Too Much Backstory

“There were once a people who called themselves the Dwarvenkind. They were not a tall folk, though they were stout and strong and hardy. Known far and wide for their metal craft and stone lore, they came down from high in the mountains to trade unbreakable weapons and delicately carved stone animals. But though they came down from high in the mountains, that is not where they made their homes. No! They lived beneath the mountain. It was only an outpost high and away on a steep cliff to guard an entry point and an airshaft leading to their tunnels.” Mr. Agosto paused to sip his tea. The small girl child seated on the rug before his rocking chair stared up at him with wide, brown eyes and lips parted in anticipation.

 

“Such tunnels! Made from stone cut so precisely even you could not fit your tiniest finger into a gap between them. The arched ceilings bore beams of dark, porous stone cultivated with a glowing moss to give the only light needed by the sensitive eyes of the Dwarves. The tunnels lead on a gentle slope to twisting stairs down, down, down to the hollow heart of the mountain. In the great cavern beneath the weight of earth, was found a lake, deep and cold and dark, which the Dwarvenkind called Thunersee. Around the edge of this lake into the towering walls of rock, the Dwarves carved out their dwellings, building the city they called Drunengalm am See.

 

“As the Dwarven people grew and prospered, so too their city climbed the walls of rock to the apex of the cavern, and a great cross-shaped bridge linking the distant corners of Drunengalm was constructed. At the center of the bridge a palace of shining stone crowned the lake, reflecting silver and white on the surface of the black water over a hundred feet below. The wide expanse of the legs of the bridge was lined with agate mined from depth below even the lake where the earth grows hot and dangerous.”

 

“And you saw it? With your own eyes?” The young girl had rocked forward onto her knees as the mysterious images painted in her mind grew with the words of her elderly friend.

 

He placed his cup gently in its saucer and smoothed the white hair on his chin. “No, child. Only in my dreams have I seen Drunengalm am See. Yes, I traveled a bit in my youth, but it was an elf of the Emberwood of Rhoanor who told me this tale. The elf’s father had been an emissary to the city beneath the mountain before the Dwarvenkind disappeared from the surface world we call our home. This was hundreds of years ago. The elves live longer than we mere humans can comprehend, but even the elves who inhabited the Emberwood in my youth had all been born after the disappearance of the Dwarves.”

 

“What happened to them?”

 

“No one I’ve ever spoken to has had the answer to that question. Fetch me another cup of tea, child, this one has grown quite cold.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Celise! You’re covered in dirt and you’ve lost your hair ribbon again! Where have you been?”

 

“On the mountain, looking for Wiriehorn.” The girl unrepentantly washed her hands at the kitchen pump.

 

“What is that? Get upstairs, change your dress, wash your face, and get ready for dinner. Jalana’s invited Luth to join us. I think they have news. I believe they are to be married!”

 

Completely ignoring her mother’s comments about her older sister and her beau, Celise dusted her dress with her wet hands and hopped out of the warm kitchen over the threshold to the stairs. “Wiriehorn is the Dwarven Outpost that guards the entrance to the tunnels that lead to Drunengalm am See.”

 

“You are far too old to believe in such folderol! Dwarves are creatures of legend and any city of theirs is purely myth! I never wish to speak ill of the dead, but Mr. Agosto should never have filled your head with such nonsense when you visited him next door.”

 

“Dwarves aren’t all myth and legend,” Celise paused on the bottom step. “There’s an alphabet that’s all straight edges for easy carving and Dalen House has statues with some of those letters carved at the base in their gardens.”

 

Marta flopped her floury hands onto her aproned hips, “That is completely beside the point. We’re having a guest for dinner and there is so much dirt on the back of your neck you could sprout a green willow. And you! You’ll be putting your hair up and lowering your skirts next year.” She glowered at her daughter’s retreating back, hopefully to wash and change as directed and not just to daydream about lost cities. “I never had such trouble with Jalana.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Those are Dwarven runes.” A male voice startled Celise out of her focus as she studied a shield hung on the wall just over her head in the hall. She turned towards the stranger keeping the shield in the corner of her vision.

 

“Yes, I know.” She patted the chignon on the back of her head to check that her jump hadn’t dislodged too much of her hair. Though her mother had long since given up on making a proper lady of her, Celise didn’t want to disrupt Dian’s big day. “I was practicing sounding out the words. A neighbor taught me the Dwarven alphabet when I was a child.”

 

“What does the shield say?” The man asked interestedly. This was a new experience for Celise. Everyone in her small circle of acquaintance were thoroughly sick of hearing anything to do with Dwarves from her.

 

The brunette shrugged with one shoulder, ashamed of her own ignorance. “I don’t know. I don’t speak Dwarven. I only know how to sound out their alphabet. The old man who lived next door to us when I was little taught me after he told me all the tales he knew of the Dwarves. He said there was an outpost on Mt Esterly that protected the tunnel entrance to a great city beneath the earth. I spent a great many days looking for it before my older sister Jalana married and I began helping in the store.”

 

“So you’re the daughter of Marcon and Marta whose younger sister is supposed to marry today?”

 

Confused, “Yes, how did you know?”

 

“They sent me out here to get you. I’m Ander Dalen. My father sent me here to Warrensburg as his representative, and so I’ll be officiating the wedding. We can get started as soon as you join us in my office.” The smiling young man gestured up the hall behind himself to an open door.

 

“Oh, dear. . .” Celise rushed past him towards her family.

 

*        *        *

 

“Good afternoon, and welcome to our shop, Master Dalen. Has Kara sent you here for thirty pounds of food she doesn’t want to carry again?”

 

The dark-haired man sauntered to the counter and leaned his weight on his elbows. “How many times do I have to ask you to call me Ander?”

 

“Shh! My father’s in the storeroom, and he’s too old-fashioned to believe men and women can just be friends. If he hears me call you by your given-name or hears a report from one of the nosy, old biddies who live in this town that I called you by your given-name, he’ll automatically assume we’re engaged, and there will be no dissuading him.”

 

“Well, no man who wanted to propose to a woman would bring her the news I’m bringing you. I haven’t told you, but I wrote down some of the Dwarvenkind stories Mr. Agosto used to tell you and sent them to my father. He used to hear similar tales from his grandfather. He wants me to ask you if you would accompany him to Arrandale when he goes for the Ruire’s Counsel next month. The library there has some old Dwarven lore, and he wants to see if you can dig up any more information about Wiriehorn or Drunengalm am See.”

 

Celise stepped away from the counter in shock. “Me?! He wants me to go to Arrandale to research the Dwarves? That’s all I’ve ever wanted!” Her hands balled into fists in a futile attempt to contain her emotions.

 

“I suspected as much, the way you talk about them and end up staring wistfully out any window that faces Mt Esterly lost in thought when the conversation slows.” He playfully slapped a letter onto the counter between them. “Anyway, there’s no one else to do it. You’ll have some quarters in the official Dalen Manor in Arrandale, and for the few weeks a year my father is in town for the annual counsel, you’ll have a few duties to assist his secretary, but the rest of the year you’ll have room, board, food, and a small stipend to research the Dwarves and anything related to the mountains near here.”

 

“Why would your father do this for me?”

 

“Family legend says that the Dalens made their fortune through trade with the Dwarves centuries ago, so without them we wouldn’t hold the position we hold today as one of the founding families of Hedrimond. If you can find Wiriehorn and reestablish contact with the Dwarves again. . .”

 

*        *        *

 

“And lastly here is the nursery. Since all of my children are grown, but do not yet have younglings of their own, I thought you might quarter in the governess’s rooms through there and use the desks and tables in here for your studies.” The distinguished gentleman stepped into the room with large windows overlooking the courtyard, three desks, and four scratched and paint splattered worktables. “It’s a quiet part of the house.” A door to a large bedroom with a sitting area of two comfortable chairs in front of a fireplace was visible through the open door at the far side of the room.

 

Celise followed him into the room with an awed look on her face after this tour of a grand manor house. “Ruire Dalen… All this space is for me?”

 

“Yes, and Gwenie has cleared and readied the governess’s suite through that door. It will be years at least before my family will have need of this space, and if I can help a scholar get her start, I’m glad to do it.”

 

“This is the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me. I would sleep on a rug in the attic if it meant I could actually study and learn how to search for the lost.”

 

*        *        *

 

“So good to have you here for a visit, Ander. Gwenie didn’t say a thing!” Celise looked up from her book as the nursery door creaked open.

 

“Yes, things in Warrensburg are the same as ever, and I hadn’t been to Arrandale in a good two years, so I came down. There’s also been precious little news from you about your progress. Two letters to your parents in eight months?”

 

Celise shrugged unconcernedly. “They don’t care about my progress even if I’ve learned to read Dwarven slowly, with a dictionary at hand, in that time. Learning the language of ‘lost mythical creatures’ is a waste of time as far as they’re concerned. I spent my youth getting told off for not caring enough about dresses and appearance as much as my sisters. I think my mother just wants a thousand grandchildren.”

 

“I did have the honor of recording Luisa’s birth in the town records recently. She’s very cute.” Ander sat backwards in a chair across the table from her.

 

“Yes, yes, babies are cute. I think I’m going to need to learn to use cartography tools next. There will be little point in exploring the mountain and trying to excavate anything if I can’t accurately and precisely locate it. Since you’re here,” she pushed a stack of parchment and a quill to him, “can you give me a letter of reference to the Cartography Guild?”

 

*        *        *

 

Ruire Dalen sat at his desk reviewing the home estate’s ledger when there was a knock at his door. He made a note before cheerfully calling, “Come in.”

 

The door was pushed in by a woman carrying a wooden scroll case. “Good afternoon, Ruire.”

 

“Celise, I didn’t know you were back from your mapping excursion. Please come in and sit down. What have you got there?” He stood up to greet her.

 

“Thank you, sir. This this the map I’ve spent the last three and a half years making of the near side of Mt Esterly.” She placed the scroll case on his desk and unrolled her map on a clear corner. “As you can see, I’ve identified four possible sites where Wiriehorn might have once been located. I am hoping to start at this one in the spring just before planting, which I believe is the most likely location from the point of view of Wiriehorn as a trading outpost. However, if its primary function was more of a fortress or guard station, this location is more defensible. It’s harder to get to, so I was thinking that the first spot would be a better starting point for a first excavation.”

 

“What supplies will you need?”

 

“Do you not need to discuss such an expenditure with Lady Dalen? She was… not pleased to see me downstairs when I came in.”

 

“Lady Dalen is much like your own mother in that she is content with what she has and does not need to seek dreams beyond the comforts of her family or her flowers. The gardens here at the estate in Birchwood and at the house in Warrensburg are entirely of her design and execution. As Dwarves were not known for flowers, she is little interested in them. This expenditure, as you call, it is not so great that I cannot afford to keep sending you up the mountain, by yourself at your own insistence, once a year on excursions. What is your plan for excavation now that you are ready to proceed to that step?”

 

“If I could have supplies and an assistant to get to this location,” Celise points to her first-choice site on the map, “I could stay there for about two months scrapping away the topsoil to search for signs of worked stone before the streams from the snow thaw dry up, and I need to come back down.”

 

“So we’re looking at food and pay for two for two and a half months as well as excavation supplies?”

 

“No, I meant an assistant to get to the site. Once we had unloaded the pack animals, because I’m pretty sure we’ll need donkeys or mules to get everything up there, the assistant would bring the animals back down. Vegetation is pretty sparse that high in altitude on that side of the mountain, so there would be no good way to feed them. No, if someone could help me set up camp, they could head back down with the animals and then perhaps make another supply trip after about a month. Then I could come down at the end of two months plus a week or two when I have just enough supplies to get me home.”

 

*        *        *

 

Day 11: Jake left yesterday with the donkeys leaving me along with a month’s worth of supplies. I’ve made camp a few hundred feet from my dig site, so my commute will be significantly shorter than from Dalen Manor to the Lady Amania Mondhal Archival Library.

 

I’ve spent today making a semi-permanent shelter against weather and settling in. Tomorrow I’ll grid the first section near the cliff and officially start digging.

 

Day 20: I thought I found a rock with some worn Dwarven runes, but I think they were stray chisel marks since they only read as gibberish.

 

Day 47: It’s been three days since Jake left again bringing the second month’s worth of supplies and letters from my family. Dian’s lost another babe just as she was thinking to let out the waists of her dresses. It’s the fourth time. I wish I had had time to write a return letter before Jake left, little good though it would do to comfort her. Though she’s always idolized Jalana and stole my hair ribbons, as though I cared, Mother and Jalana will be of no help for her since they can’t stop themselves from chattering constantly leaving her no peace.

 

Day 68: The streams of snow thaw from the peak are down to a trickle as summer is setting in properly. I’ve dug down to stone in three sections and found only Orcish graffiti. There’s one note that’s strange in comparison to the usual “Ogar was here.” Something about an exploding stone, but my Orcish isn’t as solid as my Dwarven. I estimate I must head back down the mountain with my notes in two days’ time. I have taken a rubbing of this strange text to send to Sir Grint about this phrase I don’t recognize.

 

*        *        *

 

“Thank you for coming to stay with me and insisting Mother and Jalana return to their own homes. You’re much more restful than they are.” The sweet-faced young woman said from her nest of pillows.

 

“I’m sure you never thought you would rather spend time with me instead of Jalana when we were growing up.” Celise said from a nearby chair over some darning. “I received a letter from Gwenie, Ruire Dalen’s housekeeper, and she wrote that the greatest healers in Hedrimond are at the Temple to Mishakal in Mistverge. If we can travel there, her sister can host us for a few weeks after harvest.”

Dian picked nervously at a loose thread in the hem of her coverlid. “I… I don’t know if I can take the hope without breaking permanently…”

 

“Shh… It’s three months until harvest. You don’t have to decide right now.” Celise dropped the sewing into the basket next to her chair and sat on the bed next to her younger sister, taking Dian’s nervous hands into her own calloused ones.

 

“What would you do?”

 

“Whatever it took to avoid regret. You have a dream to have a family. Clearly something beyond your control is preventing that from happening. If there is anything that can be done, the Nurse-Priests of Mishakal are the best there is. If nothing can be done, at the very least you will know that you tried everything available to you.” She gently squeezed her sister’s soft fingers. “If nothing can be done, we will all grieve for you, but then you can find a new dream once the grief has passed.”

 

*        *        *

 

Brushing snow from her shoulders as she entered her parents house, Celise was pounced upon by her mother before she had a chance to even remove her cloak. “What news? Will Dian be able to have children?”

 

“It’s unclear. The healers gave her some potions and tea recipes to try to help stabilize a pregnancy, if she can get pregnant again. They were concerned about the report of the bleeding from the last miscarriage. There may be scar tissue that could prevent her from becoming pregnant again, but they couldn’t be sure. There were no clerics or paladins to infuse her with Mishakal’s light in residence and none were expected imminently. The Nurse-Priests recommended trying for one more year, but if she miscarries again, Divine Intervention might be the only way she could carry a pregnancy to term.” She hung her scarf on top of her cloak on the pegs by the door.

 

Marta slumped against the kitchen door. “What a disappointment.”

 

“Yes, but Dian is hopeful. If you’ll fetch me a broom, I’ll sweep up this snow before too much of it has a chance to melt.” Her mother turned and went back through the kitchen door returning with both a broom and dustpan and a small parcel wrapped in brown packing paper.

 

“This came for you while you were in Mistverge with Dian.” She placed the parcel on the small table next to the cloak pegs and handed over the broom.

 

“Thank you, Mother.” Making quick work of the job at hand, Celise tucked her parcel under her arm and dashes up to her room taking the stairs two at a time.

 

Removing the twine and carefully folding back the parcel paper, a book entitled A Guide to Orcish Grammar was revealed along with a small folded note. It read:

 

Dear Ms. Vonda,

 

So nice to hear from you again after our studies together at AML. Your thoughts and theories on the Dwarves and your interest in my Orcish histories are missed in the scholarly circles here in Arrandale.

 

The graffiti rubbing you sent me is most unusual. The syntax of the text implies there’s not a stone that does the exploding, but about a stone that seems to cause other things to explode. Very impressively remembered considering that Orcish was never your primary study. I have included my first Orcish grammar so that you can translate any more interesting bits that you find without having to wait months on the mail.

 

I do hope that you will continue to send me copies or rubbings of any more interesting Orcish carvings you come across in the field. Those few of us who have made a particular study of the Orcish language, histories, and what little bit of culture they are known to have rarely get new information from the field without being killed outright.

 

Sincerely,

 

Sir Varon Grint

 

*        *        *

 

Day 9: This is the third and final trip to this dig site. The more Orcish graffiti I find, the more the defensible location makes sense. While orcs have not been seen this far west or south in the mountains for decades, they were clearly once prolific in this area. There was even one graffiti that read “Fuck all Dwarves” in addition to the very comment “Humans are puny” or “Humans are weak” which I believe proves there were once Dwarves on this mountain who fought with the orcs.

 

There were also at least another dozen references to an explosion causing rock or a cursed rock in one or two cases, which is interesting, though not relevant to my search. I have on the nights when the wind is howling too loudly for me to sleep pondered the meaning of this and have come to the conclusion that it may be a crude slang for intercourse. The cursed rock could be a mocking note about orcs who are unable to “finish” as it were. Having a drink with Jake or Ander in the back of the pub when most of the men don’t even realize I’m there has been very elucidating.

 

In the morning I shall set up my first grid as the improvements I made to my shelter last year held through the winter. Hopefully some my digging will turn up a bit more clay which I can use to plug the last few holes in my little lean-to.

 

Day 24: I have been digging through much more top soil in my third grid this trip than at any other point in my excavations of this rock face. I’m 32” deep and have yet to hit actual rock. The build up of sediment may have been a landslide that covered the mouth of a cave.

 

All the records I could find of Wiriehorn did seem to indicate that there was some sort of Dwarf-made structure on the surface, and this face is only showing naturally formed rock, so I believe is must be a nature formation as well.

 

Day 28: I have hit rock at 37” deep near the top of my grid. This must just be a bit of a divet in the side of the mountain.

 

Day 31: There was a naturally formed niche at the back of this divet. On the ledge was a blue, pink, and green stone disk about 4” in diameter. There’s a small hole at one side, so I believe I shall put it on a bit of string until I can get home and get a chain. My first interesting, physical find!

 

Day 34: The strangest thing happened today. I was just starting to dig after gridding up the next section of the rock face and realized I’d left my shovel leaning against my shelter. I was in the process of climbing down from my makeshift ladder, which is quite rickety. It wobbled slightly more than it ever had previously due to a hump of rock that’s too wide for the ladder to straddle, and when I threw my left hand out for balance, my shovel moved half-way from its resting place to where I was standing.

 

I lost half the morning experimenting with my newfound ability before it occurred to me that I could pull the soil directly from the wall into my sieve without having to climb my less-than-perfect ladder at all! My life on the mountain just got a lot safer.

 

*        *        *