You know the drill, all rights reserved, this is my stuff not your stuff don’t be a jackwagon.
The gentle dripping of the clock that marked all the days and nights of life within the massive keep had a character all its own, to those that troubled to listen to it.
Darandur had heard that sound echoing through the caverns for all his life. Sometimes, he felt they burbled with the joys of discovery in the deeps, urging him to follow the winding path of water deep into the stone. It was a promise to guide him home, no matter how many twists and turns the path may take.
Other days, the tempo was a steady, placid thrumming that exhorted him to calm and patience. I have measured millenia in this same way, and I will go on for always and ever, that drip said, and none of Darandur’s problems seemed all that pressing in the sound of that everlasting promise..
On this day, he found himself resting his forehead against the stone of the time piece’s edifice, trying to shut out all of the thoughts and fears racing through his mind, as his stomach burned acidly. Of a mercy, this day there were no other steps or voices, no feeling of eyes following his every move and motion, to be followed by the murmuring, always the murmuring of the Many. No one to call out the delinquency of Darandur to linger here at the dinner hour, when his family must be waiting the meal upon him.
There were many advantages to life in the keep Naradhurn had carved out of the rock at the beginning of all things. Surrounded by the most treacherous mountains in Myskaria, outsiders were not a common sight. As the treasures crafted by the inhabitants were prized and highly sought, a distant and sheltered refuge was what had kept them all safe.
When he was due for his shift, the drops had the insistence of a drumbeat, driving him out into the snows with his spear this grandmother had made for him to stand the watches and march the patrols. Darandur was honor bound to take both his and his grandmother’s duties that they keep their debts paid to the thegn.
Once, and only once, Darandur had suggested that Thegn Barhadnein would understand the challenges within the Durein clan and reduce the tithe. “The thegn has spoken fair to me this past season, and never fails to inquire for grandmother’s health.” He remembered that he had said this with a gentle smile and touch to his grandmother’s hand, rough and aged with the work of keeping them all in homely comforts.
Without so much as moving his chair back from the dinner table or changing his expression, his father backhanded Darandur from his seat with a cuff that spilled him onto the polished stone floor. His head and shoulder took the brunt of the impact, but he bit his lip on any cry of pain. His mother’s gaze was flinty and she had opened her mouth to speak before Grandmother laid her hand upon her shoulder, her mouth a grim line while her eyes also bored into the patriarch.
Tharandur did not so much as look up from his bowl, but merely went on eating the watery stew, jaws working mechanically. His face was grey with stone dust and lined with weariness, as it always was at the end of a day spent in the damp mines. Tharandur had no touch of Gayania’s elemental gift to coax the precious ores and treasures from the stone. The Durein claim was not as profitable as it had been once, and the hours spent wresting even a meager living from it had taken a toll.
And all knew he was too proud a man to permit the work of his wife’s hands to provide for his household’s daily bread.
The silence stretched out, unbearably tense as his ladysmith mother continued to glare at Tharandur. Darandur picked himself up off the floor, his face white where his father’s hand had fallen. He carefully kept his eyes upon the table as he resumed his seat, only a slight twitch of his fingers betraying his thoughts. Darandur was the acknowledged scion of the house, having achieved adult status from the time he first paid the family tithe. He would be within his rights to challenge his father, but a quick glance to his mother and grandmother told him this was not the time.
With his forehead’s warmth being leached away by the cold stone, it was too easy to bring the scene that had played out three seasons ago to his mind. As bad as that day had been, he would rather live it a hundred times over than have to walk into the Clan Durein home this day. It was why he was standing here instead of putting his feet on the graveled path that would take him home.
Grandmother would be there, taking his spear and armor from him, as befit the matron of the house. She would have warm water at the hearth ready, that he might wash before sitting with his feet soaking in and not catch a chill. A hot drink would be in his hand while Grandmother cleaned and oiled his raiment, clucking over any new dings to be repaired during the next rest day.
And, if she were in a particularly good mood, with mother at her forge and father gone wherever it was fathers went, Grandmother might tell him a story.
Over the years, Darandur tried to figure out what made the stories so important, what it was that made it linger in his mind. Maybe it was the overarching tale itself, filled with adventures of a kind foreign to a small boy, safe in the depths of the keep. Maybe it was how the hero broke every rule and every tradition for reasons most mysterious, or the people and creatures met along the way. The hero was young, and wise beyond those years, and people listened when he spoke. Maybe it was the way that the hero always got out of certain doom somehow, and always managed to miraculously save the day.
Maybe it was the way Grandmother’s eyes shone when she looked at him and told him that he was her hero, her hope. It made him feel powerful and strong, determined to do the best he could for all of them.
As all the best stories, it had a hundred different parts, all of which Darandur knew by heart. He had only asked his mother for the story once, only to have her turn away, a little coldly. “I don’t know it, it is not of my kin.” That was all she had to say to cause her son to see again the great rift that they all tiptoed around, never to be spoken of.
It was best that Tharandur never knew the story was being told. While it hadn’t always been an armed truce between them, his father had never been easy in his manner, and considered stories to be a frivolous waste of time. Unlike the fathers of his agemates, Tharandur rarely made time for his son’s education, entrusting it to his own mother as he claimed was the custom of his clan since the days of old.
There was one day his father had taken up a teaching, though, that came unwillingly to Darandur’s mind as he stood, listening to the endless dripping of the clock.
They had been out in the clear air, running the snare line in the deepest part of winter. Normally a duty that fell to the women of the clan, with their more nimble fingers to set the traps, Tharandur had taken it on the rest day so that Grandmother could stay by the fire with a nagging cough. Her thanks had been perfunctory enough to irk the proud man, and he stamped from site to site, Darandur struggling to keep up along the trail his father had broken in the snow.
When they had four rabbits and a fine fat beaver, Darandur asked why they did not turn back to the keep.
His father had snorted, blasting a long plume from under his bulbous nose. “There’s a lesson to teach there, lad.” He used a mittened hand to clear off the next stone overlook bench they came to. “Yes, we have enough meat to eat until the next rest day, or until mother’s cough decides to heal itself. But we also have three more traps set- because you can never count on the luck of traps. Now, we could go back, have our warm drinks, smoke our pipes.” His mittened hand lingered over where his pipe hung from the belt for a moment, then went to his water flask instead, passing it to the boy before taking his own long draught.
Tharandur motioned the boy back to his feet, with a sign that meant to step quietly. Very far inwardly, Darandur groaned to himself, feeling he was being punished in the way that small children do. It was another few minutes of sneaking through the snow before he felt an unwontedly gentle tap from Tharandur, followed by a point.
There, floundering desperately in the snow where their snare should be, was a perfectly white rabbit. It was laying on its side, mouth open and panting, legs having churned the snow in panic. Around the right rear leg was the twine of the snare. As they watched, the wild eyed rabbit leapt back to its feet, pulling and tugging, wildly bucking to attempt to free itself. It was a brief struggle, only this time the rabbit landed on its other side, facing away from the watchers. It turned its attention to the back leg as Tharandur cupped a hand over Darandur’s ear.
“I want you to watch this one,” he murmured. Horrified, his eyes darted between the rabbit, suffering so cruelly, and his father. He wanted to ask why, he wanted to take the spear and put the creature out of his misery, ashamed that he was being forced to do this thing.
This was not a thing a hero would do, he thought miserably as the rabbit lay in the odd, curled shape on the snow.
It was just then that they heard the sounds of the thegn’s hunting party, crashing through the woods heedlessly so close to the keep. They were mounted on study ponies, thick furs to keep them warm, with mead in their flasks, and a stone sledge to drag their kills back over the snow. Darandur’s eyes were wide at the number of deer, rabbits, and even a moose piled up, reading for butchering. The rabbit lay, apparently too exhausted to care about the noise or footsteps anymore.
“Ah, Tharandur!” bellowed out Thegn Barhardnein, his red beard nearly glowing as the sun struck him. “I wish you’d come to join us if it was hunting you wanted this day. I do miss your voice raised in song, the way we used to hear it.”
“Illness in the house, my thegn. Wouldn’t do to spread it.”
“But you do hunt, and on your rest day, too!” The burly dwarf lord turned in the saddle to his companions. “See now, do as the head of Clan Durein does- always takes care of his own!” Darandur noted the expressions of the younger men take on the same he was sure his own had- was there ever a time or a place without old men feeling like they had to tell young men their duty?
“Och, thegn, the beast suffers. Should we not make an end to it?” asked a boy, much younger than Darandur, face betraying his distress, mounted on a fine dapple grey pony.
Why couldn’t I say that to father? Darandur wondered.
Then his father’s dark eyes flashed before he spoke. “I would that you leave it to me, young master. Doing a bit of teaching this afternoon.”
The thegn’s wild brows formed a bridge over the long nose. One of the men of the party, obviously having partaken of a great deal of mead, spoke up, loud and slurring. “Oh, and what might the lesson be? Teaching your lad to do the women’s work?”
Predictably, this caused a derisive shout of laughter from the hunting party. “Nay,” Tharandur said, clipping the word off in the way that told his son to keep out of arm’s length. The sledge passed by the party, and Tharandur motioned to it. “Do you not wish to guard that all the way back to the keep? We did see bear sign this day.”
The thegn frowned down at the pair before motioning the party off to follow the sledge, while keeping the boy on the grey pony by his side. “One can manage all responsibilities when one has the hands to do so. And I would know more of this lesson you teach.”
“Be that as it may, my thegn.” He turned away from the imposing, glittering figure wrapped in all the furs who did not feel the cold nor stamp through the snow. “Look again at that rabbit.”
Afraid of what he was going to see, Darandur turned back to find the rabbit in the odd, hunched shape, facing away from them. It seemed so very still. “Is it… is it dead?” he whispered, feeling as though he had failed the little creature.
“Nay, lad,” Tharandur said, pointing at the almost imperceptible movements around the twined foot.
“Here’s the lesson- you give even the simplest creature enough time, and they will find a way out of the trap.” Darandur felt his heart leap as he looked back to the rabbit, who had almost gnawed through the twine and was moments from being free.
His eyes darted back to the thegn, who’s face had become a frozen mask.
“Aye, lad,” the thegn said, giving a nod to the boy. The boy flung a dagger from the saddle at the rabbit’s head, striking true. The movements stopped. “So it’s best to take what’s yours while you can. And ensure it does not suffer.” The thegn turned his gaze from Darandur back to head of the Durein clan. “A cruel teacher can lead to a cruel man. Next time, I would that you and your lad join the hunt.”
“As you wish, my thegn,” Tharandur said, and the great man rode away without another word.
Such were the teachings of his father.
His mother’s, however…
From the time he knew ore from stone, his golden haired mother, the Ladysmith Matilda, had welcomed him to her forge to learn what only she could teach of the ways of metal. Within the great keep, it was common for the men of the house to find the metal, and the women to craft it. There were exceptions, and the overriding factor always lay within having a genuine affinity for the work at hand. Tharandur looked askance at the boy’s eagerness to go to the forge when he had to be chivvied to join him in the mine. At this point his son was used to his father’s black moods, with cutting remarks staying clenched behind his teeth, at least in his wife’s presence.
Darandur did not discover until many years later that this, among many other things, had been agreed upon in the marriage contract. Lady Matilda came from the House of Darune, acclaimed amongst all dwarves as the best workers of the ore.
The dripping of the water of the clock matched the rhythm of his mother’s hammer, a music she had admitted him to and taught him the way of. It made him smile even then to remember his mother’s magical hands that were never still when there was metal to work. Her fingers were thin and graceful, strong and knowing as they guided and shaped the most wondrous of creations. In her youth, it was said that Lady Matilda had spent time out in the world, amongst the elves, and it was true that a number of her designs included the sinuous, interlaced lines that bespoke the grace of those people.
It was also true that she received many commissions from them, and occasional missives that she did not read out loud at the fire. The gold she received for the work was envied; but Darandur was aware that the Many found her friendships with outlanders to be exceedingly odd.
“Here, my lad,” she’d say, putting a hammer she herself had made into his hands. “Watch and do as I do, and know that metal will bend to you.”
“But this isn’t metal, it’s stone!” he said.
The lady laughed. “It’s the way of life, that stone will break before it bends. And,” she indicated the floor, which was coated in rock dust. “You can see why it does not last. Metal bends to the hands of the skilled, and survives to become something beautiful and new.” Giving the heated stone a sharp tap with her hammer, it split open to reveal shining ore inside, making Darandur gasp with amazement.
Hours upon hours, murmuring as much to the metal as to him as she coaxed the metal from the stone. Then applied all the techniques she had ever learned to shape, temper, and polish into the form she wished it to take. Sometimes she sang softly with words Darandur could not understand, lilting and soothing as lullabies.
It was worth noting that in a society that prized space as each room was carved painstakingly out of a mountain, Lady Matilda’s forge was hers alone. It was on the level with the rest of House Darune’s apartments, not that Darandur was given the opportunity to speak overmuch to those that would consider him family from that side of the tree. He liked being on their level as it was much less crowded, and the shuffling noises of voices and feet as they wended their way about was sometimes so soft it could be ignored.
He also liked working metal at the forge, though he never felt the magic tingling in his fingers, nor did they cast shimmering lights over the work as his mother’s did. By the time Darandur’s beard reached to his belt, his mother proclaimed him on par with a mastersmith in the outside world.
“I don’t have the spark, though,” he’d said, and the bitter wave of disappointment rose to the back of his throat. Of all of his agemates, he was one of only three that had failed the most recent set of trials. Thirty others had moved on to Gayania’s temple that they might be trained in the ways of the earth’s secrets, while he remained back in the children’s classes.
She gave him a stout buffet on the shoulder, as though he was an equal. “There’s more to life than magic, my son, and there’s plenty of time for it to come if it’s going to. What you know is here,” and she tapped his forehead with one of those slender, delicate fingers. “And here,” she said, prodding at his chest above his heart. “Magic would only make you able to work faster and see the shape more clearly.” Matilda leaned against her workbench, reaching up to insure the blond coronet of braids remained securely fastened. “Too many smiths make the mistake of learning to craft after they have their magic, so they use that as their primary tool instead of what they ought. You will never have that problem, my son.” She reached out and pulled him to her side in a one armed hug, her blue eyes aglow with pride. “That’s the secret, you know. Magic is all well and good, and yes, it can make life easier. But without skill and experience, you’re just waving a crude stick around as though it were a spear.”
That had been after he’d failed two of the three Great Trials.
While work at the forge progressed, within the Clan Durein quarters, the scion’s progress with his lessons was not mentioned. With hope dimming and only one chance for the son of the clan at the trials remaining and the ore from the mine beginning to play out, tension had begun to mount whenever Darandur came through the door.
For a people living in the midst of the earth, metal and stone were the foundation of life. With talk of metal nearly forbidden within the Clan Durein apartments, only the stone remained. And the takings from the mine became poorer. The polished carvings with the device of the clan in bas relief emerged from behind the warming tapestries as they were sold off, one by one. Grandmother had merely lifted her chin and commented that it was good to see the heraldry again, before taking up the cleaning rags to wipe away the endless rock dust while shivering with chill. Evenings that had once been warm with hearty meals and the stories of the day became strained affairs, with the content of the meals becoming poorer and leaner. Teas became weaker and had to be steeped longer, while mead and tobacco leaf disappeared altogether.
Mother said nothing at all about the changes to their lives, not as her golden hair became duller within its braided coronet, not even as the rosy plumpness faded from her face. She became quieter, her eyes stuttering to Tharandur’s face more frequently to gauge the possibility of a storm brewing.
And it seemed that Father became quieter too, in a way that Darandur found more disconcerting than when he bellowed and swung his fists.
That was also when Darandur began to realize that he hated the Many. Until then, he’d simply accepted the rules of dwarven society as they were. Safety lay in stone and in numbers, though the council of elders had been talking about the need to found a new fortress over the past few decades. By the time Darandur was a man, the overpopulation of the keep seemed worse than ever before, even though each family would have but one son and one daughter. Always there were eyes watching, ears listening, on alert for anything to be weighed and discussed, where it would ostensibly be found wanting.
Due to both of his parents, Darandur was the special focus of watchfulness. This he would not understand until it was too late to matter. All he knew was the Many had gone from the soft whispers in the long corridors to a nigh unbearable crawling under his skin. He heard the murmurs about his mother, at first speculating that the Lady Matilda grew wan due to the fact that she would finally produce the long awaited daughter of Clan Durein. But as time went on and no swaddled pink bundle was presented, the gossip turned malicious.
Caught herself a disease out in the wide world, I shouldn’t wonder.
Probably lay with the elves what used to come for her wares. Glad they don’t come round here anymore. Unnatural creatures.
Did she already bear the daughter and that’s why she fails to quicken?
Shouldn’t want to marry into that clan after she’s gone. He’s a cruel one, he is.
He’s a poor one, he is.
Tcha! She’s made him that way. New wife with a new hammer would fill their coffers in no time.
Good name, honorable name, and still a vast space to call their own.
Clan Durane cast her out when they wed, though.
I heard it different, that she wanted the thegn and they made her take him and that she promised never to sit at their hearth again.
Thegn still watches her.
On and on the rumors went, and if Darandur hadn’t heard them from the mouths of the speakers, the echoes helpfully carried them along the vast tunnels. Those were the times he wished most to stay out in the wide world himself, where there was wind to carry the words away like they’d never been spoken.
Just memories, he told himself as he stood next to the clock with only its dripping to be heard. Memories that made Darandur shake his head as though they were smoke from the pipe he could clear away as easily. They would not help him, just as tarrying here would not help him.
For this was the day that the scion of Clan Durein had failed the final Trial. The magic did not pulse in his veins, and the song of stone would not sing for him. Darandur spread his hands before him, staring at them dispassionately as his head ached and stomach churned.
They weren’t as slender as his mother’s, and they were more delicate than his father’s. They could wield pick and chisel and hammer and spear for him, but they would never shape steel with the lightest of touches, nor find the ore.
Darandur would be no one’s hero. Just the son of a cruel man.
The clock wept for him as he set his feet for home.
Curiouser and Curiouser 