![]() So mostly Nish just stood outside in the swamp, sweating, and thought about beer. Occasionally one of his squad-mates would offer to wrestle, to relieve the boredom, but this just made Nish feel even more uncomfortable, especially since this particular squad-mate always wanted to wrestle naked, “to keep our uniforms from getting wrinkled,” he said. Military service at Bekemlogem mostly involved standing around outside, swearing, and sweating, not necessarily in that order. Nish, a glass-blower by trade, had arrived at Bekemlogem on a spring morning and was promptly informed that out here in the country they didn’t have much call for fancy things like glass, that stone was good enough for plain-spoken honest dwarves, and that we don’t have any sand around here anyway, so here’s a crossbow and you’re in the army now, son.Īs I said, there were no goblins in the swamp, which was good, because there weren’t any bolts for Nish’s crossbow either, and even if there had been bolts, there was nothing to shoot at. There weren’t even any goblin attacks, and when was the last time you heard of a fortress that wasn’t attacked by goblins? Even the goblins, it seems, were smart enough to avoid the swamp. Soon enough, they started attracting immigrants. There was solid rock near the caldera, and although the miners had to be careful to not accidentally take a bath in hot magma, they were able to dig down below the aquifer and establish workshops, where they began growing mushrooms and carving crafts to trade with anyone crazy or stupid enough to visit them out in the middle of the marshlands. The funny thing about this is that Stukos turned out to be mostly right. Only 6 other dwarves left the safety of the mountainhomes to try to find their fortune in Stukos’s swampy paradise. Stukos was a good dwarf, but not a persuasive one. If we’re careful, there’s nothing to worry about.” We can tunnel down near the caldera, and mine under the aquifer. “There’s a caldera there,” he insisted, “which has to be solid rock. The leader of the expedition to found the fortress, a merchant by the name of Stukos Oddomsanreb, had to do an awful lot of fast-talking to persuade people that he wasn’t crazy. An aquifer can make it hard to mine safely, and no mining means no profit. This was not just any swamp, but a swamp that, as near as anyone could tell, was over an aquifer. There are many adjectives one can apply to a dwarf, but “moist” is not the first that comes to mind. There’s too much mud, for one thing, and too much water. Dwarves, by their nature, are not fond of swamps. The second’s was Urist Köbukrinal.īekemlogem was an unusual fortress, built as it was in the middle of a swamp. The first dwarf’s name was Nish Oddomshetbøth. The other died miserably, starving in the dark. This is a story about two dwarves in the fortress of Bekemlogem, “Springpainted.” One of these dwarves became a legend. The dwarf’s co-workers might say to him “Hey, Arast, why did you stop hammering?” and Arast will say “Fuck you,” walk in to a grocery store, kick everyone out, and spend the next nine hours obsessively examining each pomegranate to find the perfect materials for his cookbook. And the book shall be called ‘Berrydowned’.” And the ink will be made from pomegranate juice, and the pages shall be made of the finest papyrus, and the pages will be bound with a single thread of gold. ![]() “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” the dwarf will think, “and I will make the cover from pomegranate peel. They have lives, and jobs, just like us, and they have normal ideas that don’t come to pass, just like you and me, but sometimes – often enough that the Dwarves have five different words for it, all of which translate, roughly, to “touched” – a dwarf gets a particularly strong idea, an idea that he can’t shake. “I should create a mosaic depicting Washington’s terrible defeat at Fort Necessity,” we think, and then, almost always, we reach our bus stop, we step off the bus, and we go on with our lives.ĭwarves aren’t like that. “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” we think, and then we get out of the shower and towel off and we don’t write the book. We wake up, we shower, we get dressed, we go to work, and while we’re doing all this, sometimes we get an idea. Now, here’s the thing about dwarves: they’re not like you and me. ![]()
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