Krulm’venor was a wretched, broken thing in mind, body, and soul. He’d stood up to the Lich that held his leash for as long as he could, but after the last abomination, he was empty. His ribs were cracked, his pelvis was bent, and he walked with a perpetual limp that didn’t hurt, though the endless echoing sounds of his step-drag, step-drag gait did eventually start to grate on him.
That annoying, repetitive sound was a sweet melody compared to the sound of the goblins running rampant in his head. They hadn’t stopped their incessant screaming and whispering, and there were times when Krulm’venor bellowed in rage just to shut them out for a few seconds.
“Where are we going?” one hissed.
“When will we get there?” another one rasped.
Then they would argue and rage about how close they were to whatever was next and when they would next be able to rip something limb from limb. There were times when they discussed more visceral topics like that, that his hands would twitch, and he found himself throttling the neck of something that didn’t exist.
He’d long since lost control of his body, but day by day, and trauma by trauma, Krulm’venor was losing control of his mind as well.
That it hadn’t even punished him for trying to warn his people galled him more than anything. The Lich never forgot to punish the disobedient. That it hadn’t bothered to do so yet meant only that it was biding its time and letting that axe hang above Krulm’venor’s neck for as long as the undead monster wished.
He still walked though, ever deeper into the bowels of the earth, because he had no say in the matter anymore. He was deep in the eternal dead zone where nothing with a soul could survive for long against the vast darkness that dwelled there. He might have been deeper than any dwarf had gone before, but he took no pride in it. For all he knew this was his punishment: to walk forever into the darkness until he stopped existing.
“Feed us or we will feast on you instead,” a voice repeated over and over frantically in his mind, but he swatted it away.
Schools of the empty swarmed around him sometimes, and occasionally large things moved in the darkness like unseen leviathans, but in both cases the Lich would assume control and devour them with Krulm’venor's mouth before leaving him to wander again. After a time, the denizens of this strange world learned to steer clear of the pale blue light that accompanied him as he wandered deeper into the cold dark tunnels.
Truthfully, he didn’t expect to ever find anything again. He expected that he would just limp for an eternity, gnashing his teeth at the idea of what the monster that owned him must be doing to the sacred dwarven dead. Then he saw the glow.
Krulm’venor was miles underground and knew for certain that there should be neither light nor life here, and yet, there, far in the distance of the titanic cavern he’d found, was a speck of light. He found it strange, but he didn’t let his shock stop him. The only thing that would await him for stopping without reason was pain.
The light turned out to be a luminous fungus that glowed white-blue. It was incredibly faint, but in the absolute darkness he’d just endured for weeks or months it might as well have been a beacon fire. First it was only here and there in small patches, but eventually the whole tunnel was full of the stuff, pushing back against the dark, and preventing the shadows from passing this way, he realized.
For the first time in a long time that raised the specter that he wasn’t alone, though he had no idea what could possibly live this deep. Though he didn’t discover what was down here, he did see movement several times amongst the rocks and stalagmites of the tunnels he explored, but he could never quite see what it was. Slowly Krulm’venor grew certain that he wasn’t alone down here; that’s when he discovered a sign.
“What is this language?” the Lich whispered in his head.
“Yessss… tell us. Read it. Read it!” a voice in his mind sprang up, to repeat the Lich’s order.
Krulm’venor could not give either of them a good answer though. “It looks vaguely like dwarvish,” Krulm’venor said hesitantly, though, that could have just been because it was carved into stone, or that he was losing his mind. “It’s not though. Too many curves. Too many spirals. Each of these is almost a dwarven letter but they don’t add up to form any words.”
“If you cannot read it, then find me who wrote it!” the Lich commanded, and then it was gone again, leaving Krulm’venor alone to wonder what he was supposed to do next.
Though the sign was unreadable, it had two vaguely arrow-like shapes pointing two different ways at the fork in the road where he now stood, so he went left, following the path of the larger word. The result was more walking down dimly lit corridors. Though sometimes the color of the moss would shift from icy blue to an almost white or an aqua color, the intensity of dull, uniform light never changed, lending the entire place an air of surreality.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Why should there be so much light down this far,” he grumbled to himself.
“So we can find our prey,” a goblin hissed.
“Yes, find it, kill it!” more screamed. Krulm’venor was horrified to find that he’d mouthed those words, but before he could react to that, he noticed a small movement in one of the stones up ahead. The sounds he’d made had started something, but he was quite sure the stone itself had moved not something behind it.
Krulm’venor approached the small stalagmite near the left wall of the winding tunnel, and when he got within a few feet, it took off running. It wasn’t a stone at all, but a tiny little person, dressed as one.
With all the bloodlust in his system, Krulm’venor couldn’t help but give chase like a hungry predator.
His body couldn’t hope to keep up though. Not with his foot dragging. So, grudgingly he bent forward and starting scrambling on all fours after the thing in giant, loping strides as his twisted form ate the ground. The Lich had always designed this skeleton with the proportions of goblins in mind, so its arms were a bit too long, and its legs were a bit too short to be comfortable for a dwarf, but the result was something perfectly suited to the monster he was slowly becoming as the goblins muddied his once clear mind and made him thirst for the blood of his tiny little prey.
Even running as fast as he was, Krulm’venor did not catch the tiny little dwarf-like creature until after it had reached a small hidden passage in the stone and sealed it behind it. The fire god was not about to let it get away though, and the secret door only intrigued the Lich that was now watching him all the more.
Krulm’venor pried the door open with his steel fingers and shattered the small entrance. He then pounded against the walls to widen it slightly, before he crawled through the gap. What he saw next would have taken his breath away, if he still had lungs to breathe.
The strange cavern was a tiny little world, with fields and houses. There was even a river, and a fortress that the inhabitants were streaming toward. All of it was lit up by a large glowing crystal, mounted in the ceiling. The whole cavern had been molded into a tiny work of art, and the stone had been bent and melded with magic to create flowing, organic shapes which the small parts of his mind that were still wholly dwarven found beautiful in their simplicity. The rest of him simply wanted to destroy it all.
The strange little things which he’d decided were almost certainly gnomes, were screaming as they ran. The dwarves had legends of the tiny creatures, but Krulm’venor had never seen any evidence that they were real, in life or death. He’d assumed that they’d existed at some point before the goblins had hunted them to extinction, but somehow, a few of them at least must have journeyed so deep into the depths that no one could ever find them or hurt them.
Most of them were running anyway. Some were on the walls of their completely ineffective fortress that were a little taller than he was, readying their tiny little ballistas while he stomped through their tiny little world. Some of the small things were charging toward him too with weapons not much longer than his fingers. Their bravery didn’t last long though, and all of them died within seconds without him even having to resort to flames as he crushed their little bodies in an orgy of bloody violence.
They wouldn’t have stood a chance against him at all, without unleashing their golem. Well - maybe it wasn’t a golem, he thought as the creature began to congeal from the debris in front of him. One second, he was tearing down the curtain wall of the tiny fortress with his bare hands, and the next all the shattered stone and the bodies of the gnomish dead were congealing into a giant man shaped thing that was almost as large as he was.
Krulm’venor rose to his full height, and looked at it, unsure of what was going to happen next, when it suddenly lashed out with a solid upper-cut that lifted his several hundred-pound body of steel and bone off the ground and sent him sprawling. It hadn’t hit him quite as hard as the All-Father’s avatar had, but it had hit hard enough to hurt, and Krulm’venor rolled out of the way before the thing could stomp him.
He was fighting like a filthy goblin now he realized, scrambling to his hands and feet as he maneuvered out of the way. Their battle carried on across the cavern, and everywhere they went they left wreckage and death in their wake as the two-foot-tall inhabitants tried to find shelter. There was none though. Not once Krulm’venor started to breathe fire.
It did less than nothing to the golem or elemental or whatever it was, but it seemed to pain the thing to watch the gnomes die, and fire reached into the tiny nooks and crannies they were hiding in quite well.
As the fight went on, the thing congealed from a thousand tiny rocks, into a single creature made of a single slab of stone, and it got stronger as that happened.
“Fascinating,” the Lich whispered.
“Murder! Death! Fire!” the goblins screamed.
Krulm’venor didn’t listen to either of those voices though. All he did was try to shatter its opponent. For several minutes that was a fruitless endeavor, but finally it struck some weak spot in the things exterior, and it cracked like an egg, creating a long thin rift that revealed the hollow, geode-like interior of the thing.
After that weakness was exposed, Krulm’venor dodged the thing’s blows, getting in close and grappling with the thing until he could pull it apart at the seams. Even if his mind was no longer truly dwarven, he understood how weak spots affected even the most complex creation, and now that he had an opening, the creature soon splintered into a hundred pieces, and all that was left was the thing’s head in its hand.
Krulm’venor looked around at the holocaust it had created. Everything was death and smoke, which it gloried in enough for the goblins that burrowed into its mind to finally be still for a while. Only then did the fire spirit move to crush the quietly whimpering thing in his hands to dust, but the Lich stayed his hands.
“No, you fool,” it shouted. “Carry that back to Mournden and I shall bring you home. Be careful not to let it touch stone the whole way, lest the earth spirits trapped inside of it escape! If you fail me in this, I will make your next body out of goblin shit. You’ll need one since you’ve ruined the one I built especially for you.”