“The Desolation Hold. After Grimnir’s last hunt, after the first war with Chaos, for millennia we thought no one else had weathered the storm, that there was no more dwarfs left in the world. Karak Vlag proved us wrong, and a glorious day it was when for the first time we heard khazalid spoken by our southern cousins. Through them gunpowder came to us, metal ships, the plans for that nautilus you so praise, engineers who transformed the way we build, mine and make war. Through them my peers shared with the southern holds knowledge lost during the Goblin Wars. For a time it seemed the two halves of the Karaz Ankor would be welded once more, and Karak Vlag was the lynchpin that kept us together.”
Harek’s voice rumbled on as he settled on the tone of a loremaster. Kala knew what was coming well enough. Karak Vlag was one of many mournful sagas about the enemy lurking in the north. The same chaos surge that overwhelmed Kraka Drak had engulfed their southern kin. After the Great War the borders of the Chaos Wastes returned to the far north, leaving ruins in their wake. The fall of Kraka Drak was a grudge burdening every norse dwarf.
But of the Desolation Hold, no one spoke.
“Then Chaos returned, as it always does. The southern holds and the manlings had their battles to fight. We suffered the onslaught of Valmir’s invasion and only survived thanks to Kraka Drak’s sacrifice. No one marched in support of Karak Vlag, and with the benefit of insight maybe we should be thankful no one did.” As he spoke, his eyes drifted away and settled on the Ancestor Gods carved on the roof of the chamber.
“Kraka Drak fell to the aeslings. The hold was ravaged but it is there still. A fallen hold can be recovered and Kraka Drak will be ours again if the Cromson has to build a bridge of norscan bones from here to his throne. There will be no such redemption for Karak Vlag. We speak of the Hold’s fall, but no one knows if it even fell, if there was a battle, a siege. Those who travelled to the High Pass after the war discovered no ruins, no signs of conflict; no sign dwarfs ever lived and thrived there. No Karak. Just… nothing. The Desolation Hold and its inhabitants are gone, plucked from existence, erased from reality, or worse…”
A sinister shadow passed through the chamber, carried less by the runelord’s words than by the horror that remained unsaid. Kala shivered when she saw Lorgan’s haunted look, she shivered thinking of the fears Harek was not sharing, when his eyes went back to her. “For the sake of the living some mysteries need to remain so. I ask myself other questions. How many were spared? How many were away when doom stroke? Are there still sons of Karak Vlag in the world? Did they found refuge with our southern kin? Do they roam the mountains, homeless, kinless?” - The runelord stopped his litany, as if tired of so many riddles. - “I have no answers. Cranneg never told us. Maybe he doesn’t know himself”.
He said, and Kala felt a battering ram hitting her in the chest. “He is one of them?” she whispered.
“Cranneg was born in Karak Vlag, one of last engineers to come from the south. He may be the last to remember what once was. Do you understand what he represents? Every word he utters should be written down by the loremasters.”
“But they don’t”, said Lorgan. “No one asks him. No one wants to know. People fear the curse that name entails. We do not need that kind of grief. No one needs memories of a home that might as well have never existed. No one wishes to imagine what fate our southern kin could have suffered… or suffer still…”
The runelord struck the ground again, and again thunder brought back silence. “We will not dwell on the fate of Karak Vlag! We can close that door, as painful as it is!” – He looked back at her – “But he cannot. He remembers, and remembers alone. Cranneg No-one. No hold, no clan. You chisel your words like jewels, Kala Kadrisdottir, can you then conceive for me the perfect shape for the word loss? Could you declare a grudge knowing you are the last one left on this pestilential world to strike it out? He did.”
He did, knowing it will go unfulfilled if he lived a thousand years. Kala realized she in fact couldn’t imagine a word to match the thought. Anyone else would have taken the slayer’s oath. Why not him? Was there a grief too deep for even Grimnir to expunge?
Or maybe only to deep for Cranneg. Cranneg No-one, who lost half a skull fighting Valmir Aesling.
And then it dawned on her.
“He wasn’t at Karak Vlag… because he was here…”
“He was here, with the throng of Kraka Drak, wounded and carried away before king Crom collapsed the hold and buried kin and foe alive. His family wasn’t so fortunate.”
Kala thought they had drunk enough grief for a night, but Lorgan wasn’t done.
“Kraka Drak fell. Karak Vlag vanished. Which failure do you think burdens him the most? He had kin on both.”
He said, and the words hanged in the air like a cruel joke.
·
“Is he insane?”
Harek raised his gaze to the thane. “What?”
The tone was enough to know the runelord had no taste for more conversation, but Lorgan barely paid heed. Kala was gone, and the chamber felt all the more empty for it. They send her away unchastised, to nurse new knowledge and the possibility that it was punishment enough. In her absence, the thane seemed to drop a mask.
“Is he insane?” – He repeated quietly - “Is there an answer to that question? She is not our first warning. All that I fear or suspect… She would not voice it more bluntly, maybe she can’t put it into words yet, but I can guess what keeps her and others awake. The powers of this pestilential world have a way to respond to bloodthirst, to excess and despair. Moths to the flame, and they do not ask for permission. At what point Cranneg stops being ruthless and becomes something else?”
“Do not judge he who declares a grudge, only he who caused it. Cranneg does what he must, like all of us. Kraka Drak taught us that. The land you tread every day teaches us to endure. He endures, and endure we will, whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes…” Lorgan whispered.
That tone made the runelord eye him suspiciously. Another would have kept quiet, but the thane only stared intensely at the hook that was his left hand, as if it held the answer to a question.
“There are others who live by those words. Others who stopped at nothing. Others who found it easier to burn all around them…”
“ENOUGH!”
For a split second Lorgan went blind, thunder deafened him. A storm ravaged the chamber and threatened to drive him to his knees. All he saw was the gale, and in in the midst of it, Harek’s eyes gleaming like molten silver.
“NEVER MENTION THEM!”
But mentioned them he had, and compared to that confession even Harek’s wrath felt clean. So the thane faced the storm and raised his hook as a testimony. “I’ve seen them! I’ve fought them! I’ve seen what they do to the world! If I see the danger then you did long before me, runelord! Can you swear to me there is no chink in our armor?”
“Lorgan Skalfsson! Give voice to their name and by Grimnir I will have you take the slayer’s oath! Not here! Not in their presence!”
With his staff he pointed to the Ancestor Gods, watching pitilessly as their children wrestled with the oldest of shames. Lorgan grew quiet. The storm receded and the Bane of Crows was once again an elderly dwarf holding to his staff.
“We live surrounded by the void”, said the runelord. “It closes its jaws around us, it festers on our borders. It can grind the mountains into dust but it will never take us for its own. If others did, that is their weakness to bear. Never even suggest that kinship. We do what they failed to do. We still do and forever will.”
“They also did” - Lorgan whispered still - until survival demanded something more.”
He feared another explosion but Harek looked drained. This time, the Bane of Crows looked at him with tired eyes. “Then tell yourself we have their example to learn from. Their failure. Cranneg will not fail us, and we will never follow down that road. We can die, but we shall never bow.”
He said, and then turned his back on the thane. Lorgan saw him leave back to his realm, back to the forges, where the heart of their people could always beat true and untainted. In utter silence the thane found no peace and he started longing for the shipyards, hard work amongst kin to drown his memories in deep wells, for a time.
We shall never bow.
Alone with the Ancestor Gods, Lorgan Skalfsson prayed for those words to be prophetic.