Urist Sealstood sighed, touching the cool surface of the elder cage before him. He thought back to the rash decisions taken by the fortress leader. Sure, the idea thrilled him at first. A real dungeon! In his bedroom! And he got to laugh at Eral every day, that stupid prick. But it soon got old. He felt… betrayed somehow by his own wealth. The poor peasants in the cages around him kept on staring on in the same state of shock as when they were caged. They had come to the fortress, utterly friendless, to have parties and make lifelong companions. But in their first party, they were drafted, and literally forced to cage themselves in an ingenious cave-in generator consisting of a bridge, a stone stockpile, and a row of traps. And then Eral had started crying, pleading for the sake of his family and his pet donkeys. That really took out the fun of having a rival caged in your room.
After long deliberation, he decided to go against the fortress leader’s zealous generosity, and free the poor victims. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the keys to the locks. So, like any other dungeon master would, he created an elaborate plan involving eight mechanisms, and an obsidian lever. But alack, he had no knowledge of mechanics! The linking process took excruciatingly long, as the peasants had to make the choice of partying next to the legendary well, or working in the creepy noble’s bedroom next to a moat of lava. The prisoners started tantruming inside their cages, but even the strongest dwarf could not break the finely crafted feather wood bars. Eventually, however, the system was set up. Justice and mercy had come together to free the hapless souls.
Urist, still in the drink stockpile, heard of his plan’s success. But due to the guilt he had felt for simply owning the cages, he had assigned the lever to himself and himself alone. He ran to his remote bedroom as fast as his stubby legs could take him (After finishing his drink of course – he IS a dwarf, after all.), but it was TOO LATE! One of the dwarves, a simple thresher, had died of thirst. He didn’t even deserve to die.
With a gut-wrenching sob, Urist Sealstood released the drowsy, thirsty, starving dwarves, who ran to the stockpiles. The dead dwarf, however, evidence of unjust cruelty, stayed in his cage.
Urist Sealstood took the cage filled with bloody evidence to a tiny, little known alcove in the fort. It was the meager office of the legendary clerk, Lolor Amusehandle! He looked grimly up, light streaming into his darkened room, warped by the flowing cloak of the dungeon master. The visage sent tremors down the spine of Urist. This was a man who had once been the leader of the fort, until the day he grudgingly gave his power to another, lesser being. He had retreated from the day-to-day events, meticulously keeping stock. His face was on all the masterful engravings (Literally on all of them; the legendary engraver has some sort of fascination with Lolor), and his work was in all the rumors. With a brief nod to his fellow noble, he looked down, continuing his mysterious plans.
With silence and absolute secrecy, the dungeon master set the cage down in an unused corner of the room, the floorboards seeming relatively new, and not as covered in dust. With a few tugs and pulls, the floor gave way, dropping the cage into the river of magma contained under the clerk’s office. Lolor looked up from his work, pulled out a piece of obsidian, and once again, for the third time in the fort’s history, replaced the floorboards.
Urist ran out of the evil room, and returned to his bedroom. He fell asleep with happy dreams of what he could do once the baron, tax collector, consort, and hammerer came, and dwarves could be caged that really deserved to die.
Such is a story of the damned room of the dungeon master. An epitome of cruelty and neglect that could have been avoided had there not been so many parties, and the peasants could have finished the linking of the cages in time!
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Topic: What is wrong with me? (Read 1658 times)