19th of Hematite, 125“Ho there!”
Another poet. As was once again forced to divert his attention from evil-groundhog watching.
“And just who,” said As, “might you be?”
The poet, a dwarf of long nose and longer facial hair, marched over and bowed. “Logem, good sir-- Logem Alathunal, wandering poet. I’d heard old Sakzul was seeking you seven out, and-- well! I couldn’t let him discover a spiffy new poetry hole without me, now could I?”
“Er. I suppose not? Look, I’ll just show yuh over to the dining hall before yuh get eaten by squirrels or somethin’.”
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21st of Hematite, 125Inod climbed up to the surface, where As was standing guard.
“Where’ve yuh been?” asked As. “I’ve been up here for days now, and nobody’s been hauling wood! I mean, I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t supposed to be hauling wood!”
Inod started. “Oh dear. We didn’t realize you were still up here-- we’ve been putting up beds in the bedrooms for the past three days!”
As sighed. “Well, now you folks are done, wouldjuh mind terribly bringin’ down those last logs? I’d rather like to go back inside and get a drink, y’know.
---------------
23rd of Hematite, 125“Ho there!”
As didn’t even bother turning around this time.
The poet walked over anyway. “Hullo, good sir! I’m--”
“Don’t tell me-- yer another poet, like the last two poets that’ve showed up in the past week, and yer here because yer buddies are because poets are a buncha nosy lunatics.”
“I-- yes. Yes I am.”
“Won-der-ful. The hatch cover’s thataway. Now if ye’ll excuse me, it looks like the haulers are done--I’m gonna go submerge my head in a barrel of fermented mushroom juice.”
And As stumped back to the hatch. Lost for words, the poet followed suit.
---------------
24th of Hematite, 125With the wood-hauling expedition complete, the dwarves of the Brazen Hills treated themselves to a day of rest. The miners had passed out in the new bedrooms; sleep, blissful sleep, took them like it had not since they’d arrived here. Tun and As cracked open a new barrel of ale. Sakzul the poet regaled Inod, Kel, and Atis with an old historical tale while the other poets criticized.
On days like this, you could almost forget you were living in a hole in the ground under a haunted woodland.
---------------
26th of Hematite, 125Erush stumped up to the food storeroom, wiping sleep out of his eyes. “Hey Tun?”
“What?”
“Did you ever start counting things around here?”
“Oh! I *hic* never did. There was so many pots to carve I sort of *hic* lost track...”
“Ah. Well, could you get started on that? Nobody seems to know how much food and drink we have left in here, and I suspect we’re running low...”
Tun nodded. “Yeah, sure. I’ll *hic* get on that.” And Tun made her way, slightly unsteadily, to the stairway.
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27th of Hematite, 125“Erush?”
Erush turned from his digging. “Yeah, wh-- oh, Lorbam! What’s going on?”
“I was just thinking-- we don’t really have anything left to dig up here. We’ve been widenin’ the hallways and such, but none of that’s really so important right now, yeah?”
Erush frowned. “I mean, I guess so. What are you getting at?”
“I want to dig down,” said Lorbam. “We’ve got a good settlement carved out up here-- it’s time we look at the stuff down there. We’ll find some new ores, maybe crack open a cavern or two, and eventually... magma.” Lorbam spread her arms wide. “Magma! Blood of the earth! Soul of the fortress! We’ll bring ores down there, forge weapons, armor... the things we came here to make!”
Erush nodded. “Yes. Yes, that sounds wonderful. Sink a shaft from the main stairway, we can widen it later. Let us know what you find.” Erush smiled. “Happy digging.”
---------------
Twelve days after Lorbam disappeared under the earth, she returned. The dwarves gathered in the dining room to hear her findings.
“It’s great down there,” said Lorbam. “Diorite and granite, layers and layers of the stuff, good solid building material-- and ores everywhere. Tin and copper for bronze, silver for warhammers and statues, and gold-- gold all over the place. I dug straight through a big vein of the stuff, gold all ‘round me. Fan-tas-tic.”
Erush nodded. “Any caverns?”
“Nah, not yet. I think I musta bypassed one or two of ‘em, but haven’t cracked any open yet. Had to come back for a drink.”
“Mm. Well, great work down there-- now we know where the good building rock is, we can start thinking about quarrying some.”
“Ooh. I might have something for that,” said Kel, and he began to draw on the stone floor with a chunk of chalk. “See, we want to do three things down there: explore the level, dig out plenty of raw material, and dig it in such a way that we could convert the floor into something later. So we start by digging these tunnels out across the level, like this--”
“And then we start digging a crisscross of these, leaving 5-by-5 chunks of rock between the tunnels. We want to explore the level? We dig more tunnels. We need more granite for building stuff? We widen the tunnels a bit, or knock out a few chunks, or just carve more tunnels. We need more living space? We knock a few chunks around until they’re the shape we want. Simple!” Kel brushed away the chalk markings and stood in triumph. “And once we’ve got ourselves a nice little pile of granite-- well. The things we can build...” Kel stepped back, chortling.
Erush shrugged. “...Looks as good as anything, I guess. I’ll go start the digging; Lorbam, could you come help once you’ve got something alcoholic down your throat?”
“Sure.”
---------------
All this talk of stonework and design had put Kel in a constructive sort of mood. He needed to tinker, fiddle, manipulate-- engineer. Yes, engineer. Kel needed to play around with mechanics; it'd been too long...
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10th of Malachite, 125Inod was in the dining hall when a rather odd odour descended upon the room. “...Hey. Do you three smell that?”
The three poets were in some kind of heated argument about the proper structuring of acrostics. Inod sighed and set herself to investigating. The smell seemed to be coming from upstairs...
---------------
“Hey Atis. Is something...
rotting up here?”
Atis turned. “Rotting?” he asked. “I suppose there is a bit of a stench up here, now that you mention it... well, it’s certainly not my plump helmets!”
“‘Course not. I think it’s coming from outside...” Inod lifted the hatch cover-- “
Eeyugh!”-- and promptly slammed it shut. “Definitely coming from up there. I could swear I’ve smelled this before,but it seems somehow
worse this time--” Inod pinched her nose, lifted the cover again, and scrutinized the forest. “...Oh.” And Inod began to laugh.
“What’s up there?” asked Atis.
“Skunk.”
---------------
Tink-- tink-- tink-- down in the granite quarries. Slowly but surely, the stone gave way under the cold copper.
“We never did finish sinking that shaft to the magma sea,” said Erush.
Lorbam shrugged. “Eh, this quarry here seemed like a good thing to get started on. Kel’s itchin’ to do some real construction up on the surface, y’know.”
“I suppose,” said Erush, nodding slowly. “One of us could go finish what you started down there, though. For the magma.”
“Yeah. Just doesn’t seem like a proper fortress until there’s magma in it, know what I mean?”
“Mm.”
The two miners worked in silence.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Copper on stone.
“I think I’ll go finish that shaft now,” said Erush after several minutes had passed. “For the magma. Unless you’d rather do it?”
“Nah, you deserve a turn at it. I’ll keep working here.”
Erush smiled and descended the staircase. Lorbam nodded and turned back to her tunnel.
Tink. Tink. Tink.---------------
12th of Malachite, 125“Inod?”
Inod, not having had much else to do, had been spending most of her time in the tavern, listening to the poets’ stories and telling a couple of her own. “So when we get here Erush goes “Right-- who want to be militia commander?” and As, he just grabs this big hammer out of the back of the wagon, and he-- oh. Tun?”
“Erush told me to count everything a couple weeks ago,” said Tun, “and I’ve just finished counting everything, and there’s something he needs to see, but he’s under a hundred urists of stone right now, and-- but maybe you could look?” And Tun led Inod over to where the drinks were kept. “Look. We’re running out.”
Inod groaned. “That’s enough for us to take what, three good swigs apiece? That won’t do...” Inod wrinkled her forehead, then looked up. “Say. Remember what Erush said about mashing plump helmets into juice and fermenting them? Maybe we could do that.”
“I guess so,” said Tun. “Who’s going to do it, though?”
“Me! I’m bored out of my skull listening to the poets anyway. I’ll grab a few of those nice pots you’ve been making, nab a few plump helmets from down here, and try my hand at it. How hard can it be?”
Tun smiled. “Perfect! Just let me know when you’re done so I can count the wine!” And Tun scurried off to carve more pots.
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14th of Malachite, 125Atis was burying another fistful of plump helmet spawn when he heard the voices.
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“Migrants! Migrants!” cried Atis, running down the stairs. “As! Migrants have come!”
“Migrants?” As stumbled from his training room. “Wot sort of daft folks would migrate here?” And As rushed upstairs to see the newcomers in.
---------------
Melbil Tadcatten, novice miller, beekeeper, and gelder, was beginning to have doubts. His group had been trudging through the woods for two days now, and the landscape had only gotten bleaker as they moved farther into it. Not to mention the eyes in the darkness... surely no dwarf could survive here? He’d only come because his older cousins did anyway.
Melbil’s doubts were soon dispelled by a dwarfish voice. The infamous dwarves of the Brazen Hills were alive! And had come in greeting! The wonderful voice boomed out, in true dwarfish welcoming fashion:
“Get over here, ya lunatics!”
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15th of Malachite, 125Still the migrants came, a great string of dwarves eleven strong. Well, five if you didn’t count the kids. As shook his head as he watched, confounded by the utter stupidity it took to bring children to a place like this.
“Alright,” said As, “welcome to our little hidey-hole. Don’t mind the stench; there’s a dead skunk prowling around here somewhere.”
“A wha--”
“You’ll get used to it. Hatch cover’s thataway, there’s room and board down there. Well, board anyway; Inod’ll have to get t’work on the room part. Now then... anybody here got any skills worth mentioning?”
There issued from the five adult migrants a mumbled string of various novice farming trades.
“That’s about wot I thought. You people willing to work hard and fight harder, then?”
The migrants shrugged.
“Eh, good enough. Yer profession here is ‘Soldier’. You’ll probably be drafted into the army at some point, of which I’m the only member, but if you didn’t want to fight yuh should’ve stayed home. In the meantime, we’ve got a dining room downstairs where you can go rest up a bit, and plenty of food and drink above that. Make yerself at home.”
The migrants spent the rest of the day herding themselves and their six children down to safety, and on the 16th of Malachite As closed the hatch cover. The dwarves of the Brazen Hills were now 18 strong.