As the sun rose Mym rested a moment at the place from which the tall orc had watched her struggle under the corpse of his kin. Right there he had stood with her da's [alpenstock] clasped in his filthy claw. Right there he had bit its shard of the sky as she clutched her dying da.

Her hands balled around her pack straps. The ground was dusty there and she dragged her foot across it as if to wipe away his standing. She looked down at the span as he had done. There were the stones who remembered her [oath], and though the debris and barricades and bodies had since been cleared away she knew the exact places each of her kin had fallen because she visited them every night. She wondered whether nightmares haunted the tall orc. She wondered whether orcs dreamed at all.

She turned away from the memory to follow the seaway down the cliffside. There were few signs of the horde's passing. A discarded rag flapping from an outstretched crag. A shard of broken bone wedged into a crevice. Crude script defacing a proud cliff where the track switched back on itself. She knew not what it said but she halted an hour to sand it off.

Two more switchbacks and she saw the falls where meltwaters off of the white mountain and others poured over the cliff and down and down in great cascading sheets that blew themselves to nothing hundreds of feet above the swirling sea. Their spray pelted her face and soaked the track so thoroughly that water trickled out of its gravel and down the path ahead. At the end of the switch a series of wooden trusses and sluices collected the trickle there and elsewhere and redirected them in a heady stream that traversed the cliffside past a broken water wheel on its side with its rusting spindle high in the air. No doubt a portion of the delving's water went with it: silt from her mountain's glaciers, her da's tears, stonedust from her half finished daughter.

Another switch brought her right out over the channel. Its seas fought high in wild foaming vortices between the continental walls. Writhing and crashing and spitting like living things. Like dying things. She wondered what those stones down at their surface remembered. As the stones of the tallest summits are eldest uplifted so are those at the farthest bottoms eldest restrained, but where high stones know harsh sun and harsher wind, low stones must still remember things of shadow. Their beginnings and the sun's and the sea's. If only she could [hear] them over the roar.

The seaway curved around a vertical rib and she put her pack on her chest and her back to the wall to toe around the narrow place where the rib intersected the track. Between her feet she could see a jumble of fallen rocks and orcs among them. Gray and green and brown. Broken on hard edges with limbs and necks suspended in air or burst into pieces from their tumble so she could not be sure how many there were. Five. Perhaps six. The wind rippled their torn garments and made them seem to move. The wind across the stone crevices and runnels made them seem to howl. They did neither. They were dead.

"Good," she said. She knew none were her tall orc. She'd recognize him even if he was split into a hundred pieces, as she meant to do.

Around the next switch she saw the seaway's end. A town crouched on a tiny tilted sodden seaswept stone shelf too small for its throng of tiny tilted sodden seaswept stone buildings. Weathering centuries with neither room nor soil for cultivation of any kind, nor freshwater save that delivered by the leaky sluice, nor sunlight on the shadowed foot of those great continental cliffs.

Miles later she stepped onto the town's pavers between ramshackle homes of oxidized tin atop homes of rotting wood atop homes of crumbling brown brick stacked without forethought or afterthought so that they lolled sideways and leaned together like a throng of drunken harpooners after a first night ashore. Beneath the nodding chins of houses upon houses in rows upon rows snaked alleys of pavers and brown puddles rippling in the wind and littered with filth. Men sleeping behind a seam in a wall or an askew paver or a flattened piece of paper held over a scalp. Knees up and naked feet tucked under with dirty toes curled and threadbare rags clenched against bodies. Wiry and hard worn as if they'd suffered ten years before the mast. Wretched and odiferous as if they were grown from nightsoil. She knelt beside one to make sure he still breathed. Just ahead a door opened and a [dockworker] strode into the street. The wind slammed the door with an empty bang. Above the door a huge woman poured herself out of a window onto a sagging wooden sill and she called down at the [dockworker] and laughed at the incomprehensible and impossible suggestions he called back.

Mym hurried after the [dockworker] down a street broad enough for one handcart. The layer of brick homes transformed to a layer of brick warehouses that towered over her with their wood and tin additions stuck like barnacles to the backs of leviathans. Laundry blew from crisscrossing lines like seaweed caught by a passing current. Rotting fish and seabird excrement overwhelmed the smell of human filth. Salt crusted windows and paint peeled from their frames and rust covered every scrap of exposed metal. Their strange shaping and unconventional alloying had lessons to share, yet the sea drew her on. She followed the steady sound of gulls and waves and frequent rushes of cool air until her toes hung from the edge of a pier with her pack and [alpenstock] dropped onto the planks beside her. In the lulls between the waves she heard tackle clank and rigging creak from tall wooden ships in long wooden berths that colonized the sea. Fishing buoys bobbed on gentle surges lapping the pillars of the pier and the hulls of the ships and the rough jetty of tumbled stone on the far side of the cove that calmed its enclosed waters. Behind her goods in crates and casks from a hundred places and peoples sat stacked and crammed together so that the whole world fit in a box: human foodstuffs and dwarven whiskys and tusker clayware and orcish artifacts from up and down every coast and every waterway and every overland way fitted and stuffed all together in complementary shapes and sizes. No warring or squabbling between them. Waiting for loading into flatbottomed boats thence to the tall ships where humans knocked wooden mallets against wooden problems and hammered metal rings around timber planks, where black smoke smelling of tar rose from their decks and flitted up through their furled canvas to add their color and odor to the receptive sky, where some made ready for leaving and some made ready for staying awhile before leaving again, and again, and again, as the sea itself sloshes around the world to grind all stone to sand.

She dropped onto her backside and hung her feet from the pierhead. The tide was too low to dip a toe. She sat back on her hands and watched the ships and their forest of masts and spars and lines hanging like vines. They and their colors and calls and clatters all blended together so that they might've numbered three or thirty. There was no way to tell.

Amid it all she saw no sign of the [armiger]'s expedition. No expedition meant no shard of the sky. No justice for her da. No hope for the white mountain. She wiped her nose and squinted into the wind. She saw a small boat crewed by some men approaching from the tangle of sterns and spars.

"Child!" called a [pilot] from the boat's prow. "Child! Belay your lollygag and get to firm shore. Pull after there, man, break it across your chest. Child! You'll sink like a sounding rod for all the earth coming outta ya. Pull after, I said. That grog stopper your ears? Child! By gods even her eyes are rocks. Pull and belay that turning, keep your jibing head and hands to your oar."

As the boat came beside the pier Mym hopped to her feet. "Oy! I'm here for the armiger."

The [pilot] held the pier's pillar and gawked at her appearance. An [oarsman] jumped from his oar to the deck with a line in his hand. "He sailed on the evening tide," he said.

"They've gone, then?" she said.

The [oarsman] worked the line quick and fine around a painted iron cleat spiked into a plank. "Aye, gone then, gone there, all aweigh and away and good riddance."

"Damn," she said and she dropped her chin to her chest. "Ye lose yer aim ye lost yer way."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Funny thing for a girl to say."

"I'm not a girl."

He finished his tie off and stood and got a good look at her. "By gods you ain't. Look at you. Bet he would've stayed if he knew ye were pulling in. Lubbers say he's a lee eye for right women and a weather one for whales, and after yesterday I'm starting to believe em. Aye, and ye be broad in the beam. No topsails and all castle. He send for ye? Don't be worrying, anyone good enough for the milky bottoms of his lordy feets is good enough for me. Where're ye from and what're ye costing?"

A [rigger] stepped from an oar to the pier. "Fasten your mainsheet and shift your hold, these casks ain't loading themselves and I ain't hauling your share."

"I'm conversating here," said the [oarsman]. "How many more we gonna get fore weighing?"

"Conversating?" said the [rigger]. "Best get to your berth. Best to converse with your god if you be feeling the need to converse with a child."

The [pilot] leapt onto the pier from his place in the prow. His eyes flicked to her as he landed. "Ain't no child. She's the dwarf they're talking about."

"No she ain't," said the [oarsman]. "She's a, oh what do they call em? She's a she dwarf."

"Wedwarf," said Mym. "I just got here. Nobody's talkin bout me. What dwarf ye meanin?"

The [pilot] ignored her. "Dwarf's a dwarf. How many you think there be in a rotbottomed wormchewed bilgesoaked port like this? She's the one, now get lifting, and you, she dwarf, get offa this pier before someone thinks your sniffing around stuff that ain't yours. Fact that's quite a load you're hauling. Lay it around and let me see."

She brandished the adze of her [alpenstock]. "Step to and I'll show ye."

The [pilot] laughed. "What's a little thing like you going to do with a big tool like that."

"That's what we was conversating about," said the [oarsman].

The [pilot] swatted the [oarsman] on the ear. "I said come about now and work, man!" The [pilot] shook his head at Mym and turned to lambast his fellows lifting cask and crate.

She frowned at his backside and collected her pack and slowly walked to the pier's foot. She scanned the buildings lining the harbor. At the corner where the broad seafront avenue met a narrow alley squatted a public house. Offset green bricks framed its damp wooden door and the laughter of early morning or late night flitted out the gap around its edges. If a dwarf was to be found among men, that's where they'd be.

She pulled the door and inside was all thighs and waists and elbows and laughter and clatter of tin on earthware and the sweet smells of beer and bacon and a sour tinge of vomit. A place made from the world's troubles full of people trying to forget them.

She edged her way to the bar through all manner of men and women. Mariners and fishmongers and servants and landlords all together, each talking louder than the other, some sitting shoulder to shoulder around tables too small to hold their food and festivity so it poured over and onto the stains of thousands who'd come before. A veneer of joviality dressing up a foundation bloated by damp and mold.

As she passed the table nearest the door she heard a [merchant] there say, "I was worried he'd never leave."

"May he never return," said a [curator].

"Drink to it," said a [dockworker], and they all did.

At the bar Mym waited while those taller and louder asked more of the [barkeep] than she had hands to give. New folk came up and got what they wanted and old folk leaned into the long counter and chased the help around with hawkish eyes and finished what they had and ordered more and spoke to each other out of the sides of their mouths. They talked of ships in and out and of the [armiger]’s chances abroad and of the dwarf come, now two, soon to be a whole army, three armies in three months, never so much excitement since the [cobbler] sent his wife over the fall in a barrel.

Eventually she caught the [barkeep] sighing over a bearded [drunkard] who leaned on the counter with his head down and snoring.

"Oy. What ye servin?"

The [barkeep] heaved a bucket of beer onto the counter and said, "Morn Sal. Oh I thought you was lil Sally collecting for her pa." She heaved the bucket back behind the bar then stuck her thumb at the sleeping man. "You're one of them dwarves, yes? Can you help me with this one? My man's gone fetching oil."

"For brekkie and a pint, sure."

"Done deal. Bacon today and sweet bread. Here, I got his head, just get him round the hip, yes? Whoa, hey there."

Mym hooked the [drunkard]'s heel with her toe and toppled him over her shoulders and dashed him out the swinging door as he started to spit up. The whole pub roared in delight.

As Mym settled back at the bar the [barkeep] nodded and said, "Food's coming." She pumped a pint of bitter into a tall ceramic cup and set it on the counter where the man's head had rested just before. Its bottom made a wet ring from its spilling foam.

With her feet on the bar Mym was just tall enough to wrap her hand around the cup and rest her chin on the counter. The beer was good and bitter and its foam prickled her upper lip. "Seen any dwarves around?" she said.

"Only you, but I just got here. Are more of you coming? Some say a whole army of you are coming."

"Who's sayin?"

"Nobody particular. Just some wise folk. Is it true?"

She sipped her beer. "Might be."

"Yes I see it in your face. Them wise round here think the more they talk the wiser they are. Better to be silent and mistook for a fool, yes?"

"Yer talkin te the queen of fools and I'll tell ye why. One of yer wise talkers came up te my mountain and spun a footwide ball of yarn bout armies crossin the sea. Shook me down out of the hills and one of my kin sounds like. Don't see no armies here though."

"We've seen plenty. More than I'd ever wanted between the armiger's lot and them orcs before."

"Surprised the orckin left anythin standin."

"Strangest thing is they didn't touch nothing but the ships. Three merchantmen and a whaler and a right man o war they took clean just fore first bell. I was here and had a view there," she nodded at a porthole built into the wall, "and of course we knew they was coming. Everybody here knew a minute fore they came when Sal burst in all adrift and looking for her pa, so we knew and we crowded around the winda holding the legs offa tables and all my cutlery and each other. And with my man Jimmy stacking all my chairs fore the door and about had em scraping the ceiling fore he remembered it opens out not in. God it was quieter than the first day in here, and we was watching and listening, but didn't hear nothing, didn't see nothing. Laid in til first light fore I made Jimmy put all the chairs back and I myself peeked out to see what was what. If any old army of orcs went into the harbor I couldn't tell it save that those ships I said were nowhere to be seen. Thank god your folk took the fight out of them."

She watched the foam fizz and pop away to nothing. "Doubt that."

"As you say, but it's not like a sweet little thing like you was there, and everything here was just as it was, even Joe was sleeping in his gutter, though maybe shaking more under his coat, maybe lying in a bit more piss. And of course them five ships were gone. Biggest ones in. All gone fore dawn with most of their crews ashore. Even had a couple whalers rooming here, say, you gonna need a room?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"Well you just let me know. Got the driest rooms in the Cove. So I was saying them whalers was right mad about them orcs stealing their ship. Casks of oil floating in the Cove like apples, and them running to commandeer anything whole bottomed to salvage what they could. Shipped a handcart with the wheels still on they did, and after it sank under em magister Daraway made em pay for it too. Hey where you going? You got food coming."

But Mym was already running across the pub and kicking open the door and jumping over the [drunkard] who still lay where she had tossed him. Up the alley she flew, boots splashing puddles and pack bouncing in all directions at once like she was riding an avalanche, head swiveling left and right and ahead and back looking for the [harbormaster]'s hall, wondering how many Daraways there could be in the world. Wondering if hers still slung fire.

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> +1 [Vengefulness] ...revenge lives wholly in your mind, feeding off your rotting memory and imagined counterfactuals. Your could have beens and should have beens. At least that's how it is for us. For dwarves it's different. Their memories are as inviolable as their stones. There is no rot, and all facets are absolutely certain... (9/10)

> +1 [Stonespeaking] ...I understand she spoke with some of the eldest stones in creation. What an education that must’ve been. I shudder te think what they told of our legacy... (3/10)