Everything ends with blood and smoke. It always does.
Gleaming fangs, rotting flesh, stale air and nauseous fumes. If you're lucky, the fires will get you before the pain settles in. Some live on, charred husks of their former selves. You don't feel pain when you're without flesh.
Others aren't lucky.
I have seen mothers tear apart their very children, wielding them as clubs or weapons of fortune against rampaging hordes. Their madness induced by grief and rage fueling their screams, their fury, their hatred.
I have seen majestic bridges of pure white marble rise and fall, crushing down on the advancing army.
I have seen grappling hooks sail the air, wielded by goblins out for the blood and the young innocent dwarfs with but tiny stubbles on their chins.
I have seen a lot of things, some grandiose, others majestic, many more however I have heard of.
To the west lies magnificent towers of death and sin, where ancient tablets of power bring forth forgotten whispers -names of gods of old, twisted forms of evil and malice.
To the east I have seen the elves, the beastly men, the frost titans. Cannibals, the lot of them, no matter the amount of perfume or the frilly dresses. Mighty warlocks tore through the flesh of soldiers decades old.
Legendary fighters, bloodied by a thousand death and more, I have seen die in the blink of an eye, for there is no forgiveness in war and battle.
Everything that lives must perish. Everything that rises must fall. No mountainhome remains forever, no King can forever rule.
No noble will survive the onslaught of its mandates unscathed always, no Captain shall remain steadfast and true.
Madness lingers at the edge of the mind of every dwarf, whispering sweet nothingness of cloyingly sweet visions.
Artefacts of power are born from the forges, screams of joy mix with cheers at the tables, where the gardens' show their magnificence with bubbling pools of water coming down from the waterfalls.
Dogs bark happily, as frill lizards feast on the occasional vermin or maggot. The poultry lays eggs that end up straight in the kitchen, boiled and served by a cook all too willing to hide his stash of meat for himself.
Who am I, you ask, to have seen all of this?
I am nothing more than a shadow, one that lingers behind every torch that shines in the otherwise pitch-black tunnels, one that is as black as the strongest of tars. I am the whisper in the ears of every dwarf, I am the brilliant genius that usher forth a wall and the madman that breaches the caves.
I am the voice filled with courage, the one that with bile in his throat watches the incoming onslaught from its position beyond the screen.
Yet...
Nothing lasts forever.
Eventually, even gods fall down on earth.
When I woke up, it wasn't to the comfortable bed I had fallen asleep in the night before. It wasn't even -ashamedly, I admit thinking about it- the bed of a nice curvy woman.
I was on a rock bed. Let me tell you this, if you have never slept on a rock bed before...
It actually was pretty comfortable.
I know, it might sound strange that I was debating the inner-comfort of a bed made of rock while the actual point would have rather been 'where the hell I had ended up in', but the problem was...
The engravings on the walls gave it away.
I was in Dwarf Fortress.
I was a Dwarf.
There was only one word that summed it up pretty well.
Self-Insert in dwarf fortress.
It can only end up well, right?
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Topic: Let me tell you a Tale...(SI) (Read 790 times)