“The dwarfs want to do what?”

Grud’s question echoed from above the guild hall causing Suri and Renata to look up at his office. At that late time in the morning, most adventurers cleared the hall, having taken their quests and moved on. For that reason, any loud noises tended to echo around the wooden panelling of the empty guild hall.

“Why do you want to hold the dwarf blacksmithing championship here?”

The unusual one-way conversation took place because Neither Suri nor Renata could hear the soft voice replying in the office.

“How long have we known each other? I know you well enough to know that you’re not pulling this stunt because you dwarfs love Hafeld City, and before you pull that one on me, our drink here isn’t that fantastic either, I’ve actually tried it.”

The trouble with dwarfs were their indomitable spirits, and not in always in a way people appreciated. Not when it they coupled it with their well-known propensity to drink, and we are not talking about fruit juices unless it underwent some form of fermentation. Come to think of it, the only dwarfs with water in their hands were probably either sick or near dying.

If dwarfs limited themselves to quietly drinking on their own, the other world denizens could go on with their lives oblivious of any raucous behaviour. But dwarfs believed it their divine right to teach the world how to properly party, dwarf style. Any event worth celebrating meant drinking was naturally included and all were invited.

According to the authoritative book on dwarfs, Strathmore’s Repository On Species, dwarfs are described as quote, being generally long-lived solitary creatures, short in stature and overly preoccupied with their occupations, unquote. However, the moment alcohol touched the lips of said dwarfs, they transmutated into not-dwarfs and gone were the mumblings under their beards of unhappiness at some metal bending conundrum puzzling them, or the threats of physical harm to whomever and whatever caused them unhappiness.

“Have you ever met dwarfs in an alehouse?”

Renata whispered to Suri as she skilfully caught the brief quiet between the next verbal outburst from their guild master.

“No.”

Suri never darkened the doorway of an alehouse; she would never think of going into a place like that and her mother would never approve of her going there either. Suri didn’t know what shocked her more, that Renata thought Suri would enter an alehouse or that she knew what happened inside one.

“Well, you should know that it’s probably best you never go in if you know dwarfs are inside. They get very drunk and happy. They can be a bit short and… touchy.”

“You mean they are a bit sensitive when they drink?”

“Oh, heavens no. You are a bit young I guess; I mean their hands are as free as their mouths.”

Renata wiggled her fingers suggestively as Suri mouthed a shocked ‘oh’, just as the guild master’s conversation continued.

“Okay, keep your darn secrets then. Just know that I feel somethings up and you’re not telling me. If I find out that there is, I’m going to personally go to visit your mother and tell her everything you wish she didn’t know, and I know a lot. If that wasn’t enough, the last time dwarfs pulled a stunt like this Hafeld’s mayor demanded answers from me because some dwarfs managed to shut the town down. I’m holding you accountable for any stuff-ups.”

Following the guild master threat to visit the dwarf’s mother, an unrepeatable argument broke out between the two resulting in a dwarf storming out of the guild office and down the stairs. Suri never met a dwarf in person before so she couldn’t easily read their facial expressions, but it didn’t take any effort to see the dwarf fumed. But imagine her surprise after reaching the door, the dwarf suddenly spoke to them in a normal, even tone.

“By the way, dwarfs are not short.”

And he left Suri and Renata embarrassed to their cores as the usual quiet filled the hall once again. Both ladies thought the same thing; just how the blazes did that dwarf hear that whisper from that distance?

“I hope you ladies didn’t hear that conversation. It got a bit heated.”

Grud stood near the mezzanine balustrade looking down the corridor where the angry dwarf just stormed through a moment before. Both of them thought it wiser to save face and shook their heads.

He ignored their obvious lie.

“I can’t believe you called Sir Flintbane, short.”

“I, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Apologised Renata, bowing for some reason.

“There are two things you never tell a dwarf; that they are short, or that you’ll threaten to tell their mothers on them.”

“But you told him that.”

Piped Suri. If her memory served her right, Grud caused the whole argument with the dwarf in the first place by mentioning that point.

“I see. I thought you said you didn’t hear our conversation.”

For the second time that day, Suri wanted to disappear under the floorboards.

“Is Melody in yet?”

“No, Melody still hasn’t come back.”

“Okay, let me know when she returns. The bloody mayor’s going to flip his lid when he hears about this. Oh, and Renata. Tell Rufus to urgently buy as much drink as he can; he’s got a lot of dwarfs coming, and I mean a lot.”

“Yes sir.”

Hafeld’s mayor looked out his window over the cityscape with disdain. Despite the awful dice throw life threw for him, he couldn’t really complain. He enjoyed a relatively content life there, but he couldn’t help disliking the place. Being honest with himself, he hated the entire Regesea Realm ever since the day he first landed in Port New Hope. Perhaps it had something to do with his hasty political exile. Who was he kidding, it had everything to do with it.

It struck him as ironic as to why they called a port, new hope, as if it offered everyone something new? He never wanted anything new, he wanted his old life of luxury back, but he couldn’t return home and force his stupid older brother to forget his little indiscretion.

Trust his crown prince brother, James, to get so upset about his benign attempt to befriend the second prince of the Alsgrove Kingdom? Sure, he found an opportunity to circumvent his brother and why wouldn’t try, it wasn’t as if they loved each other, right? In the end, the one person he needed to help him achieve his dream, backstabbed him and in the Roselind family, no unsanctioned insurrection from dear mother and father went unpunished.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Someone running down the corridor and calling his name distracted him from his thoughts.

“Mayor Roselind, Mayor Roselind.”

He recognised the voice as his personal secretary and judging by its urgency he steeled himself for some unwelcome news. He sighed to himself; his personal secretary never learned restraint no matter how often he chastised him. When the exhausted man finally arrived at his door, he waited impatiently for his secretary to regain his breath. That didn’t stop him from chastising the man.

“Why are you making such a noise? How many times have I told you not to shout my name from down the corridor?”

“Sorry… sorry sir.”

He drew a big breath.

“We, we have news… from the city garrison.”

“Well, what is it man? Stop stalling. Get on with it.”

“A large contingent of dwarfs just requested entrance to the city.”

“Dwarfs? What’s that got to do with me, surely the guards can deal with it?”

“It’s not that sir. It’s the sheer number of them.”

“Well just how many of them are we dealing with? Out with it, man.”

“The guards say over a thousand dwarfs. They’re not sure.”

“O… over a thousand you say?”

“That’s what I said sir.”

“Don’t get insolent with me man. Do you want me to send you to the dungeon for a reminder of how to address me?”

“Please no sir. Please accept my humble apologies for my indiscretions.”

“That’s better. You’re better to remember your place.”

“W, what about the dwarfs, sir?”

“Tell them to get lost. We don’t want them here.”

Mayor Roselind scowled at them in his mind. The bloody brats. Who did they think they were demanded entry as if it was their right. Besides, none of the dwarfs told him what it was about or so much as paid him a copper bit for the privilege.

“Sir?”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I’m sorry sir. I’ll let the guards know.”

“Oh, dock yourself half this month’s salary for disregarding my order about calling out my name. No, make it an entire month, I don’t want to remind you again.”

The man wanted to object to the severity of his punishment when he stopped himself short, realising that he came off lightly.

“Very well sir.”

He said in a calm voice.

Four hours later a knock at his door interrupted his midday lunch. The secretary stood there once again. The mayor seemed pleased that he learned his little lesson earlier.

“What’s it? You know I don’t like being disturbed when I’m eating.”

“The garrison commander is here to see you sir.”

That caused him to pay full attention. In the mayor’s small world, it spelled big trouble.

In the adventurer guild, Renata stared at a dwarf in front of the reception desk. It wasn’t often that she needed to look down at adventurers but for the first time she felt a little apprehensive about things, especially since the dwarf seemed a lot older than her. As she recently learned, commenting about dwarfs’ heights would not endear them to her and she decided it best to add their age to that list.

“Er, so let me get this right… Mister Firmstone. You want to join the guild, right?”

“This is the adventurer guild, is it not?”

The dwarf said sarcastically, looking around the place.

“That’s right. Now that we’ve determined that, you are looking to fulfil the role of a tank?”

“That’s the only thing I know how to do, well that and smithing.”

“Okay. Tank it is. Are you originally from Hafeld?”

“Have you seen me here before?”

Renata was discovering that dwarfs were difficult customers.

“I’m sorry Mister Firmstone, but we need to know your place of birth.”

“Now why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“I tell you what. Why don’t you sit over there and fill out this form for us, and when you’re done you can return it to me along with the three metal bits application fee and save yourself all the hassles?”

She pointed towards a sturdy table amongst some others to the back of the hall where adventurers liked to sit when generally waiting for things.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because they serve the drinks over there.”

“Now lassie, if you’d told me that from the very beginning, we needn’t got ourselves into such a difficult start. I’m liking this place much better already.”

Looking much happier with the situation, the dwarf deftly swiped the paper off the reception desk and marched off to enjoy his drink.

“You’re something you know?”

Suri giggled at Renata’s blatant dwarf mitigation antics. The best part was that the dwarf probably didn’t even mind.

“Don’t flatter me.”

In the following hours, many dwarfs joined the guild. Had it not been for Grud’s warning about their arrival, they both might have battled to deal with the flood of dwarf applicants. Most of new arrivals turned up that morning to take part in the week’s festivities around the blacksmithing championship only coming to drink, party and watch the match.

It turned out that the reason why so many dwarfs joined the guild was that most of them hardly had a copper bit to their name and used the local guild quests to garner some finances to fuel more drinking. Of course, to the local economy the dwarfs were a godsend and to anyone looking for accommodation it was pure hell. If you didn’t mind drinking or shutting the dwarfs for a few drinks it might just be that you also enjoy it just like they did.

“You won’t believe it.”

Suri complained to Renata during one of their brief breaks.

“Some of these dwarfs try to join the guild and don’t have a single copper bit to their name. They even try to barter with me. I’ve been offered three blacksmithing hammers, some lucky horseshoes, and one even offered me his hand in marriage.”

“Seriously? I’d never thought that they would be that desperate. Have you ever seen what the woman looked like? Well let’s just say from our perspective it’s difficult to tell the difference between man and woman.”

Suri felt shocked at the revelation. Like discovering for the first time as a kid that your parents are human. Suri hadn’t seen so many dwarfs in her life. She certainly couldn’t wait to tell her mother about all those things she learned. How many times they sat talking in the evenings, her mother listening with keen interest to all of Suri’s latest adventures with the guild.

If Suri ever thought she would run out of things to tell her mother, then she was sorely mistaken because later that afternoon Hafeld’s mayor turned up. And yet another heated discussion related to the dwarfs ensued.

“What makes you think I am responsible for these dwarfs? I didn’t know they were coming, just as much as you did. What you want me to do about it? I can’t make them go away just as much as you can.”

“Those bloody dwarfs destroyed the city gates!”

Apparently after Sir Roselind’s bold edict to kick the dwarfs out of Hafeld the said dwarfs promptly pulled the city gates of their hinges.

“That’s what happens when you get between some dwarfs and their drink. Don’t blame me for your poor decisions.”

“I don’t care. That Sir Flintbane is your friend, you sort it out!”

And an inflamed mayor stormed out of the office, but he stopped short when caught sight of all the dwarfs below most of them frozen midway with their drinks to their mouths, and all staring at him. Naturally, the lot of them overheard the argument not that they could avoid all thanks to the glorious hall acoustics that would make a cathedral choir proud.

“And all you dwarfs can go back to your caves and fix those gates when you’re leaving. And I’m damn well not paying for it.”

A chorus of dwarven jeers assaulted him mixed in with some rather unsavoury dwarfish words. They certainly didn’t share his point of view. Once he left the guild, the mayor might probably never give the situation a second thought, but that night those dwarfs he snubbed sang pub songs about him and the fallen city gates well into the night. Unfortunately for the mayor, those sordid songs proliferated through the ages in many a dwarven Tavern.

As for the rest of the city, the average height of the population plummeted in one day when hundreds of dwarfs suddenly descended on Hafeld. There wasn’t any warning, not that the average citizen minded as much as the inns, alehouses and any other place that offered alcohol.

The dwarfs held their precious blacksmith championship and for some unknown reason they picked on the guild sparring hall to hold their final championship.

Grud tried to corner Sir Flintbane about it, but he just got a shrug from the dwarf saying he couldn't do anything about it. Personally, Grud felt it was the only place the dwarfs felt comfortable for some weird reason. After the championships there was a mighty shindig by the dwarfs that eclipsed any party before. The winner of the championship left the guild comatose.

The next morning the dwarfs disappeared like the mist before the sun. Not before covering the mayor's residence with profane graffiti. Nobody knew what they used as paint, but any attempt to remove the offending words failed dismally. Even painting over it only caused the paint to drip off and expose the words again. Obviously, somebody used a bit of skills to enhance the artistry.

In pure desperation the mayor commanded a fully grown hedge be planted in front of the walls, the only way he could hide his embarrassment.

“How is it that dwarfs don't die from alcohol poisoning?”

Grud asked Melody the next morning as staff cleaned up the mess below.

“I believe it has something to do with their unique biology.”

“Is that so? I never found out why the dwarfs came to Hafeld in the first place.”

“Perhaps I can shed some light on that. It turns out dwarfs like to boast when they have had too much to drink. Some of the ladies serving drinks overheard the dwarfs saying they didn't have a choice. It turns out some dragon gave them a challenging time and they had to shift their venue at short notice.”

“I see.”