One morning that spring the [hornkeeper] came to see her as she sipped beer and sat on Thayne's stool beside the empty sling. The beer was from a certain tavern down in seaway's end. She had brought two kegs back to the delving after going down to tell the humans their water had been contaminated for hundreds or thousands of years. It was her duty to tell them. The duty of the dwarves. Listening to the [hornkeeper] was her duty also. She offered him a pint.

"No thanks," he said.

The foam fizzled on her upper lip. "What ye need?"

He told her about the missing hunting party. Two dwarves and a man and a hound. She listened and offered advice when he asked. Then he asked for her to help search. He needed his best [sharpshooter] just in case orcs were behind it.

"They aren't," she said.

"Ye willin te stake lives on it?"

"Aye. But I'll go if ye aren't. Just need te finish da's tomb first."

"Ye been workin on it for months, child. Those lads need ye now."

"I'll be there."

"Search is leavin at first light."

"Said I'll be there."

After he left she turned to the slab. She used the granite they had started on together. She kept the cuts she had made while he had still watched. How she wished he watched her still. He would have told her to use some other slab. To not give up on her dream. But having a daughter had always been his dream, not hers.

She set to scraping and shaping with his [Skyshard]. Hers now. She did it on the porch because she didn't want him suspecting. As she worked she told him lies as if she were a lass again and he a living doting father. She told him she was shaping up a workbench because his was too tall. She told him he would be glad to see what she wrought on it. She would show him once it was finished.

There's an old saying that dwarves make their own tombs. She never really understood it until she went inside to gather her father for his. She left soon after and walked down the delving.

She found Khaz down at Thayne's working on his son. She nodded at the sculpting. "He's comin along."

"Aye he's shit. Hard carvin with this soft thing."

"I'll lend ye da's."

"I'd appreciate it."

She ran a hand down the cheek of the lad coming out of the block. "The keeper come round earlier?"

"Aye. We're headin out first light te search."

"I'll be there."

He nodded.

She said, "He's awfully heavy now. Thinkin there's not much reason te put him who's stone inside a stone box inside a stone mountain."

"Dwarves make their own tombs."

She nodded. "Aye."

"Ye don't need te rush it if ye aren't ready."

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She thought about that for a while. Khaz set to chisel away at his son. The forge was warmer there. Its heat was a kind of balm for everything that had happened.

She said, "I think I am."

He set down his hammer and chisel and stood up wiping the dust from his hands and fluffing out his beard. "Let's go."

Back at her place a woman leaned on the porch. Her cloak was new and her hair was still chopped short after what had happened in the black heart of the world. It would take years to grow back.

"Oy, Dara," she said. "Yer a welcome surprise."

They embraced. Over her head the woman nodded to Khaz. He nodded back.

"What's yer king say?" she said.

"Donnas denies everything."

"Ye said he would."

"Forget him a moment."

Mym stepped back. "Then yer here bout the other thing."

"Yes. I inquired with the royal chemist. He helped me examine the sample. Rather I helped him. The substance isn't new, but its concentration in the specimen is much higher than what occurs naturally. I took his findings to the physicians guild. As far as they can tell, the infertility is permanent. Whatever this stuff is, it just builds and builds inside you knocking around your insides and damaging everything it touches until it finds a way out. And the damage is to your tissues and inside your tissues and," she spread her hands before her as if to show an enemy she carried neither arms nor ill will.

"So much for dwarves," said Mym.

"There might yet be hope. I couldn't wait for their final analysis. While they worked I followed the armiger's trail. Who he talked to, where he went, how he spent, who on. Everyone I questioned denied everything, but I learned plenty. What he did on the rising front. What he did in the camps."

"And?"

"Those things are as we suspected. But there's something else. He found something in the royal archive. A manuscript of dwarven make with sheets of metal that's likely older than the armistice. It's filled with stories and myths and images of an ancient art I've never seen or heard of. It must be how he learned so much of the delving's history and customs."

"Bring us te yer point," said Khaz. "There's dwarves missin and we need te step after em."

Daraway nodded. "It's da, love. Is he," she trailed off.

She gestured at the facade of her family's house. "We're just about te return him te the smelt and I got te say I'm mighty glad yer here for it."

"Then he's still in there?"

"Aye."

"Thank goodness."

She looked at the woman as though she had said the exact opposite of what she expected.

"What do ye mean?" said Khaz.

"Go and get him. I'll tell you on the way."

Together they carried her da up the flume and through the forge and into the wyndings. She couldn't believe the story Daraway told as they walked, or her wholesale lack of an explanation. Yet even without belief or explanation, with every step toward the molten core in the black heart of the world hope rose in her again. A kind she hadn't felt since the night before she took the elk. In a world as wide as the one she'd seen, why couldn't such things be possible?

At the antechamber of the colossus the doomstone [sentinel] was as still as stone. They entered the first colony with its river of lava and its invisible shell and its bridge and its anvil. Daraway leaned over it then looked under it then placed her hand in the flume and nodded.

"Place da upon the anvil and the orcstone upon his chest."

They did as the woman asked.

"Strike the shard against the anvil and speak the secret word."

She held the [Skyshard] in her hand with its head down and its spike skyward. She raised it a foot and let its shaft drop through her palm until the head smashed the anvil. The strike resounded within the sphere and she [harmonized] the secret syllable to it in the manner taught to her by the Madlands’ endemics. From a hidden place overhead molten rock emerged and poured over the crystalline shell encasing them, and she watched its hot red edge eclipse the chasm's walls in all directions and cling to the underside of the unseen globe and drop into the river of fire and it was as if they stood inside a tube of glass as an [artisan] blew it into a fiery ball. The heat made sweat stand from every part of her body and pour down the sides of her face to her chin and it dripped onto the anvil and hissed as if it too were molten rock.

"Mym," said a voice.

She looked at her da. Hope became belief.

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> +2 [Belonging]: Anyway that's how she finally came home. (10/10)

> [Belonging] Title Gained: [Mother of Her Race] Denotes she who synthesizes the ancient and the novel.