By delaying my departure for the capital city and staying on in Allendale I managed to obtain useful bits of information from the townspeople. I learned that when the Erst kingdom was still accepting refugees priority was given to individuals based on their rank and many individuals of high rank had taken advantage of this to flee to the Erst kingdom. The official responsible for immigration matters agreed to show me his records and there were several names in there that I recognized. The most notable name was that of Uther Wenman, the man whose military stature I was counting on to restore security to the kingdom.

"From what I understand many of the refugees that passed through here ended up settling in a town called Westmore. The town's not far from here, if you travel there on your teewah you should be able to get there in less than a day," the mayor said to me.

I had gone to him to ask if he would be willing to provide lodgings for any Aseronians I found across the border that I wanted to bring back with me to take with me to the capital city. He said it was no problem and he advised me to make the trip with Lucy and not Myra.

"If you are seen with the phoenix and word of it gets to the queen she's going to become paranoid and will bolster her defenses, making it harder for you to storm the city."

I had already thought of this but I was still impressed by his analytical thinking.

I left Anbu with Cyrus and made the journey into Erst with Lucy. My goal was to reach Westmore as quickly as possible, as such I didn't spend any time taking in any of what I was passing in Erst. What I was able to apprehend was that Erst had a refugee problem besides the Aseronians that had crossed the border. While riding to Westmore I passed a number of encampments where dwarven refugees were staying. In one of my father's books I had read about the displacement of the dwarves from their ancestral lands of Grunheim.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Grunheim was tiny, and the dwarves were its only inhabitants. The land had been shunned by everybody else as uninhabitable because it was mostly just rock, but the dwarves had managed to find deposits of precious metals in the rock that they were able to extract. The dwarves made Grunheim their home and used the land's mineral wealth to develop the area and support themselves. Grunheim was bordered by five kingdoms with whom they did most of their trading. The minerals that were mined by the dwarves were used by the kingdoms mostly for minting coins and were thus indispensible to them. The dwarves traded fairly and most of the kingdom's that traded with them did so without complaint. The king of Kandalar, king Emon, however, had other ideas.

Kandalar was one of the five kingdoms that bordered Grunheim, located to the south-west of it. He decided that he wanted Grunheim's mineral wealth for himself, and launched an army to invade Grunheim and drive out the dwarves. Because of the untraversable terrain of Grunheim, the army had to march on foot. Progress was slow going, and with only a few wagons maintaining supply lines was a challenge. The dwarves had expected that such an invasion would one day occur and had taken steps to fortify Grunheim. Using the rock that they had quarried when mining the dwarves had built large walls and watchtowers as perimeter defenses. These perimeter defenses surrounded Iserlohn Fortress, the mountain stronghold that housed the dwarves' underground city. The Kandalarian forces struggled to penetrate the dwarven defenses and suffered mass casualties without succeeding in penetrating the walls. Nevertheless, the king of Kandalar would not be deterred. More and more troops were summoned from Kandalar to throw at the dwarves with no regard for the mounting losses.

The siege of Iserlohn Fortress lasted for two years, with the dwarves eventually having to surrender due to the depletion of their provisions. The dwarves lost ten thousand men in the siege; the Kandalarians lost over two hundred thousand. It was a pyrrhic victory for king Emon, whose crusade had drained his kingdom's military and treasury. He returned home to furious subjects, and was assassinated just one week after his return.

After leaving Grunheim, the dwarves were scattered across the realm, never able to find a new home for themselves.