On the birth of my son, here’s a short piece I wrote as part of a larger project about Kislev, called Troll Country, that I haven’t posted anywhere before. No context is needed except to say the narrator is a man and he is travelling with a(n order) dwarf.
“There it lies,” I said, passing him the looking glass and pointing towards a pinhead-dot on the ridge. He extended an arm in silence, stone-faced and otherwise still, as though carved from the mountains themselves. Through the glass he saw what I had seen; a rickety stodoła surrounded by a few draughty farmhouses and a single field of wheat, waving unsteadily in the breeze.
We crossed the mile of plain below the ridge with only the sound of the desolate, cutting wind and the crunch of rocky ground underfoot. His gait was slow, but unfailing; he did not slow as we mounted the slope, nor did he break his step for the many jagged chunks of granite sticking up out of the ground. But as we approached the nascent wheatfield, we passed an empty patch of tilled earth, cleared ready to raise a second crop. He stopped, and stepped off the crude path, lowering himself to run a fingertip through the black soil. I leaned over to see what had stolen his attention, but it was only a miniscule seedling, trapped in the dark shade of his broad hand.
“To coax a single green shoot from such a place," said the dwarf, coldly. “That is the work of man.”
He spoke with the same even tone he always had, but something was missing, or hollow. He spoke to me, to the mountains, to the wind.
“To bring rivers where the land is parched, burn woodland where the thorns strangle, lay seeds among ashes until the earth gives up a bounty foreign even unto itself,” he continued. “These are your works.”
“To take one step forward every spring, for ten springs, on a path of a hundred steps, until the land has been such for a thousand years, so that your sons may walk in gardens where your feet now find rocks and filth,” he said, reaching out toward the seedling, brushing it lightly, back and forth against his fingertip. “Such are your dreams.”
He turned his face to the sky, halfway toward me, but did not meet my gaze. He reached from the seedling to one of the field’s last remaining stones, barely more than a pebble. It had lain in the ground for Dazh-knew how long, covered in a sodden moss which the dwarf brushed gently with his thumb.
“I have watched you shape the lands on which you dwell. I have watched you raise yourself up from beasts, and in time, renounce them. I have watched you tread upon the bones of your kin and spit upon their holy places. Always you must go forward. The son harvests the wheat of the father, and his bones in turn become the sod from which his own progeny coax more life, built upon more death, down the ages in which the elder races contemplate mere trifles,” he said, looking out across the barren expanse, him palm still pressed to the moss.
“A dwarf can watch you raise up cities from ruins in the time it takes him to sharpen an axe. You go from stumbling children to wizened elders in the passage of a few constellations. In the time it takes the dwarf-Lords to carve a single Hold, your Kings live and die, your nations rise and fall, your Gods are exalted and then forgotten. And all the time, you grow more numerous, more ingenious, more dangerous. They tell me you stand on the verge of harnessing the very powers of the elements themselves, powers that we have held sacred since you were little more than beasts clad in rags. How long until you master them?”
His question fell to the moss-covered stone.
“Every generation, young dawi hold up some work of umgi artifice, and say to themselves, this is umgak. But the longbeard does not laugh so loud, for he recalls the umgak of his youth, and every dawi generation, you claw your way ever closer to the art of the ancients. You lurch, unsteady, and often fail. But then you tumble forwards, and great ironclad wagons fed by waterbreath will strike a line of warriors, and the longbeards will know, in the passage of a handful of crowns, you will surpass the Karaz Ankor itself.”
He looked from the moss, to the field of green wheat just a stone’s throw away, and back to the seedling.
"But it is not your smiths I fear. Not your soldiers or wizards, your young gods and younger kingdoms. No. It is the farmer,” he said, rolling the delicate stem of the seedling gently between forefinger and thumb as he fixed the wheat with a hollow stare, “for where he goes, his sons soon follow.”
