Heart of Oak

A Job Unfinished

The Dwarven Ale Room; a pub, a bar, a place of gatherings and memories. Great food and drink aplenty all within the comforts of the town of Vida. Roughly twenty thousand strong, this walled city housed a keen group of adventurers and a pair of married dwarven women.

"So riddle me this one," Jodi spoke in her jumpy, gruff voice. "Once you met him, then what?"

Roderick was trying to paint a picture of determination amidst adversity. "So there I was, standing at the feet of this giant tree creature. I looked at him and told him, 'I have come to this forest to investigate rumors of an untold magic—'"

The orc slammed her mug onto the table, "Bullshit Ricky!"

"The fuck do you mean bullshit?" Roderick turned to face the uncontrollably smiling orc.

"You were trembling like the rest of us. No shame in admitting it. Having Sedel vomit from her detection magic is something worth being afraid of," Dmahdi spoke with an unusual amount of logic.

"I'm telling a story, Dmahdi. Can I at least tell it?"

Sedel leaned forward on the table. "Not when it's a sack of crap. C'mon ol' Ricky, you're better than this."

Roderick rolled his eyes once the two dwarves started laughing. "Kathanac and myself have a journey of our own. After all, how many dwarves do you see in this town?" Jodi smirked. "We got married because we realized that without each other, neither of us would survive. Escaping the gnollish tribes was no easy feat."

Roderick was surprised. "You cannot compare gnolls to being five feet from a deity that could snap you out of existence."

"Perhaps, but you'd be dead and gone before ye even realized it. With gnolls, there'd be months of torture." Jodi's gleeful chuckles fell silent, as even the memory of it was grim enough to dampen her mood. "You want to talk about facing down fears? Then picture this: The caves the gnolls lived in were previously dwarven mines. This was the Iadosh clan, one of the fiercest gnollish clans known, rivaled only by Dymreith. Far west of here, over a large span of the ocean, is the dwarven continent, now home to its gnollish invaders. Gnollish raiders besieged my home city of Gowen one night. The city's garrison did its best to stop the gnolls, but they still made it inside the walls. The raiders took my family, along with a thousand other people, and brought us into slavery..."

The parade of rope-bound defeated prisoners marched helplessly out of range of the city and its valiant defenders. Jodi, a dwarven kid, was being carried by another adult, one who was not her parent. The older dwarf was a wounded guard, still clad in his badly damaged steel plate armor. He cradled the kid in his arms, a quivering lip held together only by the determination to keep this child from bawling her eyes out. He spoke with a gruff, smokey voice, "You'll be alright. Gnolls don't want children."

For hours, the gnollish raiders marched alongside the thousand dwarf prisoner parade, bringing them to a cave far away from the city, over hills, and through a sticky marshland. Several weaker dwarven prisoners collapsed from exhaustion and were used as examples to keep the others in line and moving. The bog became their grave. The cave had structures integrated into the face and tunnels, designed and carved out by former dwarven miners. Hundreds of gnolls occupied these living quarters and storage units, all fiendishly brandishing their weapons, both crudely made in-house and pillaged.

The older dwarf held the small child beneath his waist-long dirty-blonde beard. Jodi was asleep in his arms. The man shuffled his eyes side-to-side, watching his peripherals. The gnolls were chanting amongst each other, excited to put the fresh haul to work.

The entrance tunnel led into a main chamber with dozens of tunnels spider-webbing outward. The main chamber had all the crafting and repair stations needed to maintain a mining operation and one unusual feature: a desecrated mass grave.