The journal of Nine Shovelmurders, ElfCHAPTER ONE: HOW WE QUIT THE FOREST14 Hematite: Things have come to a head. Perhaps I was wrong to eat flesh with the dwarven traders, animal flesh cooked on a wood fire. But I cannot help who I am, and I was not born in the tree cities but in the far west, where elves walk with their heads bowed among the conquering men, serving at their tables and eating their leavings.
My mother was a freewoman, but only in name; she kept the old ways, but when I was a tiny girl, barely breeched, she sold me to pay her debts and handed me smiling to the indenture-agent. (Go! My dearest, this man is a friend and he will take you to a school where you will be with other children! except, no, he was not a friend.) I know nothing about my father but I presume that from him I got my scarlet hair and my temper. At age 12 I took a shovel to milady's lazy-eyed chambermaid for taking my tortoiseshell comb- my only memento of mother, treasured above my actual memories of her.
The wretch died and I would have too- an elf's life is in her master's hands, and for an elf to strike a human is death- but instead I was traded again. Not to a brothel, as I had expected, but to a mine. For six years I worked in the tin mines, first tending the animals that pushed the carts, then sorting through slag heaps for the tiny cassiterite gems they call spangles, and finally swinging a pick. Though we elves do not tire as fast as humans do, we are not suited to strenuous work, and it was mostly dwarven captives who broke rocks beside me. From the dwarves I learned to drink, to defend myself, and the rudiments of their language and letters.
Four years later, the mine was raided by the elves who live in the forests south of the Glad Seas, the larger of the two great inland oceans. They were looking for bronze for weapons and armor- the wild elves make no metal themselves- and they carried off all the elven prisoners. But I was not at home with them; their flowing speech was clumsy on my tongue, their moralistic fables seemed inane and their druids' songs left me cold; after a life of hard labor, I became restless after only a few months of leisure. When dwarf merchants passed through our forest I snuck out to greet them- an elf will not speak to a dwarf on the road since they use wooden wagons, but I grew up among the rumble of minecarts and have no such qualms. They said that they were going to Dinnerwandered to sell diamond-inlaid armor and some peculiar bones to a count who cherishes exotic crafts and oddities of all kinds. Perhaps I intended to return and travel with them; perhaps not; but in any case only hours after I returned to the grove, a war band returned bearing the choicest cuts from their hairy kills, and the druids insisted that I either eat with the conquering heroes or face immediate exile
I moved on.
15 Hematite: Dinnerwandered is far to the northeast, I know that much. Travelling eastward, I crossed a wide river and entered a pathless forest choked with stinging plants and strange purple trees. I was attacked first by a band of kobolds and then by a coati that whose clumsy swipes would have been comical had they not instead been rendered horrifying by the creature's rotting stench, exposed ribs and lolling head. I pushed onward, but reaching a rocky and waterless wasteland, I turned north, resolving to travel instead through the open country along the western shore of the Glad Seas.
17 Hematite, Afternoon: Through the heat haze and far off I saw buildings clustered on a low dune overlooking the inland sea. Closer in, it was clear that the hamlet was long abandoned; what timbers still stood sagged from decades of rot. Farther off, elephants trumpeted to one another among the ruins.
I moved on.
17 Hematite, Evening: A few miles along the coast I came to Dwellingclans; again, only ruins, without a scrap of clothing or flake of bone. As I pondered the fate of this village's builders, it suddenly occurred to me that earlier that morning I must have crossed unaware into the Hills of Murdering.
A chill ran down my spine. Night was falling fast. I found the most intact structure, a damp wreck whose collapse had been partly checked by the sturdier wars it shared with its neighbors. Building fires at the two gaps in the walls, I settled in for an uneasy night. No moon could be seen in the sky, and the rising wind rushed through cracks in the walls, whipping the flames into thin ropes and casting foreboding shadows on the filthy walls.
18 Hematite, Early morning: I woke suddenly with the perfect awareness that the wind had died. Around me was blackness and silence; not a star could be seen between the few remaining roof-beams. It was still long before dawn. The fires had dwindled to embers, tiny lines of red light. But there were more than two- outside the walls, other red pinpricks were moving. I leaped to my feet and threw logs on the fire, blowing on the embers to make them light. Suddenly eery howling laughter seemed to be everywhere and a huge grey shape bounded over the walls and fell among my unpacked belongings; stumbling upright again, it unfurled two huge wings and beat up into the air, rising to just above the level of the roof. It was a bogeyman!
I unsheathed my knife and flailed at the beast; my knife met bone but the creature seemed not to notice, and its cruel talons raked my face. Grapping its legs, I tore it from the air; it fell heavily on top of me and I plunged my knife into the monster's belly again and again. My leg was in its jaws and even as its breath faltered it gnawed as though it thought to devour me alive before succumbing. Too late! The creature was dead.
Limping, I set to feeding the fires. The room was filled with choking smoke, but the flames rose as high as I dared let them go without setting the building's sodden timbers alight. The insane laughter was still all around but it had assumed a lower, less frantic pitch- perhaps the brutes had taken the death of their fellow to heart? I heard no wingbeats; looking up, I realized that the sky was lightening. Dawn was breaking, and the bogeymen were moving off flowing into holes or creeping into caves, perhaps; hiding themselves away from the sun's killing light. Suddenly aware of how mortally tired my ordeal had made me, I slipped into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke the sun was overhead and the fires were ashes. The gash on my leg had clotted over, but the leg now felt stiff and swollen. I moved on.
18 Hematite, Afternoon: With no natural outlet, the Glad Seas were never the freshest body of water. Nonetheless, as I moved further up the coast the rotten odor seemed to take on new depths of unsavoriness. Climbing a small bluff, I saw that stretched out before me me a vastbay, ringed on three sides by a town. Rows of low black buildings stretched out in every direction, smoke from cooking fires rose in high pillars in windless noonday air. But there were few such pillars, few fires. No road led me to this city; the fields that I crossed were wild, unplanted and unplowed. This city was clearly dying, but unlike every other non-elven settlement that I had seen, it was not yet completely dead.
The town was unwalled and rose gradually from wilderness that surrounded it. For the first time in my life, I saw stone buildings and paved roads- but the roads were torn up and the stone buildings falling down- crumbling and empty, but not fallen, not a total ruin like Dwellingclans. Dwarven stonecraft? Lifeless, empty; even a few inhabitants would have left footprints, wagon ruts, garbage, but there was none. Every building was empty.
Rising from the center of the wreckage was what seemed to me to be a virtual mountain of black slate- a fortress. Ragged banners streamed from the gates; their markings were unknown to me, but chiseled into the rock were the dwarven runes EKULSIM. Chainedname. The portcullis was raised, and I entered the fortress unchallenged.
Unchallenged, but not unnoticed. On the ramparts, a flicker of motion. I raised my arm and shouted
Lun Babin!, but received no response. Entering the nearest guard tower (the stench! clearly someone had relieved themselves here in the not-distant past), I climbed to the parapet. A stocky figure rushed to meet me, but not in greeting! What I had taken for a dwarven guard was a goblin thief, and his only thought was to get past me and make good his escape. Seeing that I blocked his path, he drew a knife, and received one of my kobold arrows through his eye for his troubles.
In the keep I found only a few miserable belongings, piles of worn clothing and cheap trinkets that the thief had laboriously picked from the ruins. The fires that I had seen from the bluff were surely his comrades-in-arms, scavengers looting a ghost town that had been sacked and robbed of all valuables decades before. A hatchway on the ground floor of the keep indicated more rooms below, but it struck me that exploring a dark dungeon in a dead city being systematically ransacked by goblins was unlikely to prove fruitful.
I moved on.
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Topic: The Museum: Adventure mode succession world (DF 34.11) (Read 781462 times)