It would seem that the overseer looked at the automatic weapon of indiscriminate death with a penchant for killing the soldiers intended to serve the same purpose and immediately noticed the obvious problem; he did not have eight of them. Unfortunately for the Baboons who had not kept up on the latest constructions they were taken by surprise when they were met by additional shotguns sabotaging their plans to follow the walls to the entrance. Instead they found themselves backtracking and heading back into the forest to circle around without being skewered. It would seem that attempting to return to safety before the overseer saw fit to stop the omnidirectional barrage would be suicidal. Instead of seeking out the entrance the Baboons moved into position near the treeline where the entrance was visible but well out of the effective range of the weapons and found a decent place to wait. The very moment they were prepared to rest the shotguns finally stopped firing indicating either they had run out of ammunition or the Overseer was satisfied with the amount of carnage (which of course meant the shotguns were out of ammunition). Dumplin breathed a sigh of pained relief with the knowledge that the horror of her blackest day in Arrowstockades was coming to a close.
Dumplin noted she was about to have her goals realized and instinctively readied herself for the next horrible thing to happen. Her expectations were fully met when she realized the tree trunk she'd deemed uninteresting exuded an overpowering aura of death. The concrete thought “Necromancer” had scarcely materialized by the time Dumplin had leveled her crossbow and silently indicated for the baboons to hold position. She was greeted by an unpleasantly cold voice sounding unusually natural.
“Conserve your ammunition.” It said.
Though he was still truly massive Cerol Sabershaft looked uncharacteristically small without his armor, though still fairly tall and strong he was not as singularly massive as he once appeared. Without his great helmet to give it resonance his terrible voice sounded peculiarly like a sound that a dwarf could understandably make. She could see now that a great mane of wild black, gray streaked hair joined seamlessly his great black gray streaked beard all horribly unkempt having been tucked neatly under a helmet day and night without end for many years. His great wide back was covered in scars of battles won only in name and pain and exhaustion were evident in his eyes. Where he had once seemed implacable he now seemed only broken, the voice that had once sounded cruel now seemed weak, in the light of the day Cerol Sabreshaft was indistinguishable from the rest of the broken, miserable, condemned dwarves that populated the fortress. He did not turn to acknowledge her or the rest of the squad and instead stared idly and thoughtlessly at the fortress in the distance.
“Why-?”
“The dark one is dead.” He preemptively replied. “His magic meant little to the Prowler of Rasps. Maintain your distance.”
Dumplin stopped her approach as suddenly as she'd begun.
“The necromancer was blighted. Cursed by the gods to bear the mark of the defiler for all time. It bore a terrible plague and as it's final act delivered that plague to me. I laid down my weapons and my armor, left my squad behind, and came here to wait for the end.”
“What-”
“Nothing.” He spoke again. “Nothing to be done, nothing to be said, there is only waiting now. Leave Baboons, you have nothing worth hearing to say.”
If Dumplin could kill only one dwarf and for whatever reason the Overseer and Feb weren't options Cerol would be the easy choice. Still, though Dumplin had understood academically that Cerol was just a dwarf and felt no strong desire to see him live the idea of him being mortal was never something she understood in her gut and to see him in this state was disorienting. She considered that this was the perfect moment to crush one of her fiercest enemies either spiritually or physically and that perhaps that kind of victory may just cheer her up a bit but somehow it felt wrong. It also felt very likely that Cerol had just killed one of the most powerful and evil beings on the planet and was by extension one of the most powerful and evil beings on the planet. It was very likely, she realized, that Cerol Sabershaft unarmed and on deaths door could slaughter a dozen Baboons on their best day.
There were an awkward few moments of silence before a helmet fell to the ground. Tath removed her armor and began walking towards Cerol. Before Dumplin could seek an explanation Tath had removed her mail and her left arm came into view. The limb was an odd shade of purple and when exposed to the open air the smell of death was overpowering. It seeped pus from open sores with black rims and had big cavities devoid of flesh. Dumplin remembered the fight with Bandrims.
“It tingled for a while,” she said. “Then it stopped. They cut the rotten bits out but it kept getting worse so they cut again. They keep cutting every few months and I don't think they can cut much more. I don't want to go back inside. Not after all this.”
Tath stepped forward and sat on a stump near Cerol. The two sat in silence staring at the fortress and Degel, Bim and Dumplin walked away.
It seemed strange at first to give up when victory was so close but Dumplin reminded herself that there was always more. When she was safely inside the fortress it did not mean the struggle was over it meant the next round was coming. No matter what was thrown at the Baboons there was always more. No matter how miserable or painful life became there was more. She thought of how Iral, Inod, and Stodir must have envied Vakun. She lost nothing they hadn't and didn't face the horrors they had. There was no real point in prolonging a foregone conclusion, the fortress killed everyone eventually. She no longer believed as she used to that it could somehow end and that eventually she would be respected as a loyal citizen, a craftsdwarf, or a warrior. The fortress demanded loyalty and punished those who were lacking in it but never rewarded those who exemplified it, the best craftsdwarves had a quasi-magical mix of personality traits and innate talent or were blessed by some divine spark of inspiration, the best warriors were unusually strong or fast or driven and hardened by brutal training that consumed every fiber of their being. Even these ones who were valuable were utterly hopeless, eventually they all died like the rest of the fortress.
The Nobles , the founders, still lived of course and they lived like mortal gods but even they were doomed to walk among the broken husks of the damned. Even they'd lost the spark that made dwarves. They looked at dwarves of their shared blood, their friends and neighbors born from the First Anvil just as they themselves were, their kin- their equals under the eyes of Armok and they felt nothing. They were no longer moved by those who were trapped in the corporeal nightmare whose walls they themselves raised. They'd been destroyed as much as anyone else and in the end they would be killed by an ambush or an accident or assassinated by the overseer for some slight that had likely been imagined.
The dwarves, even the most important and most respected dwarves, were irrelevant. The Fortress mattered. Not the dwarves who lived in it, who worked to preserve it, who loved it as their only home. The Fortress must survive, if it's population was reduced to one dwarf whose days and nights were filled with horror, suffering and prayers for death this would be completely fine The Fortress, the literal walls, fortifications, and tunnels, that was what mattered. This was not a place of refuge it was a monument and any safety it provided to the drones conscripted to it's upkeep was wholly incidental. In the eyes of the Fortress the Fortress was all that mattered.
She looked at her quiver "The Beauty of the Destination will Justify the Road." It was a lie, an awkwardly phrased lie told by an idealistic dwarfette who had never known true suffering. When you burned a corpse and mixed it's ashes with a handful of dirt you could call it “clear glass” and persuade yourself it's a gem but what you had was still just a dead body and handful of dirt and the death was no less senseless nor the dirt more meaningful when you were done. The climb to greatness was long and perilous, and the summit was a place unloved by the gods- it was blasted, wind battered, and bare and there was no returning from that place. At the end of it all she was fighting tooth and nail to get one more moment to bask in the horrors of Arrowstockades, fighting towards a goal that was both unreachable and not worth reaching. She wondered why her body insisted on continuing. Why she lashed out on pure instinct to push away an attacking zombie or struggling to stay above the waterline. After a few more minutes of walking she didn't have an answer. She smiled placidly to no one in particular.
This was the day Dumplin Lakewanders decided to kill herself.
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Topic: The Increasingly Tragic Tale of Dumplin (Read 79073 times)