Hogwyn froze at the edge of the Pit and lifted his ears. At first, he’d thought the chuffing sound was a seep from the leather bellows his father had connected to the spring water sluice far above. His heart had leapt with joy and he’d felt a tingle of excitement course through him. He could finally be useful, and help father with his work, and—

The chuffing and huffing resumed. It was coming across the expanse of the Pit. The forbidden Pit, the heart of the old mine which the dwarves had called Rumbaktum and Hogwyn’s goblin forefathers had called Druqvar and his uncle called Gobblehouse after Hogwyn’s father and several cups of spud mead. The name had stuck. 

Hogwyn kneaded his fingers together and squeezed them in front of the Orogoros locket dangling at his breastbone. The huff and chuff is the first sign of the dwarf. Granny Lagger had whispered those words at the start of every bedtime story Hogwyn could remember. The second is the stench of iron and wet stone. Could he be hallucinating, or did he smell soaked granite in the air? But no, that was impossible. He was near the Pit, and the Pit only ever smelled of the cold dark drawn up from the bowels of the earth. 

Why, oh why had he come this far? He’d only meant to see the Pit. His father had brought Hagger, his sister down here, hadn’t he? And Hogwyn had been dreadfully jealous, and wanted to see it for himself. And now—

The third sign! Hogwyn held his breath. He heard the clink clink of metal on stone. The dreadful dwarf pick! Tip tip tapping on the ancient rock. Before the dwarf digs out your heart-stone, Granny Lagger would say, and devours it whole! Arrum! She’d lunge under the wool blanket and grasp his ankle and he’d shriek like a newborn gobblekin.

But Granny Lagger, as he well knew, was peeling and shucking spuds and tubers back in the Front End of the mine with her sharp sickle. And Hogwyn was by the Pit. With a dwarf! 

Gather yourself, Hogwyn chided himself. Get your pistachios in order, as Grampy Uggwart would say. There were no dwarves in the mine. Hadn’t been for many winters, and summers, and—

Hogwyn pressed up against the stone wall. On the other side of the Pit, he saw a lamp flame flicker in one of the far tunnels. Goblins didn’t use lamps. Men and dwarves used lamps. A man would not fit but by crouching in one of those old tunnels. Which only meant— 

Hogwyn spun on his heel with a squeak and bolted down the passage. The sides of his ears smacked against the sides of his freshly shaved pate and his heart lurched up towards his throat. His sister Hagger had told him a dwarf could run a league a day beneath the ground. His uncle, never to be outdone, had said a proper blooded dwarf warrior could outrun an elf. It was the momentum created by their heavy armor and massive bellies — filled with gobblekins! some part of Hogwyn was shrieking. 

His blood shivered in his veins and roared in his flopping ears. He didn’t hear the dwarf huffing behind him in the tunnel. His feet pattered against the floor and soon its slack stones gave way to packed earth warmed by the Eternal Forge and he could smell Granny Lagger’s tuber root —that meant home— and— 

A dreadful weight crashed into him and the world spun. The dwarf’s breath was a hot brand on his face and stank of iron and bog water. He was massive, huge, a mountain boar in the tunnel. His hands were beefy pink wedges and they wrapped with ease around Hogwyn’s arms. The blunt weight of him was on Hogwyn’s chest and it was baring down, down, down. Black hair sprouted from above two eyes of glistening jet buried deep in a craggy face. His was the face of death. Death! 

“Quiet yer yapping,” the dwarf rumbled. “Quiet!” 

Hogwyn snapped his mouth shut. The dwarf’s eyes regarded him with cool indifference, the sort Hogwyn had seen before only in the eagles who made their nests at the tops of the high mountain trees above the dale. He quivered beneath the dwarf’s bulk. 

“Open yer mouth to squall again,” the dwarf said. “And…”

The dwarf raised the pickaxe. 

Hogwyn stared at the wicked tip. Another scream rose in his throat. 

“My Gobble,” the dwarf said, his eyebrows crashing together in a furious tangle, “is no… good. You. How many?” 

He jabbed Hogwyn’s chest before rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in a gesture Hogwyn didn’t recognize. 

“How many?” 

A poke with the butt of the pickaxe’s handle brought Hogwyn’s senses careening back.

“Many,” Hogwyn gasped. His heart thundered against the walls of his chest. 

“How—” poke “—many?”

“Many!”

“You—”

The dwarf froze above him. 

Hogwyn heard pattering in the tunnels. It was the familiar slap-slap of goblin feet. More than one pair, by the sound. 

The dwarf let go of his arm. 

Hogwyn took in a shuddering breath. Then he was keening. He couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t stop. His shoulders were shaking and a-trembling and the dwarf’s shadow slipped off him and he scrambled back towards the warmth of the Burrow. 

The pattering grew louder and rounded the bend. He hopped up and threw himself down at their feet. 

Hands—these ones dark green and knobby and familiar— grasped his arms and lifted him up. 

“Gwyn, what is it?” It was his father. Two green eyes split by a divot of worry. 

“The gobble’s all shook up.” His uncle Snatcher sounded impatient. “They must be playing their games again. Let’s—”

“The smell,” Gobbler said. His voice was hushed like when Hogwyn had left a sack of tubers in the old Front End of the Burrow and the light had gotten to them and they’d sprouted through the burlap. “Do you smell it?”

A shiver pranced up Hogwyn’s neck. He buried his face in his father’s collarbone.

“The stink.” It sounded like Uncle Snatcher was moving down the tunnel, towards where the dwarf had fled.

“Gwyn,” his father said. He spoke in his firm voice, the one he reserved for Uncle Snatcher and Grampy when they drank and started to list on the log where they supped. 

Hogwyn clung to his father’s neck as his strong arms pried him off and set him down. 

Gobbler’s eyes pierced him and drove Gwyn’s down to his feet.

“Gwyn, look at me,” Gobbler said. “Did you see a—”

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Hogwyn nodded so hard his ears slapped at the sides of his head.

“Gob,” Snatcher called. “Get down here. It gets stronger.”

“I’m coming,” Gobbler said. He looked back down at Hogwyn and his face was still hard. “You go to your mother and tell her what’s happened, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” Hogwyn squeaked.

He found his mother deep in the Burrow, up to her elbows in tuber mash. Granny Lagger was peeling spuds and whistling one of her old battle dirges while Hogwyn’s older sister Hagger fiddled with the broken dwarf contraption she’d been gnawing on for over a week. 

“Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf!” Hogwyn cried. “Dwarf in the tunnel!” 

The goblins looked at him. None rose shrieking to raise the alarm. 

“He’s got an imagination, that one,” Granny Lagger said to her daughter. 

Mother sighed out her nose and said, “I told you not to shout in the Burrow, Gwyn, didn’t I?”

“There was a dwarf,” Hogwyn screeched. “A dwarf with a big black beard and hair and little squinty eyes all shimmery up close and he smelled like iron just like Granny said, and—”

“There it is,” Hagger said, tugging at the pointed tip of her ear. “It’s the bedtime stories, Granny. They’re turning his brain to slop.” 

Granny Lagger aimed a hot glare at Hagger.

“Do you want to help me make the mash?” Mother said.

“There’s a dwarf in the tunnel,” Hogwyn said, his terror deepening. Why wouldn’t they listen? “Father said to come tell you.”

“Well, you’ve told us,” Hagger said. She was twisting her ear by the tip now. “And—”

“Let your ear alone,” Granny said, “or I won’t pierce it again.”

“It just feels so good,” Hagger whined as Granny Lagger slapped her hand away with the flat of her sickle. 

“Father told you?” Mother said. 

“Come now, Hetty,” Granny Lagger said. “If there was a dwarf, Gobbler would have sent Grampy or your uncle. The gobblekin’s imagination is—”

“He’s my gobblekin, mother,” Mother said. Her tone was ice. “Go on, Gwyn.”

Hogwyn’s eyes bounced between his mother and Granny Lagger. He quailed anew. 

“Father said to come tell you,” he said. His voice was trilling softly at the edges of the words. He knew he sounded like a nasty lowlander or a hobgoblin when he did it and the thought jogged his voice all the more. “There’s a dwarf in the tunnel.”

“Where?” Granny Lagger’s calamine eyes had that calculating look. The sort of look that was rummaging through your inner thoughts and reorganizing them for you, and once she was good and done you were in for a squaller of a time. 

“Down by the Pit.”

“You’ve been by the Pit?” Mother’s voice was as sharp as a pickaxe. 

Oh, Orogoros, the pickaxe! Hogwyn’s tongue was all swollen and thick in his mouth. 

“Yes,” he managed. 

“He’s—” Granny Lagger began to say just what he was, but Mother ripped her arms from the tuber mash and wiped them roughly with a rag and marched over to Hogwyn and scooped him up in her arms. 

“Hagger,” Mother snapped, “get Dugg and follow me.”

Hogwyn watched his sister pause, momentarily and improbably dumbfounded, before reaching down and lifting up the swaddled nugget that was Dugg and hurtling after Mother, who wended her way through the tunnels of the Burrow. Dugg started to wail. 

“Where’s Grampy?” Mother shouted. 

“Grampy is chopping wood,” Granny Lagger bellowed in the tunnel behind them. “Quiet the gobblekin. Here, give him to me.”

Dugg’s wailing trailed off as cool night air burst over Hogwyn’s ears. Mother had led them out the Grand Entrance rather than the Burrow hole. Immense slabs of pale stone towered above them, the face of the mountain hewn into the shape of a massive arched door. Here the dale formed by the ridges of the mountainside had been cleared long ago of trees and the dwarves had carved deep whorls and runes into the escarpments and as the trees had marched back up to the peak they had left the strange symbols bared to the sky and they shone silver and distant and forlorn beneath the moon.

The mere was an extension of the inky sky and stars, trailing off into the river that fed the deeper lake. Hogwyn thought he could make out the reddish fires of the settlements of Men in the sable beyond. Mother set him down and took his hand and led him down the slope to the tree yard. 

Grampy Uggwart lay on a log facing the stars. An ember burned cherry red in his pipe and the smoke slipped from his slips and rounded his pointed nose before the breeze came along and combed it through the wild wisps of gray hair clinging to the base of his scalp.

“Grampy,” Granny Lagger snapped. “Get up.”

“Hurrm wha?” Grampy said. 

“Dwarf in the tunnel,” Hogwyn said. 

“Hogwyn,” Mother said, eyes wide in warning. 

“Dwarf!” Grampy roared. He rolled off the log and brought up his knobby fists. “Dwarf in the—”

“Quiet,” Granny Lagger said, and quiet fell. “We’re going to move real slow toward up the Piper Path, you hear? Slow and silent-like. We’ll meet Gobbler and Snatcher at the fork.”

Granny Lagger took the lead with Dugg in her arms and Grampy and Mother and Hogwyn trailing behind her. The Piper Path, as Granny called it for reasons known only to her, was a strip of beaten earth and trampled brush which wound its way up the mountain and around to the Burrow hole where Granny kept their camp. As they climbed, Hogwyn strained his ears for the clink clink of the dwarf’s pickaxe. At least, he thought, the dwarf would be a mite slower in the air beneath the sky. Granny Lagger would hear him trundling along and her sickle would go snick like how it did slitting through a tuber. No more dwarf.

When they reached the slope leading up to the camp, Granny paused beneath the shade of the last trees. 

“What is it, old girl?” Grampy whispered. “You smell—”

Granny’s hand came up for silence. Her nostrils flared a few times. 

Hogwyn sniffed the air. Snow would come soon. 

“I ent your girl and I ent old enough for to be called by it,” Granny Lagger said. She turned her head back toward the camp. 

Hogwyn frowned. Nothing stirred. He sniffed the air again. Not a cloud in the sky, but the snows were definitely on their way. Where were Father and Uncle Snatcher? A chill crawled up his spine. Suppose the dwarf had gotten past their knives. Hogwyn saw the sparkling point of the pickaxe once again and shuddered. 

He felt a hand on his shoulder. His mother was stock still, staring at the camp. 

“There,” she whispered. “There they are.” 

Hogwyn saw a pair of shadows peel from the dark of the Burrow hole and scamper toward the camp. His father’s ears, nobly cropped, stuck straight up from his head while Uncle Snatcher’s bandied about at the sides. They were alive! Hogwyn saw they both brandished their knives. His excitement slipped into dread. 

Mother and Granny were the first to climb the slope to reach them. 

“Is it true?” Mother said. 

Hogwyn winced. A jolt of fear slung through him like he were made of jelly. He was suddenly terrified he’d imagined the dwarf, the pickaxe, the whole thing. Granny Lagger had certainly thought him capable of it.

“There was a dwarf,” Gobbler said. “Near the Pit.”

Hagger gasped. “A dwarf? That’s impossible.” 

Grampy Uggwart shook his head, trailing curls of smoke. 

“All these long ten winters we’ve not seen hide nor hair,” Grampy said. He hiccuped. 

Granny Lagger glowered at him. 

“It’s an old dwarf mine, ent it?” Granny Lagger said. “I told you, Uggwart. I warned you! Their bones are older than their beloved rocks and their memories longer lived still. I told you one day they’d ram down our door and claim it back as theirs.”

“Come now, mum,” Snatcher said, stepping quickly between them, “we trailed the stink and found where he snuck in and plugged it right up.”

Grampy’s face flushed darker jade. “If any hole needs plugging—”

“How did the dwarf get in?” Mother said. “I thought we had closed all the old entrances.” 

“It was a secret door,” Gobbler said. “One we missed.”

Mother sighed.

“T’ent good enough,” Granny Lagger said. “You find one, expect another twenty. This is dwarves we’re talking about, not some hare-brained hobgoblins off a dhow from Kurtsch-port.”

“I fought the dwarves in the summer wars,” Grampy said. He had that dreamy look. “Back when they were still mighty. Riding boars, the lot of them, and badgers in the tunnels. Of course, when I was young, we still ran with the wolves—”

“Shush,” Hagger said. 

Hogwyn listened. He heard the whispering lap of the mere against its pebble bed. A wolf howled in the distant night. And a slight rustling.

“There! Look,” Snatcher hissed. He pointed with his long knife down the mountain. 

Hogwyn followed the line of his knife with a lump curdling hard in the back of his throat. A stocky figure traipsed along the river. It was headed toward the broader lake where the settlements of Men flared up in the dark. Though it was clear the dwarf was a good way off already, Hogwyn’s shoulders were wound tight up by his ears. He had a queer notion, a certainty. This is not the end. No, not the end. The beginning of something. He just didn’t know what.