Mister Alvin Trout sat cradled in his seat in the small aero-craft asleep. The rocking of the vehicle as it wove through the skies was a comfort, and the white noise of the engines did the rest of what mere fatigue had started days before. It also blocked out much of the conversation of the two people sitting next to him. Trout drifted off into the realms of the unconscious and finally slept.

The horrors of the memories that were his last moments at the only real home Trout had loved loomed large above him. The place was the same. Again. Everything would be just as it was that day.

Again.

Drifting wraithlike as one can only do in dreams and nightmares, he followed the

ghost of the memory of himself down the corridors under the keep, to the deep

mineshafts his family owned and worked for eons. His family’s DeepHold, a warren of tunnels and large rooms, worked into the heart of the living earth itself over generations.

He saw himself standing before a small body of students in his lecture room. The

books that had lined this cavernous room were his pride. Seeing his small form standing

in this giant scholarly cell made his heart weep for what he now was starting to suspect he may have lost. His students, his research, his family…oh, my little sons! My daughter! My pretty little wife, and all my family…GONE!

“Stop yammering at these damned callow students! STOP IT! Leave and go see

your family! THEY need you now! FOOL! DAMMIT! GO! RUN! Now…”

Try as he might, not a word escaped his lips as he yelled at his former self. The little him standing there, lecturing those youths on the finer points of singing eutectic bonds just ignored him.

He remembered the lecture quite clearly. Every word etched deep into his soul.

All of the research, the hours and days spent singing at layers of different metals all

clamped together. Trying to find the exact frequency at which the various layers would

pass atoms back and forth while under the pressure of the heavy steel clamps. The many

layers of metal welding together, cleaving to one another, becoming a laminate; to him it

was the greatest of all his academic achievements. He could still recall the moment when his carefully pitched voice, and applied Will had meshed together to slip the commonly used bounds of H’Aghram magic, and flowed together in a completely new way to change everything for his people. For his family. For Alvin.

Showing the finished work to the Great Council had been so terrifying; Trout could barely remember the loud applause they had given him as he stood trembling before the assembled members, and showed them a new way to create and build using the Ways.

But he knew THIS day, remembered it now for completely different reasons. He would

never forget the first day of teaching his new method to this class of new would-be metals artists. A new generation of Warlbinden.

Making the metals form a true weld without the heat it would otherwise require! It was

fascinating! H’Aghram all had the ability to sing through the earth. Their deep voices

ranging ahead of them as they worked most of their lives in the stoney depths. The many

echoes, both sonic and subsonic telling them all they needed to know of the world around

their little bodies. All of their magic was based upon the dwarven ability to sing; and now

he had added a new wrinkle to the rich fabric of the lives of his people.

Working metal without heat! Just using the vibrations of the songs to make the

metals do one’s bidding. It was his triumph! At a century most of his kind were just

finding their feet in the trades for which they had trained. Most of his former classmates

had known him for his accomplishments, but never would anyone have suspected what it was he had been studying.

Even if they did know, they would have never guessed Trout would

crack the solution before his third century, let alone just after his first! Astounding!

His wife had been speechless for almost a week when he told her of his success,

and they had left their children with his mother for another two weeks to celebrate. Her

lovely face with its high cheekbones, and dark almond eyes looking deep into him to

delve what joke he might have been trying to play on her.

Atthlana had always known him for his odd humor, always making jokes;

sometimes at the expense of his own, though usually others’ dignity. But after the first day she knew he was as serious as a cave-in. He HAD cracked the secret of heatless eutectic bonds.

And now he would be sought after by every college to teach, every noble would want to

host his family at parties, and Atthlana would be able to afford to never work again. To not

need her parents or his mother to ever watch the children while the two of them went off

To spend their labor for others’ interests. Now she would be a Holde-wife, like the noblemen’s wives, but without the politics. It was her secret wish, and he was so happy to have been able to

grant her that wish he could have laughed for weeks when his breakthrough came.

In the Great Council there were rumblings of making him the youngest elected

Master in recorded history. He knew they would never do such a thing, but for it to even

be spoken of was an honor. The written records would hold the details of the Council’s debates for eons. And some later day they might elect him to sit in that august chamber anyway.

Someday. When he was older.

The older of his two sons had even learned how to do this amazing feat from his proud

father. Trout thought children might have an easier time learning this new magic; he had

been correct, too. His elder son, at twenty, was just entering school with the rest of the

Hold’s small children his own age, and had mastered the technique between dinner and

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bedtime that very night. Time had, sadly, blurred even that fine memory.

But on this day, before these hopeful students it all became dust…it was stripped

from me…one hundred and twelve years…gone…I’m old enough to sit the Council now…

Watching in horror as it happened and he could do nothing to stop the replay of this cursed memory. His students took great pride in just being chosen to attend this lecture. The attentive faces all turned to him as his words faded with the smile on his face.

Though at that moment Trout’s vision collapsed down to a mere pinprick of light, in these corridors of his memory he could clearly see himself and his surroundings. A

great rumbling across the floor of the lecture hall had sent books cascading from shelves,

and one student stumbled and fell as the shock wave had rippled its way along as it passed through her body.

The impossible twisting and fading of his body, the silent screams of the

students, the shadows in the chamber creeping forth against the lights to envelope him in

their cold dark embrace. As his students began to panic and run in blind fear, he saw the bright halo that oozed from the edges of the ball of midnight amber in which he was held. And

while he could not hear the yelling of the people around him, the sudden loud crack that

he remembered so well sounded the death of all he treasured as he was ripped from the

protected lands in which his people had lived for thousands of years.

`His mind was suddenly yanked forward and out to follow the black shadowy

progress his body had been forced to make against its will. Most nights when he didn’t

meditate before sleep, these dreams came. Sometimes small changes were made to what

had actually happened; once the events of the dream had taken place in the bowels of the

Death Star after seeing Star Wars in a small theater in Leeds. But tonight, on this plane

ride, it was playing out before the insides of his eyelids as it originally had a century now

Passed.

Like a child’s tale, the encompassing darkness wrapped his small body tight in a

cloying embrace. The “Knockers” had been a legendary creatures, told to small children

in their beds to teach lessons about how life for the H’Aghram worked.

Don’t follow their knockings…

Never stray from the work group and family…

Keep your lanterns in good order…

Rusted tools will not protect you…

Don’t let the darkness take you…

The feeling of claustrophobic suffocation was one unknown to the H’Aghram;

but he felt it now. That cold wet blackness as all that was evil in the world closed in

around him, gnawing at his soul, chasing his sanity through his own thoughts; the dark

had finally come for Trout. Unable to fight this capture, his little body was compressed

and at the same time explosively expanded beyond anything he had ever experienced

before. Breathing was becoming a chore.

Years past he had been half drunk from a celebration at work, and suffering from

a mild cold. When he came home from work that day his mother had seen his condition

and mistaking the reddened nose and flushed cheeks for a cold gaining strength, called

for him to take a few spoons of her cold remedy. The cure his mother always gave him for such runny noses was large spoons full of salted vinegar. He had the mischance to sneeze on taking in the second spoonful. The wracking headache he had was instantly worsened by the mixture of vinegar and coarse salt ripping through his poor little nose.

Alvin had been told by an uncle of the lake divers’ sometimes falling prey to uncontrolled ascents from the deep cold bottoms of the waters in which they swam for the rarest of mineral clusters his people treasured. The diving bells they used to reach the truly deep bottoms unable to protect swimmers caught in up-rushing currents. The pulling pain in his joints, the boiling of his blood, the inability to take a breath, or even to exhale what breath you had coupled with the certainty you were about to die. Soaring higher and higher in the water, to light and death as your body depressurized too quickly. Horribly, painfully, and all alone.

These feelings were quite like what Trout had felt as this fell spell befell him. And then breath and light returned painfully to him in a flash and an accompanying burst of sound.

Slowly he could make out the chanting and wailing around him as vision darkly

wavered before him. The night sky in all its horrible majesty hung above his head. He

had never seen it for himself, being so young, and the H’Aghram having retreated from

the outside world completely in the era of his great-great- grandfathers’ time; but he had seen paintings. They didn’t do it justice in the slightest. Mere oil and mineral gradients on stone and wood could never convey the true terror above him. It was HUGE!

And it was not just above him, it was all around as well. It was just hanging there, dark with dim angry points of light staring down in judgment at him. The too bright slash in the heavens that his mother had told him was the “moon” when they looked at the paintings in the museum leered at Trout like a madman’s grin.

As more of the pitiful huddled little man’s vision cleared he saw that the blasted

crater in which he lay was skirted by the silhouettes of barren trees, all reaching

cadaverously to the gaping grin of this pale and terrible moon.

The dreaming Trout saw all of this from the sidelines, whimpering in silent

commiseration with the slightly younger Trout freshly wrenched from his home.

The shadows about his cringing and crying form coalesced into the shapes of eight other H’Aghram and a tall shadowy figure shrouded in night. The taller cowled form towered over the others of Trout’s people in the clearing. Chains connected the H’Aghram about him, and they all sang the deep thrumming songs of sorrow his people sang at funerals; it made an eerie counterpoint to the chanting and cackling of the hooded horror gesticulating about Trout’s shivering body.

An intricately carved ox’s horn of honey and blood upended over him, drenching

Trout in the foul sticky mess.

Now he’ll stop laughing…he kicks me…and my new nightmare begins…

As the mad god began his tirades about familial treachery, the Trout watching

from above let his mind wander to the sky above him. He no longer feared the heavens as

he once did; but Trout remained in awe of the vast expanse above his head. Once in his

travels this last century he had visited the deserts of America.

Standing on the grand rocky plateau in the middle of Arizona, he stood still for twenty-four hours watching the incredible sky above and around his insignificant little body. Nothing in his life had prepared him for that experience. He repeated the mantra he had been taught as a child all that day in the desert.

We are stone from the Goddess, made to endure,

We are stone from the Goddess, made to serve,

We are stone from the Goddess, we will not break.

We are stone from the Goddess…

The chant marched calmly forward through his dreams and memories.

Smallest in stature of the thinking races, his people had told stories for eons of

their race being made from small, precious stones and gems by the Great Mother; to live

and work in her Holy Body. H’Aghram scholars made every effort to teach these tales to

the young, but only as parables; they had seen all too often what happened to the various

other thinking races who took religion to the extremes, and so while most of his people

kept their faith, they also kept their wits. Trout was an amateur student of his people’s history, and as such was proud to belong to the only of the many thinking races to never have had a “holy war.”

While repeating that mantra oft times as a child had driven back the fears all

young suffer, like all oaths of childhood he said it seldom as an adult. But seeing this

thing above him made him realize what insanity must be visited upon the heads of the

other thinking people every waking moment of their lives in the outside world. The

records of all the wars fought by the D’jinni, the Tavakia, and the Wahruhme suddenly

made a sick kind of sense to him now. Even the humans with their short lives and ever

changing insanities about water, wine and who nailed whom to what started to seem

reasonable under the oppression of this…this… this sky.

Back in the crater Loki, adopted of the Aesir, son of a storm giant and a forest

goddess, a forest fire made in godly form, stood over the still panting figure of Trout

from that horrible moment when, covered in the slime of honey and drying blood. Horrors still

fresh with details from so many years ago. He watched dispassionately as Loki bade a

small chained figure come to the fore and place heavy iron manacles about his hands and

Feet.

The elder stared at the newly arrived Trout through a tear streaked halo of silvery

hair. The knob at the end of the old fellow’s nose was the only glimpse Trout had of the

old H’Aghram’s skin; even the dark light of his sad eyes was obscured by an explosion of

unkempt colorless hair.

With what would turn out to be that ancient’s last breath he whispered “…the Hammer…” before falling into the crater along with the shivering Trout.

Watching the past come alive in these dreams had lost most of the original horror

for Trout, but none of the misery as he thought of the family he had lost that night. His new life of slavery had begun that long ago night.