Ilon sucked in a lung full of air and slumped back against the smoothed wall of his apartment before raising two heavily calloused hands to cover his eyes so that Erib would not see. Across the room, idly gazing up at one of the many engravings that had been set into the wall with his bright jade eyes, the young boy asked "Papa...why do we have to stay in here?"
Ilon slowly slid his hands down his face, wiping away the tears, and looked over at his son. "Because, Erib, there are...people from the surface, who we shouldn't see. And so we need to wait till..." Ilon paused, swallowing as he cast a wary glance to the kimberlite door, "...till Captian Likot and Commander Deler and their friends make them go away." The large dwarf forced an uneasy smile and then looked down at his hands, hands which might have once been covered in soot and used for bending steel but which now had been turned to the work of bending bone and mending sinew. Silently, the metalsmith turned doctor tried to convince himself that he had done the right thing in bringing himself and his children to this place.
"But Papa," Erib asked, now growing upset, "Mestthos is still up there! If she can go up there, why can't I?"
Ilon's eyes grew wide, and without looking up from the network of burn scars traced across his palms he replied "Th-that's because...your sister has...work to do, Erib. And when she's done, she'll come back down here where she's supposed to be."
"What does she have to do, papa?"
"I...I don't know, she has to make something..." Ilon trailed off and then, in a more forceful tone, commanded "Erib, I don't know what has a hold of her, just stay home until I tell you that you can leave."
Far above, yet still far beneath the earth, Deler Blockadespeech the Militia Commander pushed his way past his men, the steel shortsword glistening in the heat of nearby forges. Blue and red blood, mixed with something else that Deler would rather not think of, drenched the smoothed checkered floor, and garbled shouting occasionally wafted down from the high windows above. From one of those same windows he had been standing at, overlooking the workshops below only moments before whilst his men sparred and made crude jokes behind him. Now half of them were dead, and more than a third of those that remained were wounded. Asmel and the Golds of Craft, who had been out keeping the tiger population down when the horns had sounded, had never returned.
The Militia Commander growled back a cry of rage and turned to face the remainder of his troops, doing his best to hide the bloody stump that had become his shield arm lest it hurt morale. "Alright men," he growled, his voice all the gruffer from suppressed tears of anger and despair, "There're still bog trolls on the upper level. And if I've heard correctly, someone spotted one o' them voidwalker infiltrators sneaking through the hospital apartments. I need five of you to head down and deal with that, take th' dogs. The rest o' you are with me, we're goin-"
"Commander..."
"What is it now, Urist?" the commander barked at the interrupting axedwarf, and then slowly turned to follow the troop's gaze. Far down the hallway, clutching a pile of horse bones to her chest, a little girl no more than eight years of age with glazed jade eyes scurried through the shadows towards the craft workshops.Long story short, I've got this siege right? And in the middle of it, some thieves of a very powerful race show up, right? And then this little girl, who's the twin of a little boy and the daughter of a single metalsmith-turned-doctor dwarf, is suddenly possessed (likely by one of the dungeons of ghosts floating around the upper levels of the obsidian alchemist tower I've got). I'm waiting to see if she'll survive to finish the craft, and if her family will survive as well since...y'know...there's a voidwalker thief scurrying around in their apartment "building" and I'm fairly certain the father's personality is such that he -will- fight if he sees it.
This is post is entirely unedited, I might maybe go back and fix it up later. More than likely, I'll just forget about it.
Author
Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6233052 times)