She squatted at a narrow loop cut halfway up the tower of her ancestors, her [longarm] across her knees and her eyes on Khaz as he shaded a rusty iron and glass lantern on an old wooden box. They needed enough light to tempt the orcs onto the span, but not so much that it would drive them away.
"That good?" he said.
"Aye." She looked out the loophole into the night.
A second tower built by humans anchored the far end of the span. Its timbers rotted and its crown crumbled. Beyond its collapsed scaffolding and tumbled blocks the human lands were invisible. Might as well be the black heart of the world.
The moons soared somewhere behind her vantage. Their light threw a greenish shadow left and a blueish one right, each falling for a thousand yards into the chasm where one great sea crashed into another in a gravid tug of war that reverberated up the walls and shuddered the span's ancient stonework and unnerved anyone standing upon it. She watched the span and the shadows and imagined what sort of sounds orcs made.
"Look here," said Khaz. He came to her loop and leaned his [longarm] against the wall. He held two stonewrought cups, a calloused finger in each and a thumb around the neck of a glass bottle of something. He blew dust from the cups and pulled the bottle's stop with his teeth and put his nose to the pour as it gulped cloudy and thick into one cup then the other. "Whisky older than us. Probably older than yer da."
"Don't think that's a good idea," she said, but she took the offered cup and made ready over it as if the drinking was a kind of prayer which it was for her folk in those days.
"Stones," he said.
"Bones." She tossed the whisky against the back of her throat and set her eyes back on the span, but the liquor set them watering.
"That'll knock the hair off yer head and onto yer chest." Khaz made a face and hugged the butt of his [longarm]. A great elk was carved into it though neither he nor she had ever seen an elk around the white mountain or anyplace else. He held the bottle up to the lantern as if inspecting how its glass had possibly withstood the liquid.
"Can't believe they used te drink this stuff," he said. "Want another?"
"Save it for the lantern."
He laughed and took a swig off the bottle. He picked up his rifle and walked back to his loop and squatted before it. The lantern lit half his face yellow and the moonslight fell blue across the other half. They crouched and waited. Inch by inch the tower's shadows glided across the span to cover it. The lantern hissed steadily. The sea's violence shivered up through the walls.
"I heard yer da's back on about it," he said.
"Aye."
"I'm here when yer ready te try again."
"I never wanted te try in the first place."
"Too short for ye, eh?"
"Khaz. Don't."
"Well, what's the matter, then?"
She shook her head. "Nothin."
"Ye say nothin but we need te do somethin."
"Ye seen the ice goin," she said. "Ye seen the way the game's goin. It don't matter much what we do or don't."
Before he could say anything she said, "Shut up," and put her ear to the loop. "Ye hear that?"
He leaned into his loop. "I can't hear nothin through all them years of stonecuttin and sharpshootin. If there's a racket ye best holler down."
She put an eye to the loop.
A ball of fire seared into the sky over the human side of the span. It hung in the air and lit the land like a midnight sun.
"Shit." Khaz brought the elk to his shoulder and stuck the barrel through the loop. "If Gom's firin candles then they'll be on the span."
As the [flare] drifted toward the seaway the shadows of bare trees and shrubs and rocks and ruts elongated and ran maddeningly in all directions away from its light as if they were runnels of black oil spreading across the rim to recapture it for night as the [flare] dimmed and died away.
She heard her da call up from his place on the barricades, "Mym, ye eyeballin anythin?"
"Span's empty," she said. She should've been down there with him and Thayne and the other ninety nine, but he had forbidden it.
"Far side too?"
"Far as we can see."
"Gom's not firin works for nothin."
Khaz looked at her. "Maybe it's king's men comin."
A rough voice cried off away somewhere. Then silence.
"That's Gom," she said.
She saw something.
"Below the tower," she said.
"I make em," said Khaz.
Thayne lit and hurled a [flare] and light soaked the barricade with dwarves stood behind and their colossal shadows thrown upon the span and surmounting the ruined human tower. The figure emerging beneath it was man sized with a man's [longsword] in his claw, but broader across his chest and hunched forward and running lopsided because his other claw held an ornate wooden chair made for a lord.
"Oy ye orc," she shouted. "Halt and throw down or we'll be shootin."
The orc lifted the chair before his body as a shield and he sprinted to the [flare] and kicked it off the span. It sputtered and spiraled as it fell. Thayne hurled another and as it passed over the advancing orc someone said, "Drop him."
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A hundred longarms flashed and she saw the chair splinter and the [longsword] drag the ground in a rooster's tail of orange sparks and the [flare] fell behind the orc and black ribbons of blood flew from his arms and shoulders and legs, yet he rushed onward straight toward her da. Ninety nine dwarves fired again, but not Mym. As the orc crashed forward in a heap and his [longsword] fell and slid across the pavers and pieces of the chair rolled end over end to knock against the barricade she watched the span whence he had come. There she saw a teeming in the dark. Flarelight and moonslight glinted in metal blades and wet eyes and sharpened fangs as if the bridge spanned the distance to the heavens and a vanguard of the firmament itself advanced upon the world. There must've been thousands of them.
"Da!" She didn't say more. She bent to recharge her [longarm].
Khaz saw. "First dwarves' bleedin buttocks that's wee above thirty."
Another volley and her ears rang and her cheek burned from where it pressed against the chamber. Orcs stumbled and fell but three thousand others ran on over them. They crashed into the forward positions. Dwarves clubbed longarms against heads and they fired shortarms whose sudden flashes lit open jaws and grasping claws and lunging legs and they buried alpenstocks into bared guts and necks. Orcs smashed hapless stones into helms and into bearded faces and their stampede crushed throats and collapsed lungs and friends she'd known forever died as the host surged against the barricade.
Flung stones clattered against the loop as Mym fired into the mass. For every orc she slew another picked up their weapon and ran on. Lead covered her fingers in a gray film. Powder burned her nostrils. The muzzleflash blinded her. Yet she fired and loaded and fired and loaded. She could not stop. There were too many. She sighted again and as she squeezed the trigger her rifle jumped and the chamber exploded in sulfurous fire and knocked her backward into the box and lantern. The sound of shattering glass and hissing gas, and night engulfed their alcove. She felt for her [longarm] and when she picked it up again she saw a worried rock jammed in the muzzle and a thumbsized hole rent the chamber from where the powder had blown out.
"Steady on," called Khaz.
"Gun's had it."
"Fetch another."
She peered out of the loop. Orcs were mounting the barricade and her friends and family were repulsing them hand to hand and among them her da sang joyously as he pushed his [alpenstock]’s spike through the chin of one and pulled out and swung his pick through the chest of another.
She tossed her shot and powder to Khaz. "I'm goin down."
"Ye comin back?" he called after.
But she was already jumping from landing to landing. She threw open the tower's gate and she saw orcs running free into dwarfdom or holding their insides inside with bloody claws or snarling wide eyed and clutching their young under an arm or over a shoulder. Against the tower's founding stones a dwarf sang over his wife whose face was torn away, her head in his lap, his hand rubbing down her forehead and across her cheek as if her loose skin was merely wayward paper that needed smoothing. She saw the Karakos fighting shoulder to shoulder and planting her [alpenstock] then his into a longhorned otaur who bellowed as his ribs cracked and bellowed still as he embraced them to his chest and carried them over the edge of the span to a final silence. A sow stopped before her with blood down her torso and soiled garment and a [dirk] stuck into her flank past its handle. She looked at Mym and reached one foul claw to her braid and opened her jaws and breathed her dying breath hot and wet on her face and slumped over sideways. Mym pulled her pick across the throat to be sure. She heard Khaz's [longarm] still clapping above the din and orcs roaring and dwarves singing and the roaring swelled to a storm. One by one the songs ceased. From somewhere retreat sounded.
She ran to the barricade of rubble and rebar and her da defending it. Orcs now climbed their kin's corpses to come over its top where its barbs cut great gashes in their flesh and they fell on the spike of his alpenstock and were tossed aside as if they were no more than slag separated from ore. Beside him Thayne clubbed a reaching and grasping claw with the butt of his [longarm] then flipped the gun and shot into the wrist and it separated in a gush of black fluid and the orc fell away.
"Time te go," she yelled.
Thayne ran past her. His eyes wide against the dark and gore covering his face and matting his beard.
"We can't outrun em," her da said. "Stand and fight."
"Nowhere left te stand."
Khaz's firing stopped. No dwarves yet sang. She saw a tall orc look over the barricade. She put her spike at his face and he ducked away.
"We'll hole up in te the tower," said her da. "I'm right behind ye."
A sow rolled over the top and got caught on the barbs and they set their alpenstocks to her but she was already dead. Part of her neck had been shot away.
"Get on Mym."
The tall orc's face peered over again and disappeared again. Another corpse came over the barricade and it bounced off the sow's with the wet slap of flesh on flesh and landed on Mym's head. She fell beneath it and it pinned her against the stone pavers. Her da reached toward her. The tall orc vaulted the barricade, one claw on the dead sow and the other holding a thin [blade]. Mym saw his dark eyes on her and then they flicked to her da.
Her da spun his pick in a great arc. The tall orc deflected it and stepped into the backswing and punched his [blade]’s pommel into her da's helm with a terrible report. Quick as gunshot the tall orc overhanded his thin [blade] and passed it in and out of the gap between her da's mail shirt and gorget. It came back wet. Her da slumped onto the corpse that had trapped her. His right hand brushed her cheek. Its halfcurled fingers rested in the blood running off of them and pooling around her face.
The tall orc stood over them holding his [blade]. She was unprepared for what she beheld. The barbarity of him and the strength in his claws and his eyes aglow with the naked truths revealed by what he had done and what he now could do. She would never be the same and she hated him for it.
She shrieked in rage and pain and shifted the corpse and her da slid off. The tall orc planted his foot on it and she felt as if the whole of the white mountain crushed her. She couldn't move, she couldn't scream, she couldn't breathe.
"No fight," he said in human speech.
Other orcs now came over the undefended barricade one then two then three at a time. Dirty and clothed in rags. Hollow stomachs pulling skin tight over ribs. Bare feet slapping the span as they vaulted and stumbled and ran past. Some stopped to watch the tall orc finish the old dwarf and the young, then kept on when he didn't. A sow with a cub slung across her chest and a [soldier's knife] in her hand stooped to take Mym's [alpenstock] but the tall orc snatched it from her. The sow bent for her da's and the tall orc snatched that one too. The sow snarled and screamed at the tall orc then slunk on with the few still passing. Then no more passed and the span was silent but for the warring waves below.
The tall orc swung Mym's [alpenstock] then her da's [alpenstock]. He smelled then licked then bit the shard of the sky. Finally he met her eyes. "Little dwarf," he said. "The old one suffers. Best you look away."
He raised her da's [alpenstock] to strike.
"No," she screamed, and she swore her revenge.
He lowered the [alpenstock] and looked at her. "There's no good in dying to save the dying. Forget your oaths as I already have and go in peace."
She [swore] them again in the speech of the stones and the stones were her witness.
He shook his head and tossed her [alpenstock] on the span beside her da and lifted his foot from the corpse and ran after his folk. At the place where the seaway met the dwarfroad he stopped and looked back.
She heaved the corpse away and her da slid onto his side and laid unmoving in pools of blood and bile and shit all appearing a dark cyan in the wan moonslight. On hands and knees she slopped through it and she hugged her da around his shoulders. His head rolled back over her arm. She cradled it in the crook of her elbow and pushed her hand against his bleeding wound and wept. Her tears wet his cheek. His breath was quiet in her ear.
"Mym," he said.
She still held him when dawn found them. The tall orc was long gone.
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> +5 [Vengefulness] Someone put that brute before her that night and no others, and though he saved their lives she took the oath and set in motion everything that was to be... (5/10)
> [Vengefulness] Title Gained: [Oathmaker] Denotes she who is compelled to fulfill her oaths.
> +1 [Stonespeaking] ...she started by askin the stones where they'd been and whither they're goin and strange stuff like , but quick as gunshot she advanced te communions far more dangerous... (2/10)
> Lost Item: [Mym's Longarm]
> Lost Item: [Da's Alpenstock]