…" Valgud hesitated.
"We can't get to the booze!" Gramruck blurted out. "They put all the good stuff into—"
"Chew your beard!" Valgud hissed, his face flushing behind his beard.
Ir'alith chuckled. "I will rescue your booze. In which direction are the storehouses located?"
"They're over there," Gramruck said, pointing away from the gate.
Too many structures. I cannot discern it. Ir'alith frowned.
Then she looked down at Valgud again. "Show me." She wrapped her tail around him and bounded quickly up into the sky on blocks of compressed wind energy in the direction that Gramruck had pointed.
"AGH!" Valgud bellowed. "AT LEAST WASH ALL THE FUCKIN' BLOOD OFF FIRST!"
----------------------------------------
Ir'alith stepped aside, and a flood of cheering dwarves rushed into the final storehouse from which she had torn the doors.
Valgud stood a short distance away, still struggling to wipe away the remaining flakes of blood that circled the clothes on his torso.
"I will depart," Ir'alith announced. "If you have need of me—"
"Use the magic thingy," Valgud said, again sounding disgusted at the idea of using magic.
"You had no objection to using magic as a fuel source," Ir'alith commented.
"That's different! That's—"
"Magic is magic no matter how it is used or combined with other components," Ir'alith said.
Valgud frowned. "You sound just like her. Like Isemeine."
Ir'alith frowned back. "I have never before been compared to a human."
"First for everything," Valgud said, once more trying to get out a particularly tenacious spot of blood. "Like gettin' yanked up into the fuckin'—"
"Had the location been more precisely described, I could have created a gate."
"How fuckin' good is your hearing?"
"I can hear Lod fighting with a Thuzz over the last of a brew."
"That's halfway across the fuckin' city!"
"It was a jest."
"Oh."
Ir'alith grinned, feeling relatively unburdened for the first time in what seemed like years. "Until next we meet," she said, waving with her tail. A gate opened next to her.
"Fuck, why'd I walk you all the way to the city gate if you're just going to magic your way out!"
Ir'alith chuckled as she stepped through onto the rooftop where she had left the severed head of her enemy. She placed her helmet back onto her own head, then hefted the other head in her hand and grinned more widely.
A new gate appeared before her, and she entered it, feeling the sudden blast of heat from the volcano's shattered summit.
Her goal lay embedded in the side of the mountain some distance down the slope. Only a small portion of its glowing end was visible within the huge mass of cooling molten rock that surrounded it.
Carl will be impressed by my kill, even if I did not use the weapon he lent me. She strengthened herself in preparation. Had I used a weapon, whether it be mine or his, the battle would have ended sooner. Perhaps in a single strike were I to use a weapon such as this.
She bent down slightly and grasped the butt of the spear with her free hand and gave it a powerful pull. The spear of the primordial sea god broke free of its restraints, and she rested it over her shoulder.
How should I greet him? Ir'alith considered it. She decided to switch the hands that held each object, feeling that she looked more impressive with the spear over her right shoulder. Her hearts began to beat more quickly.
I should not be so anxious. I should not! But… She grinned, and a gate opened in front of her.
Ir'alith stepped through, taking in Carl standing next to the car. Her hearts pounded with joy. She