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

[TheThird]

Fewer than a thousand dwarves remained. They staggered into Krag-Duraz like ghosts, their armour cracked, skin blackened with soot, and their axes dulled to iron clubs. Children walked without speaking. Elders bled into their beards. Many bore the brands of recent grief: red ribbons, torn sleeves, or the ash-marks of clan death. Yet none fell behind. None asked to turn back. The gates shut behind them with a groan that echoed for miles.

Krag-Duraz had once been a beacon, a throne city, prison-fortress, and monument to dwarven endurance. But the halls had long been empty of song. Dust coated the grand stairwells. Deep below, in catacomb levels carved to hold the worst evils, the prison-heart pulsed in silence.

King Drunrik walked through the Anvil Hall in silence, gripping the haft of his father’s hammer. Around him, the survivors began their grim work. Runepriests cleaned blood from the stones and redrew ancient sigils on the gate wards. Forges-dwarves stoked fires that had not burned in centuries. Children were given slings and told to watch the tunnels. Some of the deeper halls had already been breached. Not by Eshkin, but by time. Cells had cracked. Warning wards lay dim. One tunnel, sealed since the Age of Unions, now gaped open. No one was brave enough to peer inside. Not yet.

By evening, the surviving dwarves gathered in the central vaults, forming barricades from stone, steel, and old furniture. They built tiered defences, fallback routes, and hidden escape tunnels. Not to flee, no dwarf expected to live, but so that some might hold longer than others. Above, the horns of the Eshkin wailed in the dark.

Below, in the ancient catacombs, something began to stir.

The dwarves lit the final braziers and painted their foreheads with soot. They would not meet death clean. They would meet it as the sons and daughters of stone. And still, not one spoke of surrender.

 

[TheThird]

The first tremors came at dawn. Not the steady march of feet, these shook the ground with grinding force, like teeth chewing into the earth. Then came the sounds: shrieking metal, wet chains dragging, and the thunder of something massive slamming into stone far below the city’s lowest levels. The Eshkin had brought siege engines. Not noble constructs of gears and discipline like the dwarven war-machines of old, but obscene hybrids, chittering, rust-covered horrors powered by doomstone and shrieking slaves.

They tunnelled beneath the mountain like worms, using rotary drills crowned in doomstone, eating through granite with impossible speed. One of the lower halls collapsed before noon, burying six defenders alive in their own watchtower. Then came the Ratapults, twisted catapults that hurled bile-filled corpses over the high gates of Krag-Duraz. Each body cracked open with a sound like eggs bursting, releasing clouds of thick green fog that hissed against stone and skin alike. Those caught in it didn't scream long; the rot worked faster than most blades.

Behind these came the abominations, massive, stitched-together beasts of fur, flesh, and doomstone-conduit. Some dragged siege towers fused with living parts, their spines visible through cracked iron. Others were simply let loose, rushing the outer walls in mindless frenzies, smashing their bodies again and again against dwarven defences until bones snapped and walls cracked. Yet the dwarves endured.

From narrow murder-holes and layered battlements, they loosed bolts and flame. Runepriests sent shockwaves through the stone, toppling tunnelling shafts and flooding rat burrows. The defenders worked tirelessly, not because they believed they could win, but because they knew they could make the rats bleed. Still, hour by hour, the pressure mounted. The Eshkin were not merely attacking. They were consuming. Chewing. Corroding.

The walls groaned. The tunnels screamed. And deep below, in the half-forgotten levels of Krag-Duraz, vibrations reached the buried vaults. The prison did not stir, but it listened.

Their Father waited.

 

[Dagon Erh]

They do not understand the sky. They look up and think it was ever theirs. Those stars were hung for them. That light belonged to gods who cared.

But light is a disease. And tonight, I am the cure.

My loyal filthrunners sobbed with joy at the sight of me. Their faces twitch with desperation, I allow it. Such ugliness is the price of loyalty. The field beyond Krag-Duraz seethed with vermin: warbands in chaos, engines belching smoke, warlords screaming over one another. Useless. Loud things die fast. I walked the lines in silence. My presence parted them like a blade. They know me. The screaming stopped. Some of the younger ones fled. I smiled. Even the Eshkin understand power when they see it.

The stone here is ancient. It hums with the memories of chains. This place was never a city. It was a wound, a seal. And those idiotic dwarves, proud in their ignorance, built a throne upon a prison. How poetic. How predictable.

The prisoner is here. I smell him beneath the roots of this mountain. Even in his slumber, his hatred stains the bedrock. He does not call out, but I feel his pulse in my spine. He waits.

The dwarves bark and spit from their walls, desperate things, still pretending they are not already buried. I do not spare them a thought. Their bolts rattle uselessly in the haze above, their thunder-shot lost in the hum of the ritual. Let them waste their fire. Let them clutch their ancestors and beg for light.

Tonight, I fed the earth. I have begun the rituals. Not of magic, no, not in the foolish sense of flame and fireballs, but of transmutation. Reordering. The world is raw flesh, and I have learned to carve it. My censer boils with nerves pulled from plague-beasts. I pour language into doomed flesh. I teach Stone to scream.

The first circle was opened. The Eshkin brought offerings, wretches chosen not for strength but for the shape of their fear. Arranged upon rusted glyphs, arms spread, eyes sewn shut with brass thread. I spoke the names that hadn't been heard in a thousand years. With each word, the air thickened, the ground pulled downward, and the stone around us darkened with sweat. Ash from a long-dead rune-priest was poured into the pit. It hissed and vanished. The glyphs drank deep. I pressed my hand to the centre and found breath pulsing back.

The chain stirred. Veins run beneath this place. Ancient channels etched into the roots of the mountain, scars left behind by what slumbers below. I can feel them now.

Tomorrow, the great drills arrive. Not simple engines, these are teeth, meant for the bones of worlds. I will guide them. I will open what was meant to remain closed. I have seen the path. Nothing can remain sealed forever. And the Eshkin, bless their blind ambition, will gnaw through every door.

Let the dwarves flee. If they wish, let them dig in and pray to stones that do not answer. Their last stand means nothing to me.

 

[TheThird]

The thunder of collapsing stone drowned out the cries of the defenders. The outer wall of Krag-Duraz, once a proud barrier forged in the fires of dwarven craft, had fallen. Its once-imposing strength was shattered in an instant. The Eshkin, relentless and cunning, had found the weakness, a breach too deep to seal, too wide to heal.

Larak Embergrip, cousin to King Drunrik and nephew of the great line of Embergrip warriors, led the charge. As the smoke choked the air, he stood tall, his axe, Emberfall, a reflection of the mountain’s last defiance. His breath came in ragged bursts, his heart thundering with a familiar fire a fire born of duty, of loyalty, of family. He had been raised for this, to defend these halls, to die protecting his kin and his ancestors.

But even Larak felt the weight of the mountain pressing in. As the dust swirled around him, he could hear the hiss of Eshkin voices, their chittering growing louder, echoing in the ruins. The sound was a constant reminder that Krag-Duraz had already been lost; he was merely one of the final lines of defence, standing in the way of an inevitable fall. The rats poured through the breach like a flood, tunnelling beneath the earth and clawing through what remained of the stone. Doomfire billowed, setting the air ablaze with foul stench, and the rat ogres charged forward with terrifying speed. Every step forward felt like a defiance against the end, but Larak would not let his people crumble quietly into the night.

He rallied his clan’s warriors, shouting orders above the din. "We stand here, we fight, we die!" he roared, his voice barely cutting through the smoke. There would be no retreat, not now, not ever. The Embergrip clan would go down in a blaze, every last one of them holding the line until they could no longer stand. The clash was brutal. Dwarven axes swung with precision, meeting the gnashing teeth of rat ogres. Iron-shod shields rang with each strike, the heavy thud of war machines crashing into the walls of their defences.

Larak's axe cleaved through a rat ogre’s skull, but there were always more, more Eshkin, more bodies, more war machines, more devastation. His warriors fought valiantly, but it was clear that the mountain itself was losing. The walls were gone, the stone cracked, and the mountain groaned as though it knew its fate. Larak fought to his last breath. He cut down another rat and another, each kill fueling his rage, but as the dark tide washed over him, he knew it would not be enough. The mountain would fall. Krag-Duraz would fall.

And when the end came, it would come with a final, defiant roar from Larak Embergrip, cousin to the king and last of his line.

 

[TheThird]

The ancient halls of Krag-Duraz, once filled with hammer-song and golden braziers, had gone silent, save for the distant rumble of collapsing stone and the skittering hiss of the Eshkin tide. Smoke poured through the vaults like a second flood, choking the air with burning pitch and flesh. The great outer ring of the fortress had fallen, its gates sundered, its walls breached.

Now, what remained of the dwarven defenders, no more than a few hundred warriors and civilians, withdrew into the catacombs. The catacombs had not been opened in centuries, not since the last exile was chained in the depths. This was no place for the living. They were not designed as refuge, but as a prison. The stonework was cruel, thick with ancient seals, iron bolts, and runes of binding. Every corridor was built to contain, never to protect.

Children clung to their mothers. Elders limped beside warriors smeared with soot and blood. The glow of torchlight flickered across the ancient walls, where carvings of bound horrors leered down in silence. Entire generations of the Embergrip line descended into those depths, led by King Drunrik himself, his crown tarnished, his beard singed, yet his eyes resolute. Above them, the rats were no longer simply looting, they were hunting. Their torches cast green, sickly halos down broken stairwells. Burrowing drills chewed into the mountain’s lower levels. Screams echoed behind the dwarves as those who fell in the rearguard were overrun.

Yet none among them begged for mercy. This was not a people ready to surrender, it was a people preparing to die with purpose. Within the catacombs, they sealed passageways behind them, forging chokepoints from ancient iron gates. Stone-priest Varrik whispered prayers over runes that had not been touched in five hundred years. Acolytes lit braziers of blackstone, awakening forgotten powers buried with the prison.

And in the deepest hall, behind three layers of stone doors, rested what the rats had come for: the Heartvault, a cell not of steel, but of runes and will. It pulsed faintly, not with life, but with presence. Something within stirred.

As the dwarves prepared their last defences, they knew the truth: this final stand was not just to save their people. It was to keep what lay beneath from ever walking free again.

 

[TheThird]

Deep beneath Krag-Duraz, behind sealed iron doors and ancestral wards, the surviving dwarves gathered in a final council. Their numbers were few, bloodied, smoke-stained, and weary beyond words. Some had lost kin, others bore wounds they would not outlive. And yet, none spoke of retreat. None wept. Not here.

The chamber in which they stood had once been a vault for royal relics. Now it held only two things: a war-table covered in ash and a rune-etched pillar, the Rune of Ending. It had been forged in secret centuries ago, not by any one runesmith, but by a generation of them. A final gift from the ancestors, meant never to be used unless the worst came to pass.

Now, King Drunrik placed his hand upon it, and it burned with a cold fire, veins of white lightning threading through the stone like cracks in ice. The others stared in silence. They all knew what it meant. Varrik the Stone-priest was first to nod. “Better death with meaning than life beneath Eshkin rule.” Others followed, Thrain, last commander of the forge wardens. Durla, whose two sons had fallen in the breach. Even the young spoke, voices steady: “Light it. Let them choke on the ashes.” Drunrik said little. He only looked at the runestone, his face hollowed by loss.

His brother had fallen at the gate. His daughter had died buying time for the retreat. All he had left now was duty. And so, without ceremony, he pressed the iron key into the pillar’s heart. The Rune of Ending awoke. It began slowly, like a breath held in the mountain’s lungs. Deep tremors stirred. Runes across the prison walls lit one by one, casting pale blue light into the catacombs.

The forges, cold for hours, sparked back to life in a silent blaze. There was no countdown. No second thoughts. Only preparation. The dwarves moved with grim resolve. Runesmiths placed seismic charges at load-bearing pillars. Veterans spread out to block access tunnels and buy every last minute. The Heartvault was sealed again, its bindings tightened one final time.

This was not simply a trap. It was an execution, meant to bury the Eshkin, the prison, and the thing they had come to free under a mountain of stone and sacred fire. Drunrik whispered to the stone: “Let this be the end.”

 

[TheThird]

The halls of Krag-Duraz thrummed with ancestral power. The Rune of Ending had been activated, and now the ancient fortress-prison stirred as if drawing its final breath. Flickering blue runes etched into the stone pulsed like heartbeats. Above, the great furnaces roared to life, smoke billowing through cracked chimneys as centuries-old seals came undone.

In the lower halls, the dwarves made ready. Runesmiths scurried through the shadows, placing rune-charges and shaping wards designed not to protect, but to obliterate. These were sacred rites never meant to be used, designed to crack the bones of the mountain itself. Each glyph they placed sang with power, a keening note that reverberated through beard and bone.

In the catacombs, warriors stood watch beside narrow choke-points and collapsing stairwells. There were no more formations. No more banners. Just grim lines of kin, bloodied and resolute, waiting with axe and hammer in hand. A few wept, not for fear, but for pride. This would be the last stand of Krag-Duraz, and they would face it shoulder to shoulder. Durla Embergrip, last shield-maiden of the Embergrip clan, stood in the shattered Hall of Chains, her armour scorched, her face streaked with soot. She had lost everything, family, comrades, even her voice to poison gas, but her stance did not falter. She raised her hammer in silence, and those beside her mirrored the gesture.

A deep rumble echoed through the stone. The Eshkin were coming. They poured through broken tunnels and melted gates in endless numbers, driven by plague-frenzy and the scent of dwarven blood. But every advance was met with fury. Axes rose and fell. Hammers shattered bone and rusted armour. Even dying, the dwarves gave no quarter. In the rune-chambers above, the final runes were locked into place. Barrek Embergrip, blood-cousin to the King, traced the last glyph across the Keystone Pillar with his own blood. His hands trembled, not with fear, but from the weight of duty. As the rune flared to life, he turned and joined the line.

They did not expect to survive. That was never the plan. Their task was to hold, to buy moments, to bleed the rats until the mountain could do what they no longer could. And when the end came, it would come not with surrender… but with a roar that would echo through stone and history

 

[TheThird]

The Rune of Ending awakened. A soundless flash came first, a pulse of searing white that lit every tunnel and hall in Krag-Duraz, banishing shadow for a single, eternal instant. Then came the roar: a deep, ancient thunder that cracked the world like an egg. Stone buckled. Iron screamed. The roots of the mountain tore themselves apart. From the outside, it looked as though the earth itself had drawn breath… and exhaled fire. A colossal plume of green-lit flame burst skyward, trailing stone shards the size of towers. Peaks collapsed inward. Valleys split open. Krag-Duraz, the fortress-prison of a thousand years, was erased from the map in a single, merciless breath.

Beneath the ruin, the runes sang their death song. Hall after hall detonated in sequence, each one carved with hatred, sealed with blood, and ignited with the spite of dying kin. The Eshkin, so many in number, were caught mid-charge, torn apart by flame, crushed by collapsing stone, or burned into ash by ancestral magic still clinging to the deepest bones of the fortress. There was no escape. No mercy. No tunnel to run to.

The prison was gone. Its horrors were buried, most of them. In the deepest cell of all, a vault long forgotten by all but the eldest dwarves, lay the reason for it all: the corpse of the First Lord of Clan Metus. Ancient. Bound in a thousand soul-chains and rune-locks. The explosion reached even here. Flames licked the ceiling. Cracks raced through the walls like fleeing rats. And still, the corpse remained untouched.

There was no breath. No spark. No motion. Krag-Duraz was no more. The dwarves were dead. The prison destroyed. And in the ruin’s heart, the soul of the First Lord still burned. Waiting.

 

[Dagon Erh]

The smoke has not lifted. It spills down the cliffs like ink, churning with soot and sickness, swallowing the valley below. The mountains no longer sing. No voices echo. No wind dares to move through the broken stone. What remains of the Valley of the Four Summits is buried in silence, thick, unholy silence.

Krag-Duraz is gone. Where once stood the dwarven capital, only a jagged crater remains, half-flooded with slag, half-choked by the dead. The explosion tore the valley apart. Fissures cut deep into the slopes. Entire ridgelines collapsed. The Rune of Ending did its work… and more. The Eshkin legions were annihilated by the blast. What few survived did so by chance alone, trapped in collapsed tunnels, crawling through filth and rot, too injured or stunned to understand what they’d lost. Clan Metus, once proud of its cunning, now bleeds from every edge. Their victory is ashen in the mouth.

And the dwarves? They are gone. All of them. Families, kings, warriors, their future, all lost in the fire or buried beneath the rock. The last holdfast of their line, the oldest bastion of the Stoneheart clan, died with Krag-Duraz. No horns sounded. No runes lit in triumph. Only silence remains. The Foggy Steps, once a route between kingdoms, now lie choked with debris. The great bridge is cracked down the center. The sentinel statues, those stone giants of old, stand no more. Some fell into the depths below, others now lie half-buried or shattered in grotesque angles. The road is impassable, and none come to clear it.

And yet… something lingers. In the crater’s heart, the ground still steams. The black stone seems to pulse faintly beneath the layers of soot. No birds circle above. No scavengers dare the ruins. The air is wrong, thick with invisible poison, the kind that warps the mind before it kills the body.

From the edges of the valley, the smoke can still be seen. A slow, constant curl of darkness rising into the sky like a wound that will not close. Those who look too long swear they hear voices, chittering, whispering, seething.

 

[Dagon Erh]

The valley is silent. Not in peace, but in ruin.

Smoke clings to the crags. Fog rolls where once walls stood. The mountains bleed ash. The fortress is no more, only splinters of blackened stone, and a pit that yawns where Krag-Duraz once defied time. Even the carrion have not come. They know better.

There are no witnesses. No eyes to watch. No mouths to speak of what happens next. All has gone according to design.

I walk alone through what remains. Skulls line my path, cracked and scorched, whispering no names. The dwarves are gone. The rats broken. Victory belongs to neither. The wind whimpers across ruined halls, and the great doors of the under-vaults are open, torn free by quake and flame. Down there, in the roots of the world, it waits.

The prison beneath Krag-Duraz. It was not built to confine flesh, but to bind souls. Souls too monstrous for death. Souls they could not destroy. So they locked them in stone, silence and darkness. Generations were born and died above, never knowing what lay beneath their feet. But I knew.

There he lies. The First Lord of Clan Metus. Dead, yes, but only by name. His body is massive, still as stone, blackened from countless brands. Chains run through him like veins. Runes dance across his flesh, shivering with every step I take. His mouth is sealed with gold. His eyes, stitched shut with iron thread. Even in death, they feared his gaze.

They were right to.

I light the braziers. The smoke turns blue. The circle is redrawn with ash and bitter oil. Not blood this time, blood is too kind. Each glyph must be sung, each line carved by hand. There can be no error. The script is older than breath. My voice wavers only once, when the shadows move against the flame. The shackles hiss. I lay my hand upon his chest. Cold. Hard. But pulsing. Something ancient stirs beneath. Not breath, something deeper. A hatred buried in stone. I do not flinch. The final rune is complete. And the valley holds its breath.

This is not resurrection. This is his return.