Three miles up the snow-covered massif a dwarf halted at the horn of her folk and rested her [alpenstock] on the hoar-frosted pavers. The wind swirled the tongue of flame in the brass bowl beneath the horn's blowpipe and the image of the flame caught in the nickeled steel of the [alpenstock]'s serrated pick. Whenever it blew across the mouthpiece it droned low and hollow like a last breath. Yet it was not quite the last.
Her fur-lined kit was damp from sweat. A stonecut flume ran in the gutter there and she threw off her hood and dipped her fingers in its cold clear water and splashed it upon her face. She scooped a handful to her mouth. Her legs ached from the long climb so she knelt beside the [hornkeeper] and in her bad knee she felt the bones grind and crunch from an old fall from the top of the world.
She looked back the way she had come. From the horn's alcove the endless sky and the granite towers piercing it and the autumnal turn downvalley all seemed to burn in her eyes. She looked from one to the next with one hand steady on the [alpenstock]'s pine shaft and her other palming her knee and both ears full of the [hornkeeper]'s intonations.
"A touch of wax," he said. "Spread it on wide and slow like, wide and slow," and he smoothed a soft white block across the horn's surface. "A touch of flame," and he cut a chip off the block and fed it to the flame in the bowl. "Give it an even blow like, an even blow."
A hunting duo walked past her with their eyes narrowed against the glare off the glaciers and their beards tied up against the wind and their [longarms] slung over heavy furs flayed from wolves long extirpated from the valley. They nodded at her and squeezed her shoulder as they passed then they slowed to whisper thanks to the [hornkeeper] and touch his charge for luck. They cupped the flumewater to their lips and edged out onto the track as it descended around a sharp arete while the flumewater swept straight on and over a thousand yard cliff to freeze yard by yard until it met the ground in a tremendous pillar of ice.
She shrugged the shoulder they'd squeezed. "Ye ever goin te sound that thing?" she said.
"Best hope I don't wee Mym," said the [hornkeeper] as he spun his hand in wider and wider circles over the thirsty wood. "Yer da comin up too?"
"Aye. We took a doe and a quail this mornin."
"That smart takin a hind?"
"It's past fawnin. We're damn lucky te take her this late."
The [hornkeeper] nodded. "Used te be dwarves went out for a day te take meat for a month. Now more and more are out for a month te take meat for a day."
"Aye but there's no choice in it. Game's goin underground."
"Already?'
"Already."
"Well. Maybe next year'll be better."
"Aye maybe so."
For the first time the [hornkeeper] looked up from the horn. "Surprised yer out huntin at all. Don't ye have better things that need doin? Ye and that lad Khaz?"
She looked away from his seeking eyes.
"But who am I te say what a lass ought or ought not te do," he said.
"I'm busy helpin da."
"Yer da don't need helpin. He's still the sharpest shot under the mountain and will be for another hundred years."
Just then her da trod around the arete with the hind over both shoulders and his hands wrapping its front and rear hooves and the quail looped over his belt where it slapped his thigh and stained his trousers with specks of gore that froze whenever a cloud passed before the sun and thawed again after. His breath huffed and steam boiled off his scalp. He looked tired.
At the horn he undid the quail and offered it to the [hornkeeper]. Mym stood up as he came past. He grumbled, "Don't wait for me," and stumped into the delving.
She turned from the white outside with the horn and its [hornkeeper] and tortured ice and tumbled rocks and followed her da underground.
She walked two steps behind him and tracked mud and meltwater along the perfectly leveled and straightened road that ran to the forge in the mountain's heart. On both sides great houses were carved out of the granite with their square stone facades of square buttresses framing square doorways, some cold and dark, some warm and glowing orange through square windows and downcasting onto lifelike stonecarved dwarves who lined their yards and listened to the delving's happenings: the tink tink tink of a dwarf somewhere chiseling on something, the long note of the sacred song saved for [stonespeaking], the living rock whispering of creation and fellowship and other things it remembered, the gentle ring of a bronze bowl singing the finger swiping around and around and away and lingering and fading to nothing.
The forge's chamber opened into a warm and airy vault. There the tall buttressing and dark windows of the delving's most ancient houses yawned for hundreds of yards toward a ceiling somewhere beyond the upcast glow off of the forge.
As Mym's da entered the chamber a [bonesmith] stopped pulling water from the flume to kneel and lower her eyes. Her hair was pinned like Mym's in a long spiraling braid and her cheeks were round and her eyes bluer than the mountain's oldest ice.
"No cause for kneelin Xaba," said Mym.
"As ye say Mym," said the dwarf but she stayed down. Once they passed the [bonesmith] dipped her clay pail into the flume and walked it sloshing into a lit house with two stone dwarves in the yard.
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"I hate that," said Mym.
"Get used te it," said her da. "Yer the mountain's lastborn daughter now that Lyza's gone missin. Unless yer ready te finally try sculptin then ye and Khaz are the best hope for our future since the Grizzly Serac set te climb the black heart of the world."
Her da raised an arm and the hind nearly fell off his shoulders. "Oy Thayne!" he called.
Fifty paces ahead an old [bellower] sat on a stone hedge running afront a yard with a stone child half formed and long abandoned. When he heard her da he grinned and called back. "What's now, Waz? Ye even left, yet?"
"Aye. We got lucky. Mym put one through its eye before I even powdered my pan." He turned the hind's carcass so the old dwarf could see.
"Straight shootin Mym."
"Thanks."
"I took a cock quail," said her da.
"Te the keeper?" said the old dwarf.
"Te the keeper. What's now?"
"Million things in the works but none of em workin."
"Aye. Where's that lad ye been keepin around?"
The [bellower] shrugged. "Khaz went out te check somethin or other. Should be back before dusk. It blowin good out there?"
"Aye, blowin the skin off yer bones."
"Blowin the spots off a fawn?"
"Blowin the sun the wrong way around the world."
Mym shook her head at their banter. “The heat off yer tongues are enough te set our dinner roastin. I'll just go drop these off and come back with the spit."
The [bellower] hooted from his hedge. "Mym's in a mood, aye?"
"When's she not? Drink one later?"
"Drink one later."
They walked on with her da chuckling to himself. A little farther along he pointed his tremendous beard at an ornate facade on the other side of the chamber. "Smell that?" he said.
"The Karakos are cookin up a wooly."
"Think it's the same one?"
"Aye. They'll be eatin on it for years."
"I could eat the sizzlin trunk off a wooly."
She patted the hind. "And yer doe?"
"Four legs, two ears, and I'll still have that trunk."
"Well then we better get on."
"I'm gettin."
"Aye and if ye get any slower ye'll give the glacier a crisis of confidence." She smiled when she said it but he didn't notice because he was studying the Karakos' facade. There stood an uncut slab beside six stone dwarves posed in their postures, their rough granite beards curled and smooth brows unworried as if sleeping. But that was not sleeping. That was something else.
Another two dark houses and they came to theirs. It was dark too. Mym went up the walk past three dwarves crafted as skillfully as the Karakos'. Brothers and a sister she'd never meet with the saddest faces she'd ever seen. Sidelit by the forge their expressions were too foreign to give comfort yet too familiar to forget. Waiting for a life that would never come.
On their porch she set down the arms she carried and unfurled a dry cloth and looked at each. She ran the cloth over the [longarms] with their rifled barrels matted to deaden sunlight and stocks carved from old wood handled so often they shed water without waxing. Her [alpenstock] with its long shaft and short spike for belaying and its curved pick for cutting and climbing and its wide adze for chopping steps in steep ice. Her da's [alpenstock] with its spike and pick and adze smithed from metal blacker than night and rarer than gold or diamond or any other mineral mined from the deep parts of the world. Dwarves called it shard of the sky though none remembered why. Perhaps because it was as dark and eternal as the firmament between the stars. Perhaps because it had fallen from them.
When she finished wiping down their arms she wrapped her free hand around the door's iron ring. "Ye comin?"
He had stopped near one of her stone siblings and looked down the chamber at the place where the flume left the road and wound into the ancient wynds that tunneled in darkness all the way to the black heart of the world, mountain of all mountains where no stones spoke.
"Ye seen the Karakos?" he said.
Mym didn't answer. She knew what was coming and she had no way to stop it.
He said, "They're gettin ready te try again. Ye know Ma Karako was the last ma before yers. Her mind's as sharp as her adze. If she's tryin again then maybe ye should too. Maybe ye finally sculpt me that wee granddaughter. Maybe we'll get lucky for once. We've damned well earned it."
Mym turned from the door and saw him hunched under the weight of the [hind] and his cheeks sagging and his forehead darkening his eyes in shadow so deep only their reflections of the forge showed, as if each was a spark smoldering in the liminality between waning or catching fire.
"I'm tired," he said. "And I'm tired of the delvin just feelin bigger and emptier and colder. The Grizzly Serac's dead. Old Zam went in after her boy and the wyndin's taken dwarves better than them. Yer uncle Barzun's never comin back from whatever hole ate him up."
"Ye don't know all that."
"Course I do. All the old dwarves are dead or gone. Who knows how many out huntin aren't comin back neither. It's up te ye and Khaz now."
She rubbed her eyes. She was tired of this conversation. "We would if we could."
"Ye say so but ye never really cared. It's my fault. I never made ye care. But young dwarves keep dyin and disappearin, and my generation's hardenin. If ye don't figure a way to make more, well, I can't stay much longer te help ye. Someone's got te step after old Zam te figure a way te keep the forge hot else the delvin will freeze from the inside out, and all dwarves with it."
"The delvin won't freeze. Nothin outside's cold like it used te be."
He shook his head. "That shouldn't clear yer conscience. Outside isn't inside. If it isn't the cold and it isn't the huntin then it'll just be somethin else. We need more dwarves, and if the human way isn't workin for the two of ye then ye need te do like the Karakos and pick up my shard and have a go with a slab like the first dwarves taught."
Mym looked at his [alpenstock]. "That's never worked before. for the Karakos or ye or anyone else livin."
"Anyone's not everyone, and everyone's still waitin for ye te have a go."
"Da," she started to say but a sudden groan echoed from the delving's entry like a crack shooting across a loaded slope. It passed on down the road to the forge and rose back again louder and louder and the urgency of it drowned her shame and her da's sorrow, and the door's ring rattled against its plank and dust shook from her siblings and her da tossed the [hind] over her stone sister and Mym tossed him his [longarm] and [alpenstock].
For the first time in her life the horn of their folk called the delving to arms.
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>Name: Mym
> Race: [Dwarf]
> Character Class: [Sharpshooter] Steady hands, quick trigger.
> Attributes: [Belonging]
> -2 [Belonging]: The first thing you oughta know about her is that she never asked to be some kinda savior. Problem was that's what her folk needed and it was all her old dad wanted. (8/10)
> [Belonging] Title Gained: [Lastborn of Her Folk] She who is constrained by tradition.