Legend of the Runeforger: A Dwarven Progression Fantasy

I don’t scream as I plummet. I wail.

My tears pour upwards, leaving a path like suspended diamonds in the air.

My legend is over before it is even begun, just like my brother’s, exactly like my brother’s—he died at the bottom of the chasm too, broken in body, mind and soul.

The impact hits me. It’s not the bone-crushing stone I’ve been expecting though, but soft. A bracket fungus jutting from the cliff-wall. I bounce off it and tumble to another. It breaks under me and I restart my fall.

Fortunately it doesn’t last long. Reaching out to guard my face, I collide with a stone ledge. My wrist bends and snaps and I scream in pain. Clutching it, I roll onto my back, tears still streaming from my eyes. I can feel the break in it and the terrible swelling too.

“No...” I groan. “No, no.”

I’m alive, but for what? I can’t forge with a broken wrist.

“No...”

I lie there in misery and agony, choking on my tears. The mouth of the cavern is some two hundred meters above me, bright from the city-lamps. The brackets of fungus partly obscure it, like curtains half-closed.

I continue to lie, crying in pain and grief.

I notice something lying beside my face, and I turn my head to look.

It’s my hammer. Shockingly, its iron head is scarred but not cleaved. It’s better made than its price suggested.

And as long as I have a hammer, I can forge, can’t I? A broken wrist can heal. And I can still feel the incandesite hot against my leg, and the length of steel and the dictionary still remain in my other pocket.

I silence my groaning and force myself to sit up. My sides feel swollen and bruised too, but the agony of my broken wrist eclipses any pain in them.

First, I need a splint. The ledge I've landed on is long but thin, only half a dozen paces or so wide. Sprouting from it are bushes of slender stalked mushrooms.

I grab one, with my left hand of course, and tear it out. It's soft and springy, no use as a splint, but I can use it as a tie.

After pulling out another about the same length and thickness, I place them parallel to each other on the ground. Then I put my steel bar on top of them at a cross-angle. In absence of anything else stiff, it'll have to do. I’ll worry about getting a replacement when the time comes to forge.

I lay my forearm over the steel, then awkwardly tie it to my forearm with the mushroom stalks, using my left hand. It's painful despite my best efforts to keep my broken wrist dead still, and when I lift my arm up the damn thing nearly comes untied. I restart, tightening the ropes hard this time, biting my tongue to stop my groans of pain escaping.

But now it's done and I can figure out what to do next. Looking left and right along the ledge, I can see two cave mouths, one dark and one with a dim red glow.

There's only one option. I can see well in the dark, like all dwarves can, but not in pitch black. Hammer clutched uncomfortably in my left hand, I walk softly along the edge to the promise of magma, and enter.

The tunnel slopes to a harsh degree. Carefully I make my way down it. The red glow strengthens; it outlines the rough edges of the rock making them look like bloody beaten iron, and the heat is making me sweat; my sackcloth overalls itch against my skin.

It turns and twists. Sweat gets into my eyes, making them sting. The red glow is now the orange of magma. Is this a false start? Does this tunnel plunge directly into a molten lake?

Thankfully the slope lessens, and widens. Another turn and it opens like the mouth of a trumpet and becomes a cave proper. I look across.

The stone below the city is riven with caves and tunnels, both dwarf-made and natural. This one looks to be natural—it’s a wide caldera lit by a central, gently bubbling pool of magma. Stalactites cover the roof, pointing down like needles. Hanging vines wrap them; they get their energy from the molten pool’s light, growing down toward it until they catch fire and the seed pods at their tips explode and scatter their contents high up back to the roof.

I sit down and gaze on the beautiful scene for a few minutes. Maybe a lot longer than a few minutes, for the heat and brightness calms my heart. I look down at the steel tied to my wrist, and imagine it softening under that heat, ready to be shaped by my will and hammer into an artifact my brother would have been proud to look upon.

Gradually, though, the calm in my heart dissipates. My wrist is still broken, and since my bag is gone, vanished into the chasm, I have no tongs, no protective gloves, no metal for a rune either.

And no food. That has to be my first priority. Moisture I can get from the fat vines above, but there is little to eat in the caves that doesn’t want to eat you first.

I stand and make my way through the stalagmites, mirror images of the stalactites above. There’s a thin layer of soil here, detritus of a million years of dead fungi, but the only living things in it are toadstools barely the size of my fingers. I pick one up and sniff it—I don’t think it’s edible.

A flash of red movement catches my eye suddenly. A baby salamander vanishes into the maze of rock points. It’s tiny, but I’m used to small rations, and more importantly, its skin is fireproof.

Catching it with a heavy hammer is not going to be possible though. Perhaps I could make some sort of trap? No bait.

But...

If there are little salamanders here, there must be big ones too. This habitat isn’t exactly small—the magma lake would take a good ten minutes to row across if it was water. And big ones like to eat dwarves. A metallic supplement to their usual diet of firefish in the lava tubes and pigs up in the city.

I won’t be able to swing a hammer fast enough, though. A spear is what I need. I break off a stalagmite, then spend the next hour carefully chipping its tip into a sharp point. It’s too heavy to wield in one hand, so I break it in half. Less a spear than an oversized pin, but it should do the job, I hope.

And I hope too that the salamander that comes for me isn’t so big.

I pick out a spot I hope is perfect: there’s only a few stalagmites between me and the lake, and I lay heaps of dried fungus between them, forming a perimeter. I’ll hear it, and have time to react.

Now time for the bait. Of course it’s me.

I need something to really whet its appetite though.

Grimacing, I pierce my right hand with the stone spear. Blood runs out, and I wipe it on the stones in front of me, before bandaging up with a strip of overall I tore off in preparation.

Now all there is to do is wait. My stomach rumbles. My arm is still agony. Despite this, I feel the darkness of sleep creep over me. I'm exhausted, and it’s just so warm...