I still remember the day me and my mates first set foot in the Imperial Palace. We all were young dwarves then that had never even set foot outside of Haggrum, so the journey to, and the arrival at Keizefurt had been quite the adventure for us youngsters. We of course did not show our amazement, we had been sent to the Maecktian capital for professional business important to the standing of dwarves within the Empire. The emperor had summoned the best young warriors from Haggrum to serve as his imperial guard, so we acted like cold professionals instead of the awestruck youngsters we really were.
At first, I did not know why the emperor would want dwarves as his guards, but then again I did not know much of anything going on outside of the Haggrum city walls. I also did not speak the Maecktian tongue at the time which made explaining things to me rather difficult. Only after two years at court did I understand why the emperor wanted dwarves for guards instead of human knights. Apparently the emperor’s father, emperor Engelbert, had fought a war against his own aristocracy for reasons still unclear to me. In this war he had been betrayed by his own imperial guard who had captured him and offered the imperial throne to the cousin of the emperor, Dietrich, I think the cousin’s name was. Emperor Willander freed his father from this predicament and he eventually won the war.
The entire imperial guard was put to death in various painful and elaborate ways as befits traitors, but Willander, who had become emperor after his father abdicated, had become rightly paranoid of human guardsman who always seem to have certain political ambitions, so he looked elsewhere for protection. Luckily for him his grandfather had vassalized our lands in the last years of his reign. Us dwarves were, and still are, regarded as skilled loyal warriors with little interest in human politics, so it was hardly surprising that emperor Willander II approached King Lucius IV of Haggrum for protection.
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At the time there was much argument among our elders about whether we should send the greatest warriors of our magnificent city to the capital of the foreign invader, yet after much negotiating and a large amount of Maecktian gulden, I and two hundred of my mates were sent south to protect the emperor of Maeckt.
That is a decade ago now, and me and most of my comrades still hold our posts. In these years I have learned that the imperial court is a pit of vipers. The aristocrats, the courtiers, the knights and the sorcerers are all overly ambitious sycophants that lie and cheat for higher social standing. In our early years we had been approached uncountable times by lowlifes who attempted to bribe us, to have us spy on the emperor for them. They were all denied and arrested shortly after for treason. We have been called fanatically devoted to our emperor ever since because humans apparently cannot fathom that we would not defile our honour in favour of a hefty coin purse. The value of honour and loyalty is lost on you humans but not on us, we will guard the emperor even if hell itself was coming down on him, because we swore an oath we would.
-Claudius, Imperial Guardsman, 1660
They look like statues with those masks on. Small steel statues. Back in the day the Guard had helmets sure but you could still see their face. It was part of the legend of the Guard. You could see them and everyone knew at least ten Guardsman by name. They were heroes of the Empire that every woman wanted to be with and every man wanted to be like. The epitome of knighthood. Nowadays no one knows the names of the Emperor’s Dwarves. I doubt anyone outside of the imperial family have ever seen their faces.
-George Bruggen, Courtier, 1554