Expansion A Tale of Unforeseen Horror [ T.H.E Expansion into Four Summits ]

[TheThird]

“I saw one last night, I swear it. Big as a bloody dog, with glinting red eyes, slithering down into the sewer grates. Everyone laughed at me. But I know what I saw. The rats are here. They’ve come west.”
— Old Ranik, dockworker in Towton

No one talks much about the Eastern Mountains anymore. Oh, there are stories, of course, there are. Around a fire, with ale thick and cheap, you’ll hear a few brave fools whisper about the Four Summits, about the stone halls swallowed by the fog. About the road that climbs so high it vanishes into the clouds. And what came crawling up it.

I passed through a village once, five years ago or so, on the edge of the Eastern ridges. There was a man there, a scarred hunter with half a jaw, who told me what he'd seen. He said the earth shook for a week straight. That the skies darkened before a single enemy had even appeared. The mountain bells rang without hands to pull them.

Then the rats came.

Not the ones you know. Not the kind that nibble cheese in the cellar. These stood like men. Carried rusted blades and howled like demons. They poured out of the deep tunnels in waves, screaming for blood. Screaming for something worse. The dwarves stood against them, as they always had. Whole families, fathers, daughters, cousins, all from the same clan. One by one, they were pulled down into the dark. They say it began at the city of Tharn-Baraz, built into the mountain's root. No one’s sure what happened there. Only that it burned. The dwarves fled upward, toward the old road. That they were buying time for something… or someone.

And now, with rats slithering through our sewers and shadows moving in the smoke, I think it’s time we remember those stories. Because the Eastern Dwarves may have fallen, but their fire is coming our way.

 

[TheThird]

The fog rolled in thicker than it had in decades. Not the usual mountain mist no, this fog had weight. A sickly grey that clung to the stone like grease. It came with no wind, no drop in temperature, no storm. It simply arrived. Crept up the cliffs below Tharn-Baraz. Oozed into crevices. Hung in the air like held breath.

The first to see it were the scouts. Captain Brynna Ironscoul led the forward patrols. Veteran of tunnel wars, sharp-eyed, stoneblooded. She had seen the weather turn, but never fog like this. She described it as moving with purpose. Crawling rather than drifting.

And in its depths, faintly the sound of scratching. Claws on stone. Thousands of them.

She brought her report before the inner hold, and her words stirred the forgemasters from their silence. King Drunrik listened, grim. His orders were swift. Lantern-bearers sent to the lower tiers. Ballistae were locked into place. Gunpowder caches uncovered and refilled. The great doors to the Steps' massive iron gates, untouched in a generation, were unbarred and left ready to swing shut with thunder.

The sentinels watched in silence. Five of them stood upon the long road winding up into the Four Summits. Giants of stone, shaped in the first age of dwarven craft. Most thought them little more than symbols now. Relics. But some of the older ones remembered stories. Stories that said the sentinels could move when the mountain itself called them.

And that night, one of them twitched.

No more than a shift of the shoulder. But it echoed down the Foggy Steps like a thunderclap. The dwarves who saw it didn’t speak. They simply returned to their barracks, strapped on their armor, and lit their hearth-forges. Whatever was in that fog, it was not the wind. Whatever made that scratching, it was not the claws of mountain beasts. The war had not begun yet, but the mountain already knew:
The enemy had arrived.

 

[TheThird]

Far beneath the surface, beyond the reach of dwarven delving or human curiosity, the earth boiled with motion. The warrens of Clan Metus were never still, but this was different. This was not the twitching, paranoid skitter of daily life. This was a movement with purpose. Tunnels lit by fungus-fire, black powder convoys thundering past on bone-lashed carts. Bells screamed orders in sharp, frantic cadence as warmasters barked commands. The time had come. From hundreds of miles of underpassage, they gathered.

The flesh-fused warbeasts, shrieking Blight-Engines, and dagger-fanged rats the size of dogs nipped and scrambled around their masters. Clanking, hissing, reeking contraptions fueled by doomstone belched smoke and shrill madness into the stale air. Machines that should never have worked but did, through Eshkin spite. At the front of it all walked the Seer Gnawtooth, hunched beneath his horned headdress, surrounded by a cloud of incense and shadow. His whispers rolled across the ranks like a sickness. But this was not his war.

From a balcony of cracked obsidian, high above the gathering madness, stood Warlord Skritt Blackmaw armoured in scavenged steel and bound by blood to Clan Mateso. His mission was one bestowed upon him by the Unholy Esh himself, so he believed. Skritt Blackmaw, the zealot warrior, had gathered in a crusade against the Dwarves, a crusade in which countless lives would be lost to the masses.

They were not marching for loot or land, not this time. Their path was clear: up through the forgotten vents and stone-wound arteries beneath the Foggy Steps. The dwarves above were few. Weak. Rotten with pride. Soon, they would choke on black powder smoke and rat blood. And at the end of that path, buried within the heart of the Four Summits, was the prize.

A cell sealed for ages. A name lost to myth. A corpse that should not move, but perhaps still lived. The First Lord. The Father of Clan Metus. He had waited long enough.

 

[TheThird]

Tharn-Baraz stirred with purpose. The clang of hammers echoed through the once-quiet halls, bouncing between columns of ancient stone. For the first time in decades, the forges blazed with full heat, bellows hissing like beasts at war. Even the old engineers, grey-bearded, bent from years hunched over schematics, rose from their benches to work the levers once more.

The dwarves of the Ironscoul clan may have dwindled in number, but their resolve had not. These halls were carved by their ancestors, defended in blood and fire, and they would not surrender them without a reckoning.
Engineer-King Drunrik Ironscoul stood on the inner ramparts, peering down at the Foggy Steps through a spy-scope, its runic casing glowing faintly. Fog was rising too quickly. It wasn’t natural. He clenched his teeth.

“Time’s shorter than I thought,” he muttered.

Beside him, his daughter Brynna checked the lock mechanisms on the outermost trap gates. Beneath their boots, dozens of hidden mechanisms waited: flame channels, pressurised spike-pits, hidden compartments for sulfur gas and thunder-oil. They had rearmed the entire stone city with grim thoroughness. Below the city walls, engineers in heavy exo-harnesses tended to the Stone Sentinels. Each one, twenty feet tall, had lain dormant for over a century, half-forgotten. Now, their rune-etched cores glowed as activation rituals were whispered. The creaking stone began to shift. Groaning limbs stretched toward the sky. Their eyes, twin lanterns of blue fire, flickered to life. Miners too old for frontline war now worked underground, laying collapse charges in the lower tunnels, a last line of denial if the city fell. Children carried buckets of slag to reinforce chokepoints. No hand in Tharn-Baraz was idle.

At the heart of the fortress, the forge priests sang the Song of Binding over each newly-cast bolt and warhead. Every piece of iron was a prayer. Every powder-keg, a vengeance. Councillor Barak Silvervein, eldest of the Ironscoul kin, met with Drunrik in the Hall of Ironstone. No words were wasted. Both had lived through sieges before. But never one quite like this. Because this time… they didn’t know what was coming.
Only that it was beneath them, closer with every hour.
And it scratched.

 

[TheThird]

It started at twilight. The fog, thick and sour, poured up the slopes of the Foggy Steps like a flood. Dwarven guards on the outer parapets leaned forward, squinting into the gloom, torchlight struggling to pierce more than a few feet ahead. Then the silence broke not with drums or horns, but with a scream. A sentry was dragged screaming from the watchtower by something fast and chittering. Another fell with his throat open, gurgling on the stone steps. Crossbow bolts fired blindly into the mist, striking nothing. Shadows flickered. Claws clicked on stone. Within minutes, the outermost checkpoint, Runegate Bastion, was in chaos.

These were not soldiers. These were saboteurs. Dusk Prowlers, cloaked in filth and doom oil, had tunnelled beneath the outer wall days ago, emerging through cracks barely wide enough for a child. They came in small bands, crawling through sewers, latrines, and forgotten exhaust vents. Silent. Precise. Hungry. The alarm bells rang late. In the forges, Engineer-King Drunrik was roused from drafting defensive schematics by a trembling apprentice, face pale as ash. Drunrik didn’t waste time on curses. He locked down the lower machinery levels, sealing them behind six-ton gear doors. It was a start but the rats were already inside the walls.

In the mess halls, fires were overturned, and smoke filled the air. Dwarves ran with axes half-sharpened, armour half-strapped. They fought in kitchens and corridors, alongside their families, fending off blades of poisoned steel and shivs carved from gnawed bone. Captain Brynna Ironscoul, rallying what warriors she could, made her stand in the Hall of the Fallen. Beneath statues of old kings, her axes bit into Eshkin flesh. Around her, dwarves pressed back, choking the corridors with bodies. The walls were slick with blood and steam. By dawn, the dwarves had repelled the infiltrators, but at a cost.

Forty-three dead. Dozens wounded. Five forges damaged. A critical air shaft collapsed from sabotage. One Stone Sentinel now sat inert, its core stolen in the night. The first blow had been struck not to kill the dwarves, but to bleed them. Shake them. Break the rhythm. And from deep below, the drums of war began to sound. The main assault was coming.

 

[TheThird]

The real invasion came not from the gates, but from below. In the dim hours before dawn, while healers wrapped wounds and masons patched breaches from the first sabotage, a low tremor rippled through the city’s underhalls.

At first, it was mistaken for an aftershock, nothing new in a land of living stone. But then came the smell. Doom-oil. Burnt fur. Acid. Then the first explosion. The western sewer forge, Ashgrate, erupted in a blast that tore through four layers of bedrock and vaulted ceiling alike. An entire chamber collapsed, sending dwarves and anvils into darkness. Smoke belched through furnace vents, and from the breach surged the tide: Eshkin, hundreds of them.

Clad in patchwork armour, shrieking with madness and hunger, they flooded the breach. Ratling guns spat green flame across the corridors. Deathwind Troopers hurled seething globes that burst into clouds of sickness. And behind them came the rat ogres, hunchbacked horrors, herding forward battering engines and hell machines, like rabid mules.

The sewer tunnels had been undercut for weeks, mapped by unseen hands. Now, they bloomed into attack tunnels, splitting the dwarven defence in five directions. The warriors of the Ironscoul clan, outnumbered and surrounded, fell back street by street, hall by hall. Captain Brynna Ironscoul, bruised but unbroken, led a fighting retreat toward the Heartforge, the central foundry. She knew if that fell, the whole city would ignite.

Meanwhile, Rune-Master Thargi and a dozen wardens held the rune-vaults, chanting ancient stone-binding rites as tremors shook the pillars around them. Every rune etched into the walls flared hot with resistance. Their defence held for now.

Above ground, King Drunrik received word with fists clenched. His city the mountain-heart of their people, was being hollowed out like rotten fruit. He gave the order: activate the auxiliary sentinels. Three massive statues carved into the mountainside shuddered as soul-gems pulsed and ancient gears groaned. Their eyes lit with forge-fire. Slowly, they turned their heads toward the chaos below.

But they were too far. The battle had gone underground. By midday, the underhalls burned. The Deep Breach had opened a second front, and now the dwarves fought not to win, but to survive long enough to seal the way behind them. The real siege had begun.

 

[TheThird]

They came up screaming. Not marching, not surging, screaming. Clawed hands bursting through sewer grates, spilling from exploded basements, pouring from holes that hadn’t been there an hour before. The Eshkin didn’t just tunnel, they infested. The under-chambers cracked open like rotted bone, and what spewed out was every kind of horror the dwarves had refused to believe possible.

Tharn-Baraz’s upper tiers, once echoing with hammer and hymn, became charnel houses. Doomfire lit the smithing district, searing flesh from bone and turning steel red-hot in seconds. Dwarves caught in the blast didn’t burn; they melted. Shields became molten pools. Beards ignited in silent screams. A ballista crew near the Market Spire tried to brace their line. They were gone before they even loosed a bolt, reduced to twitching silhouettes behind a sickly green flash.
The Eshkin wore twisted armour, riveted straight into their skin. Some had mechanical limbs hissing with pressure tanks. Others carried chittering flesh-constructs on leashes, things made of rat, sinew, and doom fuel.

A Dusk Prowler leapt from a roof and split a dwarf’s skull down the centre before vanishing again into smoke. Clan Metus's rat ogres came behind them, pikes thrusting like a threshing mill. No pause. No mercy. Corpses piled in alleys, but there was no time to mourn. The dead were dragged into side halls and collapsed under rubble to deny them to the rats. There was no honour left, only survival.

Brynna Ironscoul led a countercharge down Goldvein Street. Her shield shattered an ogre's jaw. Her axe buried itself in a warpeye engineer’s spine. For a moment, it looked like the tide could be held. Then the rattling guns opened fire. They spat glowing metal at such speed that the stone itself began to scream. Brynna’s warriors were torn apart, legs severed, guts exposed, heads punched clean off shoulders.

The cobbles ran red. Then green. Then black. And the rats kept coming. By nightfall, the lower city was nothing but flame, smoke, and echoing madness. The tunnels were no longer beneath them. They were the city. And the dwarves had lost the ground. There would be no recovery. Only retreat. Or extinction.

 

[TheThird]

The Ironbell had not rung in two centuries. Its voice was low and terrible, echoing through stone like the groan of the mountain itself. Every dwarf, from forge-boy to warden-elder, froze where they stood. Then came the words none had wanted to hear: “Fall back. Evacuate the lower levels. All clans to the Foggy Steps.”

Brynna Ironscoul didn’t retreat. She held the western gate. Her shield was cracked, her helm smeared with soot and Eshkin blood, but she planted her boots and stood unmoved. With her were forty warriors, some barely past their first beard-plaits, others too old to see straight. All wore Ironscoul steel. They held until the second explosion.

Doom-charged burrow bombs had been seeded beneath the floor, unnoticed in the chaos. With a thunderous roar, the very gatehouse erupted. Brynna was thrown across the cobbles. Half her company vanished into dust and fire. The gate collapsed inward. Stone, twisted iron, and rat bodies fused together into a grotesque ruin.

The defenders were cut off. Only a few stragglers made it out, dragged through auxiliary tunnels by engineers and rune-smiths. Some say Brynna stood again. That she pulled herself up with a shattered axe and carved a path through the tide until her voice faded from the longhorns. Others say she never moved from where she fell.

By the time King Drunrik gave the second signal, the city was unravelling. Civilian convoys were already climbing the Foggy Steps, flanked by hammerguard and ballista carts. The old sentinels massive constructs, bound to the will of the king shook the dust from their limbs and took up rearguard positions.

The hold was dying. But the dwarves would not let their dead fall into vermin's hands. Not without a fight.

 

[TheThird]

The fall was not declared; it was felt. Like a sickness in the stone, a pressure behind the eyes, a final, unspoken truth clawing its way through every crack in the ancient city of Tharn-Baraz.

Above, the gates had crumbled, buried in their own defensive mechanisms after Captain Brynna’s stand. Her sacrifice bought them precious moments, but no more than that. Below, the forges had fallen silent, the great anvils left cooling beside the bodies of their masters. Doomfire still flickered in the lower halls, casting obscene shadows where once the statues of their ancestors stood.

The command came not by horn or council. It passed through the whispers of retreating warriors and the frantic eyes of the wounded. “To the Steps, go to the Steps!” And so they fled. Upward. The survivors moved like ghosts, soot-streaked and blood-wet, dragging kin and children alike through the cracked roadways of the upper tiers. Old veterans carried the wounded on makeshift litters; engineers pulled half-melted artillery behind them with ropes of braided iron and prayer.

They did not look back, not when screams echoed through their empty homes, not when the lower districts lit up with unnatural green flame.

Before their departure, they set the fires. Oil barrels once reserved for siege defences were cracked open. Runes of collapse were etched into key supports. When the last family crossed into the Foggy Steps, the outer forges of Tharn-Baraz were already burning. The oldest of the defenders, those who had chosen to stay, drew axes and vanished back into the smoke. Not to win. But to deny.

From the steps above, the city glowed like a forge on its deathbed. Its gates were gone. Its guardians fallen. And still the Eshkin swarmed, chittering mad with hunger and victory, devouring what they could, defiling what they could not.

The dwarves would make no stand here. The war would continue higher up, on the road their ancestors had carved into the spine of the world. But as they watched their home drown in fire, even the bravest among them could not help but weep. The great bastion of Tharn-Baraz, their first mountain, was no more.

 

[TheThird]

Blood crusted their beards. The gates of Tharn-Baraz were gone buried with Captain Brynna Ironscoul and her shield-brothers. Her sacrifice echoed in every heavy boot that dragged up the winding road. No horns. No songs. Only the hush of loss and the ever-thickening fog.

The wind in the high mountains howled with a mourning voice. They say the retreat from Tharn-Baraz wasn’t a retreat at all but a climb through grief and ash. Behind them, their city burned: its forge-halls gutted, its gates broken, its proud towers now dens for the rat-hordes. The dwarves, wounded, soot-covered, fewer than half of what they were, marched upward into the clouds.

No one spoke of Brynna. But her name was on every face.

The Foggy Steps coiled like a dying serpent up the mountain’s face, each bend revealing more ruin: shattered watchtowers, old statues half-swallowed by moss, and barricades from wars long faded into legend. This was the Path of Ancients and it had not known war in hundreds of years. Now it wept. King Drunrik did not march at the front, nor hide in the rear. He walked among his kin. The engineer-king murmured to scouts, touched wounded shoulders, and traced idle calculations in soot. He was not regal now. He was tired. And he was thinking.

The dwarves passed through forgotten forts and watchtowers carved straight into the mountain’s bones. Old defences were reignited, steam gates flushed clean, rune traps tested, bolts reset. The forges within these heights had not sung in a century. Now they screamed again, belching flame into the fog as dwarven engineers, young and old, prepared for the next stand.

Food was low. Ammunition even lower. And still they climbed. Somewhere ahead, through lightning-lit fog and the frozen spires of the world, lay the great bridge—the Bridge of the Five. Beyond that, the tower. And beyond that still, Krag-Duraz. Their last home. Their first tomb. But not yet. For now, the dwarves moved like stone shaped by patience. Not broken. Only worn. And the fog behind them grew thicker still.

 

[TheThird]

The Third Curve was carved into the mountainside like a serpent’s coil, wrapping hard around a jagged cliff that overlooked a narrow ravine below. In the old war annals, it had been named a natural kill pocket, an ambush point planned for, but never needed. Until now.

King Drunrik had chosen it with care. The engineers had scouted it first, mapping every fracture, every ledge. The sappers came next, hauling kegs of black powder and rune-fused blasting charges. They worked through the night, fingers trembling from exhaustion and cold, hammering charges into old fault lines and carving detonation runes into the cliff face. There would be no second chance.

The warning came with the wind. Scratching. Clawing. The distant clanging of iron and the squeal of rusted wheels. A female dwarve, perched above the bowl with her powder satchel, saw them first, rat shapes, hundreds strong, swarming through the fog like ants through a field. They came screaming.

Eshkinruts clambered over boulders and scaled the cliffs like insects, blades drawn, eyes wide and glowing. Do throwers hissed and gurgled. Doom Drakes sparked through the mist, their engines howling with madness. In the rear, something darker followed, shrouded, bell-bearing, tolling out a cursed rhythm that bent the air.

The dwarves held the high ground. Drunrik waited until the bowl was full, until the shrieking reached its crescendo. Then he raised his hammer. The runes along its head flared blue as he brought it down, and the mountain obeyed. The detonation was deafening. The cliffside ruptured, shattering centuries of stone in a single instant. The entire shelf below collapsed inward, turning the bowl into a chasm. Hundreds of Eshkin were flung into the depths, shrieking as the earth swallowed them. War machines cracked like kindling. Smoke rolled upward, thick and stinking of sulfur and blood. But not all had fallen. Some rats clung to broken ledges, bleeding and twitching. Others surged around the rubble, frenzied by bloodlust and terror both.

Their losses meant nothing. Their hunger was endless. The dwarves did not cheer. They reset charges. They hauled the wounded. They tightened their shields and cleaned their blades. And then they climbed again.

 

[TheThird]

Above the Third Curve, where the sky begins to thin and the snow no longer melts, lies the Vale of Vigil a broad plateau flanked by wind-scoured cliffs and the silent forms of five massive statues. The Sentinels. Each stood fifty paces high, carved from mountain stone and veined with metals long extinct. They bore the forms of ancient dwarf lords, cloaked in angular armour and bearing weapons the size of towers. Their eyes were hollow, their expressions unreadable.

Some said they were just statues, monuments to arrogance and age. Others believed they were something more. Watchers. Guardians. The last dead kings. Now, for the first time in living memory, they stirred. The runes at their feet had begun to flicker in the night. First faintly, glimpses of light between the fog. Then steadily, humming low in the bones of the mountain. At dusk,

King Drunrik gave the order: wake them. It was not a simple thing. The rite to stir the Sentinels had not been performed in over a thousand years. The books were faded, the tools rusted. Yet still, the dwarves remembered. A circle of runepriests gathered at each statue’s base, chanting in the stone-tongue a language so old it cut the air like flint. Engineers hauled rods from steel cases, screwing them into ancient sockets hidden behind folding armor plates. Every contact sparked. Every rune drawn pulsed as if breathing.

Above, thunder gathered. Unnatural. Weighted. Drawn not by weather, but by will. The ground beneath the dwarves vibrated with building tension. Children were ushered back behind stone barricades. Elders stood weeping with pride and terror. A single heartbeat passed. Then the first eye opened.

A burning blue gem ignited in the hollow skull of the easternmost Sentinel. Its gaze swept the vale slowly, as if recognising what stood before it. Around its feet, frost cracked and melted. One arm shifted, an inch only, but enough to scatter the snow for yards. The other Sentinels followed, not yet moving, but not asleep either. Their eyes began to glow. Their hearts began to hum.

The dwarves did not speak. They stood in silence beneath giants wrought by their ancestors, whispering only the names of the fallen. The dead were watching again. And they would not watch idly.

 

[TheThird]

The Bridge of the Five was never meant for war. It was a monument, an ancient span of mountainstone and rune-iron stretching across the Maw, a rift so deep even the dwarves had stopped measuring. No torch could find its bottom. No echo returned. It was said to be the breath of the world, the wound left behind when the gods carved the mountain.

Now it would become a grave. The dwarves had no choice. Behind them, the Vale of Vigil was still roaring with the stirrings of the Sentinels. Ahead, the path to the Tower of Brethren narrowed into cliffs. The bridge was the only place wide enough for a true line of battle. And so, they made their stand.

King Drunrik himself led the shieldwall shoulder to shoulder with Ironbreaker captains, rune priests, and even the battered remnants of the old guard. Crossbow crews dug in at both ends, their bolts dipped in oils and runes. Engineers hastily laid blasting charges under the lip of the span, hidden between stone struts. The youngest dwarves passed water and powder. The oldest whispered prayers.

Then the fog parted. The Eshkin came in shrieking waves, hundreds at first, then countless more. Their war cries were a blend of madness and glee. Doom Wheels screamed sparks on stone. Deathwind Troopers hurled glass orbs of toxic death. Doom Drakes bathed the bridge in green flame. Above it all, a great bell tolled, shifting time, reality, breath.

The first impact hit like a landslide. But the dwarves held. Shields locked. Hammers swung. Powder burst. Rats died in droves, tumbling into the Maw below. Still more came. Rat tunnels burst from cliff walls, disgorging clawpacks into the dwarves’ flanks. Dusk Prowlers danced over the edge of the bridge, climbing with knives in their teeth. And still, the dwarves held.

Hours passed. Blood soaked the stones. Steel rang with the weight of ancestors. For every dwarf that fell, another stepped forward. For every gap in the line, a wounded hand reached to close it. They did not fight to win. They fought to endure. To buy time. To keep the Sentinels standing. To keep the mountain from falling alone.

And so the Bridge of the Five became a crucible, of stone, of blood, of honour unyielding.

 

[TheThird]

It began with a tremor. Not from the Eshkin war engines or the bridge buckling under fire, but from something far older. Stone stirred. The Sentinels moved. Forged in the mythic Age of Crowns, the Five Sentinels had stood for millennia, carved from rune-infused titanstone and buried with godsteel hearts. Once, they were guardians, gifts from the Ancestor-Gods to ward the paths to Krag-Duraz.

But none had walked in living memory. They were legends, mourned relics, watchers with dead eyes. Until now. As thunder crashed above and the sky flashed with lightning, the runes carved into the Sentinels’ chests blazed to life, pulsing with blue fire. One opened its eyes, and in that moment, everything changed. Eshkin screams broke the air as panic swept through their ranks like a plague.

The colossi stepped forward. Slowly at first, like waking giants with bones of stone and blood of molten metal. But each step was a calamity. The mountain shook with every movement. Dust avalanched down the cliffs. Trees split. The very ground cracked. The first Sentinel swung a hammer larger than a house, smashing a rat orge chariot into green embers and black smoke. The second drove a bladed gauntlet into a swarm of Wretchqueeks, flattening them in a single strike. One Sentinel opened its mouth and let loose a deep, grinding roar, part wind, part thunder, part something older still.

Deathwind Troopers and Packblades were flung aside like insects. Doomwheels collided and shattered in their panic. A Verminlord tried to charge a colossus with a shriek of mad defiance, only to be seized and crushed into the stone like rotten fruit. The dwarves, holding the line at the Bridge of the Five, felt the tide shift. For a heartbeat, hope flickered in ash-ringed eyes.

The Sentinels advanced with dreadful grace, sweeping through the rats' ranks in arcs of annihilation. Where they walked, ruin followed. But nothing that ancient wakes without cost. With each movement, the Sentinels bled light from cracked runes. Sparks burst from their joints. Fissures ran down their legs.

And still, they marched, unrelenting, unyielding. The Eshkin scrambled to adapt, but the fear was in them now. For the first time, they saw the mountain move, and they remembered that not all stone is dead. The gods had not yet finished speaking.

 

[TheThird]

The Sentinels had turned the tide. For the first time since the fog rose, the dwarves saw Eshkin flee. Saw them crushed, broken, scattered beneath colossal feet and weapons older than empires. But Clan Metus had not brought doomfire alone.

They brought muscle. From the tunnels and cliff mouths came the roar of drums, deep, fast, constant. And then the ground shivered not from stone, but from the stampede. A low churning sound, like flesh rolling over stone. Rat ogres. too many to count. almost four times the height of a dwarf, stitched with bone plating, metal hooks, and crude bracings to keep their spasming limbs in check. The rat ogres didn’t march. They threw themselves forward, frothing and howling, driven by pain, hunger, and the savage prodding of their packmasters.

The rat men didn’t send them to win a fight, they sent them to bring the mountain down by weight and ruin. The first wave charged directly into a Sentinel’s legs. They clawed, bit, climbed. Some exploded against the ancient armour. Others latched on like leeches, scrabbling up the titan’s back with unnatural fervour. Dozens more followed, turning the colossus into a grotesque pillar of writhing bodies.

The second Sentinel staggered. A second began to slow, its legs covered in gnashing jaws and flailing limbs. Rat ogres tore into its joints, their crude claws chipping at the runes, their sheer mass pulling it off balance. The dwarves, still holding the bridge, watched in horror. It was not war; it was rot and infestation. The way a corpse is eaten. The way a monument crumbles under moss and neglect. A tide of flesh grinding down what stone could not break.

The third Sentinel tried to swing its axe, only for a tangle of ogres to seize its arm and hang like ballast. With a sickening groan, the limb cracked at the elbow. The colossus reeled. Beneath the chaos, the Eshkin advanced again. Doom Drakes sparked across the stone. Clawpacks howled in triumph. Packmasters cracked whips soaked in blood and bile, pushing the ogres forward like living siege towers.

The tide had turned again, not through cunning or sorcery, but by sheer, overwhelming numbers.

Not with magic.
With meat.
And still, the dwarves did not break. Not yet.

 

[TheThird]

The Fifth Sentinel had stood longer than the first dwarf kingdom. Its stone hewn from the bedrock of the world, shaped before any Eshkin had so much as clawed into the dark. But even titans fall.

Its legs were the first to give. Not from age, but from the unrelenting swarm that climbed it like ants up a dying beast. Rat ogres had clung to its joints, chewing through rune-seals, biting at weak points. Some burst under pressure. Others simply became part of the living tangle that unbalanced the giant. A shoulder snapped. A knee bent the wrong way. And then came the crash.

The Fifth Sentinel toppled backwards, arms wide, like it was reaching to take the sky down with it. Its impact shattered the edge of the bridge. Stone cracked. A fault line ripped through the span like lightning. Dozens of dwarves were thrown. Hundreds of rats tumbled into the dark. And the bridge moaned. King Drunrik knew the sound. It was the mountain warning him.

No one waited for the order. The engineers ran to their pre-placed charges, black powder in stone sockets, rune-fuses already laid. The last survivors, bloodied, limping, deafened by battle, took positions at the detonation runes. They didn’t fire early. They waited. They waited for the next wave, queeks charging, rat ogres bounding, clawpacks shrieking with victory on their tongues. And then they lit the runes.

The explosion tore the night in half. A chain of thunder rolled across the peaks as the final support pylons were ripped from their moorings. The southern half of the bridge fell first, dragging its enemies into the chasm. Then the middle cracked, tilting violently as it sheared loose from the cliff edge. Eshkin screamed all the way down. Their machines sparked. Flesh hit stone and vanished into shadow.

And the dwarves, those who remained, turned and ran. Not in fear. In duty.
Upwards. To the tower. To the gate. To the last mountain halls.
Behind them, nothing remained of the bridge but smoke and wind. They had not won. But neither had the rats. And for now, that was enough.

 

[TheThird]

The Tower of Brethren rose like a blade from the mountainside carved straight into the cliff face, reaching from the ruins of the bridge to the gate of the old capital. No lifts. No ramps. Only stone stairs, winding like a spine up through the bones of the mountain.

For those who had survived the bridge, there was no time to rest. The Eshkin were already clawing up the walls, surging over the rubble, driven by madness and numbers. The dwarves sealed the base of the tower behind them, poured oil down the stairs, and lit it without ceremony. The climb began in smoke and screams. Each floor was a redoubt once halls of memory and rest, now death traps of stone. Doors were barred and broken. Walls were turned into battlements. Powder was hoarded, not counted.

On the third level, the rats broke through a forgotten shaft and swarmed a barracks. The dwarves fought in the dark, axes rising and falling in blood-slick hands. No one slept. By the sixth floor, the rats were clawing up the outer face of the tower. The engineers turned the narrow arrow slits into execution lines, hurling black powder charges and firing from crossbow nests. The stone echoed with shrieks.

No floor was left unbloodied. On the tenth level, Brother Halvek died pulling an Eshkin rat Ogre down a shattered stairwell with him. On the twelfth, dwarven old guard made a stand that left their dead stacked to the ceiling, a barricade of bodies. On the thirteenth, there were no stairs left, only handholds, broken masonry, and prayers. But they climbed. Upward, always upward, through smoke and ruin and the reek of death. Children were passed from hand to hand. The wounded were hoisted on shields. Thanes died bearing the banners forward so that they would not fall. By the time they reached the summit, barely a third remained. No cheers. No cries of triumph. Only silence, and the groaning of the stone.

They had climbed a grave. And they were the last to stand above it. Ahead lay the gate. Behind the tower, burned floors collapsed one by one, sealing the past in ash. But the dwarves still stood.

 

[TheThird]

They stood in the ash-swept wind, a band of broken survivors on the lip of the world. The Tower of Brethren smouldered behind them, spitting columns of black smoke into the sky like pyres for the dead. Burned banners clung to splintered beams. Blood stained the stone. Dwarves coughed and limped, smeared in soot, half-blind from smoke, their armour torn and cracked. And before them loomed the Gate of Echoes.

Thirty paces high and twice as wide, the gate was carved into the mountainside itself, ancient, immovable, eternal. It bore no hinges, no visible seam, and yet every dwarv knew it could open. Had opened long ago. Once. Maybe twice. But never in their lifetimes. Not since the great retreat, when the outer holds were sealed and the last High Kings vanished from memory.

The gate was flanked by two crumbling statues whose names were lost to time. One held a hammer. The other, a tome. Their faces were worn down by centuries of wind and weather, their eyes blind. Above the centre, a circle of runes spiralled outward like a sunburst, names of ancestors, kings, masons, and the nameless thousands who built the dwarven empire stone by stone.

King Drunrik approached. His beard was ragged, caked in blood. His helm hung at his side, the crown dented, nearly split. In his other hand, he held the Gate-Key, a haft of stone older than any crown, passed down through generations of wardens, carved with runes only the royal line could read. He pressed it into the keystone. For a moment, nothing happened. The wind howled through the peaks. Somewhere behind them, a child whimpered.

Then the mountain shuddered. Not like a quake, not violent. More like a breath. A long, deep exhale from stone lungs. The runes began to glow. One by one, then in clusters. Gold. Pure. Ancient. And the gate split down the middle with a low, grinding moan, a sound like an old warrior waking from centuries of sleep. Stone shifted against stone. The echo rolled across the peaks.

The Gate of Echoes opened. And behind it lay nothing but darkness, silence… and the first drifting flakes of snow.

 

[TheThird]

The dwarves entered in silence. Beyond the Gate of Echoes lay a narrow pass, flanked by cliff faces that rose like jagged knives into the pale sky. The ground was untouched by time, snow clung to stone that had not felt footfall in generations. Not even birds nested here. No roots grew. The only marks were faint grooves worn into the rock by the wheels of long-dead caravans and the boots of ancestors now ash.

For the first time in weeks, no Eshkin pursued. No tremor whispered of claws in the dark. The rats had stopped at the Tower, too broken or too bloodied to continue the chase, for now. The dwarves felt it like a wound: that pause before the next blow. At the end of the pass, the cliffs fell away, and there, at last, lay the Valley of the Four Summits.

It was massive, shielded on three sides by mountains that towered into clouds, their peaks hidden beneath snow and storm. The air tasted different here, older, cleaner, but thinner too, forcing every breath. A dozen waterfalls spilled from the cliffs, feeding streams that had long since turned to ice. The ruins of outer watchposts lined the edges of the valley, their beacons long unlit. Ivy and snow coated their broken walls. And in the center, rising from the bedrock, stood Krag-Duraz.

The dwarven capital. Built out of a mountain itself, Krag-Duraz looked less like a mountain and more like a fortress that had grown into one. Towering halls, half-buried in snow, thrust out from the cliffs like the ribs of a sleeping titan. Its gates were shut. No smoke rose from its chimneys. No horns welcomed them home.

King Drunrik stood at the head of the company, staring at the capital he had sworn to reach. His ancestors had ruled here. His people had fled from it. And now they returned, fewer than half their number, carrying wounded and dead, bearing stories no ancestor could have imagined. Behind him, no one spoke. They moved forward with reverence. With sorrow. With awe.

This was not victory. This was not safety. This was the eye of the storm.

 

[TheThird]

The Valley of the Four Summits opened wide and pale beneath a dying sky. The dwarves stood at its threshold, weary, soot-stained, and fewer than they had ever been. Smoke still trailed from the ruined heights behind them. Snow fell quietly now, ash and frost mingling on scorched pauldrons. They had arrived. Krag-Duraz. The ancient capital rose from the valley floor like a mountain given purpose. Its walls were not merely defensive, but penitential. Every stone, every layer of fortification, sat atop deeper and darker foundations. For Krag-Duraz was never just a city it was a vault, a tomb, a prison.

Beneath its halls lay the Old Depths. Sealed chambers bound with runes forgotten even by the Runepriests. Chains too thick for giants. Doors built not to open, only to endure. Legends told of what was buried there, dark gods, nameless beasts, traitor kings, ancient mistakes. And one among them had been the purpose of this march: a prisoner that should never have been remembered. A secret kept even from most dwarves. The thing the Eshkin came for.

The survivors marched through the outer gates in silence. Statues of kings long dead lined the approach. Some dwarves knelt. Others touched the carved names of ancestors. There was no joy in the return, only duty. The once-great city was mostly dark, its lower halls sealed since the Long Retreat. Dust lay thick on abandoned forges. Vaults remained locked, some trembling faintly with things that had waited far too long.

The few hundred dwarves who had lived here before had long since retreated into the highest citadel, surviving only through harsh rationing and bitter resolve. Now the halls stirred again. Bell-forges were rekindled. Old banners were unfurled. Families reunited, briefly. There would be little time to celebrate. For the valley already echoed with new sounds.

A chittering tide, growing louder. The Eshkin had not broken. They would come. They would come with more. And when they did, they would not find a people beaten. They would find dwarves dug in atop stone never meant to be touched again.

Below them, something older still waited. Chained, dead, yet watching eagerly.