Dumplin saw the marksdwarves on the walls fade into the distance. She was floating away. Backwards, panning out from the carnage and violence of the wicked world she'd lived in for so long. She saw the fighting grow more distant as her weightless form continued to drift away. The battlements came into view and soon so did the wall. She was descending, slowly and peacefully back to the earth. The wall soon rose above her and the sky came into view. The tearful and pained cry of “Dumplin” from Degel did not wrench her heart. She felt peace, for once since coming to Arrowstockades there was no pain or fear. She was no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. She had come to the fortress to find a new life and now she finally felt free of it. She was loosely aware of the metallic rattle as her armor clad body collided with the ground and the snapping sound of her bones fragmenting within it.
The world was very still now. She saw only the sky as musket balls and crossbow bolts whizzed overhead. It all seemed very small now. The fortress was an insignificant pocket of an insignificant territory of an insignificant region in an insignificant world. Peace, finally she'd found peace.
She thought of Okon, he would be ready to walk soon free of his mothers influence. She lamented that the first walk he would take on his own would be up the grand staircase. He would grow into a boy and then a man who would with any luck be smart enough to leave the fortress before it got hooks into him. Darkness creeped inward from the edges of her vision. She was subtly aware that her heartbeat was rapidly falling. Soon she would be with Asen again and she would rejoin the Baboons holding a place for their captain when his time came as well.
In retrospect it had been a terrible life but not a bad one. She'd been a laborer, and dabbled as an artisan for a little over a week, she'd been a hardened convict, a wife, a mother, and a warrior. She'd (not technically) slain an ancient monster,learned forgiveness in the arena and denied an armor clad demon her soul. She survived a war with a god, taught courage to the Baboons, lost most of her friends in a day, defeated a sadistic guardsman, and read arcane secrets from the walls of a palace in hell. She closed her eyes prepared for some well deserved rest.
Dumplin Lakewanders felt comfortable that she had finally won.
HATE FEAR DIEA wooden ceiling and a curious looking dwarf.
HURT STOP DON'T
A large pair of eyes inspecting her.
NO WHY QUITA dwarf standing over her.
STOP DEATH PLEASEA dwarf wearing a blue dyed robe and holding a very long strip of paper stood in front of her.
“Hi, I'm your doctor!” The dwarf said. “You're my first patient. As you may know our entire medical staff was murdered by angry patients during the riots and most of our patients were murdered by our angry medicals staff so we're a little bit short handed. I have literally never been in this room before this week. Funny story actually, I decided to sleep up here because it was closer than the dormitory and I guess someone saw me and decided I should make myself useful because when I woke up I was Chief Medical Dwarf. Can you believe it? I've been here for about a month and I'm already a noble, this place is great! And speaking of lucky, I saved your life!
You were really messed up, we had to conscript a team of doctors to make sure you didn't die before you got all your procedures done. I can't read this list, I've tried four times and I always lose my place. I brought the bookkeeper up here to read it and he couldn't get the same number of injuries twice. Muscle torn apart organ torn, bone shattered times infinity, if you need a clear picture. I've never seen anyone who was supposed to be dead as much as you are. ”
Dumplin blinked.
“So I found some cloth and thread and a couple sticks in those chests over there so I figured I'd just use them on you. I wrapped some stuff up and stitched some stuff up, by the way did you know there isn't a single needle in this fortress? I thought I was going to dislocate my shoulder doing all that needleless suturing. Some of your bones were broken so I stitched those back together and I'm pretty sure I put them back together alright, they look like bones. Also surgery, you had so much surgery.
I mushed some of your organs back together and I guess that's good, incidentally do you have a top liver because I found the left and right but there was this other thing and I have no idea what it is. Oh, I was going to mention it when I was talking about your bones but a lot of them were outside your body and I don't think they were working properly so I pushed them back in. I'm not sure if there's any tools here to help reboning but unless it's a bucket it's not in the chests so just some really hard pushing.
After that I took a couple of the small sticks and put your arms, legs, hands, and feet, in them because that seemed fun and healthy. I got you a big stick to walk with but your legs are both filled with thousands of tiny bones instead of the two or three big ones you need to walk so that went back in the chest, instead I filled one of the buckets with pond water and poured into your unconscious mouth.
Dumplin made a grunting sound.
“I consulted some militia dwarves for information on why you weren't dead and they said if a bullet didn't pierce your heart, throat, both lungs, or go deep into your brain it was basically impossible for it to kill you. I guess your armor deflected bullets away from your heart and into your non-vital organs. Now your helmet actually seems to have slowed down the bullets so they only went into your “outer” brain which is really just padding to protect your inner brain which makes you alive. We counted the holes in your helmet and we counted the bullets on the ground that passed through and we figure there's six or seven in your head. On that same subject you are filled with bullets.
Yeah like a lot of bullets. There are so many bullets inside of you. I don't know what a normal number of bullets to be shot with is but I'm guessing you have enough bullets in you to give that number to every dwarf in the fortress. So many bullets. I talked to the metalsmiths and they say there might be enough bullets inside you to melt them down and make a statue of you being shot with the bullets. It's crazy, everything I know about the world says that's impossible. Now I talked to Feb about what he did when he got shot and he said the doctors left it in so he took a bath and just yanked it out of his eye then, so I guess just do that.
Any way, you're all better- well in several months you will be, right now you're in traction. I'm not sure how long it'll take you to heal but they told me standard procedure was to deconstruct the traction bench and throw you on the floor and see if you could go back to work every few months. Dwarven medicine at it's finest.”
Dumplin made a clicking sound.
“Hypothetically that is. Practically it looks like you've gotten a little paler since we've finished and some of the other new doctors think you're bleeding internally. My thinking is that blood is supposed to be inside of you so it's just going back into your body but everyone else says your going to die in a couple days or hours but if you're still alive let me know so I can rub it in their faces. ”
“Arp?” Dumplin worked out.
“You've gotten pretty popular too, everyone wanted to see the dwarf that got shot to pieces and lived. You're a bigger celebrity than Bemul Sheep Shearer gods rest his soul! You should meet your fans in the dining hall if you don't die of blood loss, get an infection, or get killed by a tantruming doctor. .”
There was an unpleasant sound of what Dumplin inferred to be several iron musketballs rubbing against each other as she breathed.
“Looks like we're all done here, bye first patient.” He kicked the bench. “Back to work I go!”
It is said that when a dwarf sees death as imminent and expects wholly to die they enter a state of incredible single-minded focus. Such dwarves are capable of unimaginable feats, these condemned warriors know no equal in battle and strike with righteous fury awakened in their dwarven blood. These so called “martial trances” are the simple and flawed imitations of the crystaline clarity with which Dumplin saw and the infinite well of power and fury that she drew upon as the fortress shook with her mighty roar. If there was an enemy more powerful than Arrowstockades she didn't know of it and in the face of this invincible foe she entered a true martial trance rolling out of bed on her shattered limbs and clambering past the terrified doctor and down the stairs like a frightful octopus wrapped in cotton. She rolled awkwardly down the grand staircase knocking dwarves out of her way and menacing those that stood in her path until found herself in the caverns.
She moved in a spiderlike fashion scrabbling to the vein she'd left Obok in, scooped the boy up, and then made a painfully long and painfully painful belly crawl up the grand staircase tripping biting shoving and generally upsetting the dwarves who used the busy thoroughfare. She clambered up with disturbing speed as her noodly limbs flipped about. Eventually she reached the workshops and pulled herself across the ground to the jeweler's shop.
It had taken a few menacing gurrgles to frighten the attending craftsdwarf into fleeing and with an implement he'd dropped began working. She didn't have to think of anything clever, a lifetime in the fortress (nearly five years) had made the one lesson and recurring theme of her life perfectly clear.
She scratched away at the large glass gem on her quiver vandalizing the previous idealistic slogan. She carved a simple message into it to replace her earlier mantra and then with Obok in toe crawled down one flight and through a complex series of bodily manipulations made her way into the dining hall. A few dwarves reacted to her but most had seen stranger things and went about their business.
Dupmlin then mustered all of the ancient power remaining in her blood and she bent her own will. She forced herself to love Arrowstockades, to desire nothing more than to recover, to see another day, and to grow old in the most splendid of all dwarven kingdoms. Sure enough she noticed the fatigue of bloodloss almost imediately as the universe predictably conspired to disappoint her. By the time the joy of being done with the wretched fortress overtook her it was too late for the fates change their plans and she felt herself dying.
Anyone watching would see her expression change from burning rage, melancholy, abject terror, wistfulness, and by the time she'd breathed her last; peace. Whatever battle she'd fought lying on the floor of the dining hall with blood filling her chest cavity she seemed satisfied with it's resolution. She'd come to accept she was not the hero of any story. Her desire to find the right thing to say at the right time was gone so instead she mustered one final breath and repeated to Obok the words she'd etched into the green glass gem set into her quiver.
Dumplin Lakewandrers left the world having given it very little. When the dwarves of the dining hall stripped her of her possessions they found a suit of welded mithril armor, a set of decent clothing, a crossbow, all given to her by the fortress and returned to the fortress. They also found a few heaping handfuls of iron and steel bullets that she had technically collected which were eventually melted into bars. They took also the quiver which she had made and given to her son but they could not take the words she'd carved into it, the same words she'd left in his ear.
“Fortresses suck.”
Epilogue
After Dumplin Lakewanders was shot a spectacular number of times by a gnomish deathsquad and lived only long enough after treatment to return her son to the “safety” of the dining hall something odd happened to the fortress. People swore the crystal glass was less brilliant, the gold had lost it's luster, and an Arrowstockades goblet had somehow become a lesser thing. The meals lost their flavor, the wine lost it's substance, and the clothing seemed more “tacky” than “lavish”. The uniqueness of the fortress disappeared as well. There were no more massive projects and the day to day became focused on producing enough food and drink to live with most dwarves finding themselves with many idle hours and almost no unfortunate accidents. Some were quite pleased with this but others believed the Overseer had abandoned them. Some returned to the hillocks or the mountain halls, others became city dwarves and a few even came to join new fortresses.
Feb One-Eye remained in Arrowstockades as champion eventually taking up the Prowler of Rasps, he was killed by a mad dwarf and fashioned into a loin cloth. Degel went to the mountainhomes where he served as a general for less than a month before he surrendered to a much smaller elven force, joined their civilization, and became a flower picker called Foranane by his Elven kinsmen. He did not learn Elvish. Okon and Lolor decided a fortress with a bad reputation would be safer to live in and settled in the fledgling fortress of Joytheater, a haunted swamp. They didn't even make it inside. The Overseer, it is said, founded a new fortress that, facing destruction, created a path from hell to the surface of the earth and ushered in seven hundred years of darkness that are not important to this story. Ashmon found a rock. Obok grew to be a man of twelve years old, became a hunter, and left Arrowstockades leaving his crossbow but taking his quiver with him. No one is quite sure what became of then for there are many stories and some of them are simply not true.
What is known is that travelers tell stories of a lake in the mountains and is so deeply embedded in the thick would and rugged terrain one could only come across it if they were truly and utterly lost. On this lake ,they say, is a thoroughly unimpressive stronghold where the natural order is subverted. Where dwarves have no need of riches and no lust for war. In that stronghold it is said that they eat bland mushrooms and drink weak mushroom wine and work vigilantly to ensure their stock of the two never runs out. They have no silk but inexpertly spin coarse pigtail thread and produce coarse pigtail togas that may or may not be primitively dyed. They have no goblets here but they have poorly crafted irregular stone mugs decorated with poor pictures of flowers birds or other simple things. They are not troubled by thieves or raiders for they have no wealth, they are not overworked for they expect very little, they do not face horrible ordeals for their lives are very simple. It is said that if a dwarf comes to hate fortress life and walks into the wilderness then they may be magnetically drawn into the deep woods and the high mountains until they find Wanderedlake where they will be welcomed as brothers should they only find the overseer who knows well the message and speak the words “Fortresses Suck.”
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Topic: The Increasingly Tragic Tale of Dumplin (Read 79205 times)