Dear Spellbook,

I gave Dagmar a few of your pages. I hope you don't mind. Writing a recounting of his retelling of events seemed less than ideal, so I asked him to write it down for me. Honestly, I think he needs to do this. The weight of that night has been a burden on his oddly-proportioned shoulders. Writing in you has helped me, and I think writing down his own thoughts will help him as well. He was reluctant, but when I told him I needed it to have a complete record of events, he softened to the idea. Having made fun of me endlessly for writing in my “diary,” I think he needed the excuse to save face. I haven't read it yet, so apologies in advance I guess if he... I don't know. You know how he is.

Show Report DH 1

Illunia 10

Ferret, I mean, Tal, asked me to write about the events of Illunia 10, so the downfall of the Hardune can be properly documented. I’m only doing this because of that.

The Hardune were a sect of dwarven society tasked with containing threats to Kaltis. We aimed to embody our god in all things. As Torc gave all of himself to contain Faust, we gave all of ourselves to help in the effort. When the gods left and the terrors they had kept at bay resurfaced, the Hardune destroyed or contained them to safeguard the prison. When Faust turned the Primordial of Fire into his Avatar, it was the Hardune that captured it, and it is that monster I fear will soon escape.

My name is Dagmar Har’Tokar, and Illunia 10 was the worst day of my life. I guess I should explain that as well. Har was my rank in the Hardune. I earned it when I had completed my apprenticeship in the Hardune under my father at the age of thirty, the youngest any Pen—apprentice—had been raised in a generation. I grew up dreaming of joining the Hardune like my father. Applying myself fully in all the training, I longed to push back the tide of the Forsaken and safeguard the terrors we had contained. No one was my equal in my studies or training, and it was expected that I would rise fast in the Hardune.

But I did not.

I joined the Hardune at thirty, and fifty years later, I was still a Har. The first few years I tried hard, always vigilant for the next incursion that never came. The battle lines against the Forsaken were far from my outpost, far from any Hardune outpost or containment site. The life of battle and glory I envisioned was one from a pre-Flood Hardune. Back before the Flood had brought low the Forsaken and turned them to scavengers desperate for any Torack they could hold onto. The remaining sites were buried deep within the bounds of The Continent or safe beneath the ocean. The High King and his forces had kept the Forsaken back, outside of the bounds of the Continent, reducing the Hardune to an elite squad of custodians. That is, until he failed.

My service was not what I had hoped, and the years of inaction ate away at me. At first I did my duty, but over the years it fell second to other interests.

Duty. What is a dwarf without duty? Duty to your brothers, your clan, Torc, Kaltis. We are a people whose identity has been forged by responsibility and obligation. To shirk one's duty is to not be a dwarf. I should not call myself that; I failed them all.

Illunia 10th was the culmination of years of my dereliction of duty. My watch shift to inspect the Kituh wards started as usual. The Kituh, or underrail, is a system of ward powered carts that connect the Hardune outposts. I unloaded my rune maintenance gear from my pack, and filled it with whatever alcohol I'd managed to smuggle out of the stores; that day it was a mushroom stout. I rode the cart to my assigned region of the tunnel. The trip took an hour, which I spent thinking of ways I could complete my task faster to have more time to sit and drink. My assignment was to inspect the runes that made up the wards for damage. This required me to power each ward with my Will, imbued to a diagnostic intent, and then immediately read the intent in the Will before it decayed. Each day the entire Kituh ward was inspected and repaired. All 1,214 miles of it. My task for today was to inspect two of those miles. When done correctly, the task takes a full eight hours and drains you entirely of your Will by the end. When done incorrectly, it takes two hours and gives you six to drink and dream of a different life.

The wards were a complicated system of detection runes that would activate defensive measures if the tunnel was breached. If the trigger was met, the section of the tunnel would be sealed, and water would be allowed to flood the tunnel. In addition to this, the wards were also embedded with runes that allowed limited communication between the Hardune outposts.

As I disembarked the cart, the Har I was relieving was waiting to board. He didn’t give the passphrase of the day, which was “Olive Salt Ant,” but I recognized the man and just waved and walked past him. Preoccupied with not giving a flood, I didn’t notice all the red flags I see on the man now. How is this so clear in my memory? Tal always said his diary helped him remember. Is this what he meant? The man, Tarvi Har’Donir, looked uncertain, as if he expected me to attack him. His armor was secured loosely, not in regulation. Tarvi was a true dwarf, proud in his charge and faithful in his duty; this should have put me on alert. Instead, I just waved and walked on.

It took me an hour and forty-eight minutes to complete my “inspection,” a new record. Instead of performing it as required, I walked down the tunnel, visually inspecting the wards, light wards on the ceiling illuminating the tunnel as I passed. In my mind, I didn’t see the harm in my performing “below protocol,” as my performance reviews called it. The next day I would be on a different section and someone else could check this one. No ward would fail in a day.

Nothing looked amiss, so I returned to the pickup point to begin my day of drinking. After over six hours of nursing my stouts, it occurred to me that something was wrong. The years of drinking on inspection duty had taught me to pace myself, and usually I had some drink left when the pickup came. That day, I finished and waited for a pickup that never came.

Instincts hammered into me over decades of training, but long since dormant, now moved me to action. In the Hardune, a cart was never late and a watch was never missed. Something was wrong. Running down the tunnel, I reached an emergency station and activated the ward release. I removed a four-foot square metal plate that was inset in the wall. Placing it on the ward rails, I sat on the plate, and Imbued it with my Will, activating the runes.

The plate lurched forward at incredible speed. The acceleration would have thrown me had the plate not been warded with runes of Binding to hold the rider. It took only twenty minutes to return to the outpost on the emergency rail plate. Before I reached the security checkpoint, I stopped to approach on foot. Disabling the overhead ward lights, I snuck along the tunnel wall. There were no visible guards when the outpost came into view.

The late cart could be explained as a once in a lifetime failure of redundant systems, but that coupled with the missing guards confirmed it. Something terrible had happened.

The outpost had been compromised. My thoughts raced through the possibilities. Was it from the surface or the Torack? Forsaken or the Cult of Fire? How deep are they into the outpost? Had they triggered the fail-safe? Was my boy alright?

The life of a Har had been nothing but disappointment, with one small patch of light. A mushroom growing on the steaming pile of wombat dung that was my life. When I was sixty-five, and as any unwed dwarf is, I was paired to sire a child. I was paired with Ket, a Har tasked with the educating of children. We did our duty and from it, she bore us a son, Dantin. Dantin was fifteen on the day of my failure. He showed the promise to do everything that was expected of me, but that I had failed. He excelled at all his lessons, and longed to join the Hardune, but he did not seek service for the sake of glory. Dantin was a true dwarf. He sought service for the sake of duty, for he saw the fulfillment of duty as the surest route to glory.

My thoughts went to him when I realized the outpost had been breached. Protocol dictated I was to run to report the breach to the other outposts through the communication wards, but I was no longer one for duty. I needed to find my son.

I retreated down the tunnel to a secret access route for the fortress. When imbued in the correct pattern, the door opened to reveal a secret passage into the outpost. An incorrect pattern or breach of the wall would cause the tunnel to flood with water. The tunnel was barely big enough for a dwarf and was unlit, but even in the pitch blackness of the deep a dwarf can still make out surfaces. The tunnel led upward to the top floors of the outpost, with doors intermittent along the path, each with their own warded pass codes. I passed all these doors until I reached the last one at the top.

At the top of the secret passage, I listened at the door. I could hear fighting outside in the corridor. Hand on my axe, unable to draw it in the tight confines of the tunnel, I burst out of the secret passage. Before me were the backs of the invading forces. A dozen dark skinned duergar stood shoulder to shoulder, backs to me. They were in combat with half their number of my brothers. I looked at them, and then to the left, where the tunnel led to the civilian quarters. Not for the first time that night, I shirked my duty and fled to the left to see if my son was safe.

Signs of fighting littered the hall. Dead dwarves and duergar alike were everywhere, blood coating the immaculate stone surface. The blood pooled in perfect circles, for the ground was level and without grooves or flaws. Among the dead were soldiers and civilians who crewed the outpost. The kitchen was the level below us and I saw a baker dead, a bloodied axe in her hands. While not all dwarves are tasked with the duty of combat, all can fulfill the duty when it is thrust upon them.

Ignoring the dead, I ran down the hall to the children’s quarters. The bodies were piled high around the door, but there were no shortbeards to be seen. Dantin was not among the dead. I ran through the door, breaking it from its hinges and saw a trio of duergar holding a group of children hostage at sword point. Scanning the children’s faces, I did not see Dantin among them. To my shame, my instinct was to turn around and leave, but one of the children made eye contact with me. I may have been a dwarf unworthy of the name, but I was still a father, and I could not let these children be killed.

The duergar turned, now aware of my presence, and one threw a dagger at me. I batted the dagger out of the way with the side of my axe, and charged the trio, activating the wards on my blade as I ran. The first duergar lifted his pitted blade to block my swing, but the wards on my Nerestet—unrusting steel—axe allowed me to cleave through the blade and his torso, bisecting him at the waist. The other two jumped back in surprise. I released my axe, letting it fall into the gore, and threw two darts from my bandolier, powering the wards of each as I threw them. One landed true, and passed through the duergar’s skull as if it was not there, embedding itself in the wall behind him. My aim was off on the second, and it went through the intruder’s throat.

Nodding at the children, I picked up my axe and fled. They were dwarven children raised in a Hardune outpost. They may not have been able to fight the intruders, but they knew what to do in a crisis, and it would have been irresponsible for me to contradict their emergency training. Before I even left the room, they were busy stripping the bodies and accessing the secret door in the back of their room.

If my son wasn’t in his quarters at that time, he would be in the training hall. He was always practicing something. On the way to the hall, I passed the ward communication hub. I almost ran past it, but the last shreds of my duty, or maybe my shame, brought me in. The status lights on the stylized map of The Continent showed that every outpost was either red, reporting an infiltration, or yellow signifying that the connection was broken.

I didn’t bother sending a call for help.

The flow control wards were also in the room. Protocol dictated that in the event of a breach, we were to flood the fortress to prevent the flow from being cut. I had no plans to make a sacrifice of myself and my son. Instead, I went to the wards that controlled the flow to the river and set them to open completely before destroying the runes to lock it in place

My last small act of duty.

The tunnel to the training hall was littered with the signs of combat. As I neared the hall, I could hear combat again. The battle had gone on for some time, judging by the bodies on the floor. Four dwarves faced off against four deurgar. The dwarves were Pen, but holding their own against the deurgar who were as poorly trained as they were equipped.

I threw my remaining two warded darts, killing a deurgar with each, and the Pen capitalized on the remaining two's surprise to end the fight.

I recognized the surviving shortbeards as being from Dantin's training group. "Where's my boy!" I shouted while scanning the faces of the dead.

One shortbead answered as they began working on opening the secret passage, "Dantin went to help at the rail station! He saw on the board that a cargo shipment was due, and he wanted to warn them."

My heart sank at the words. The outposts on either side of us were lost. Any train coming in was as likely to be foes as friends.

I backtracked the way I came, running as fast as I could. The dwarves I saw fighting when I left the secret tunnel lay dead along with most of the deurgar I'd seen. I didn't think I could feel any lower, but every moment surpassed the last.

This was the day I'd trained for, dreamed of, longed for. It was all my fault. I let them in. I didn't raise the alarm, and now I was sneaking around as my brothers died. Flood to my brothers, I have a son, and there's at least hope of saving him.

Re-entering the secret passage, I exited on the ground floor, nearly sliding down the incline in my haste. The station was silent, the echoes of battle not reaching here, or the battles were over. The light warning of an inbound rail cart was lit, and there were a dozen deurgar milling about, rummaging through crates.

I saw Dantin as the air started to move, heralding that the cargo cart's arrival was imminent. He and a dozen other dwarves jumped from behind crates. Dantin killed his first foe and was turning to his second when the cart pulled to a stop and blood orcs leaped out the doors. I was halfway to Dantin when I saw him fall from a blow to the head.

"Dantin!" I screamed.

Rage and grief warred within me. I wanted to both kill everything and collapse into a ball and let them take me as well. Rage won out and I charged the remaining deurgar. Dantin's killer saw me charge him, and threw his axe at me. I sidestepped the throw easily and closed the gap. Weaponless, he fell to a downward blow from shoulder to groin. By then there were two deurgar remaining, all the dwarves lay dead or dying. The last two closed in on me, keeping me from my boy. These were more skilled than the rabble I'd faced till now, and I couldn't get past them. The orcs, who only now noticed the commotion, were heading this way.

I did many things that night that still haunt me, but nothing so much as what I did next. I fled. Imbuing a flasher, I dropped it between my foes and myself and ran. They flinched away from the small ball, and were blinded by the brilliant flash it gave off after landing.

I ran for the tunnel I had just exited, and could hear the orcs giving chase. I was near the exit when I heard the first blood orcs trying to squeeze in. Mounting my discarded plate, I escaped into the dark, tears streaming down my face as I wept.

At the halfway point between outposts, I got off my plate. There was an access tunnel to the Torack along with a supply cache. Taking everything I could carry, I set off into the tunnels.

The months that followed were a desperate struggle for survival against the wilds of the Torack and the Forsaken which now roamed it unchecked. Eventually I surfaced outside of Crossroads where we first met. By then I was little more than a broken man. The Hardune were destroyed, and a small part of that was certainly my fault. Without them, the contained calamities would break free, or be freed. Kaltis was doomed, my son was gone, and both were my fault. I just wanted to escape the pain.

The first night of the etney, I succumbed to my shame. I tried to end my own miserable life. Succeeded more likely, but the next morning I awoke alive once more.

I thought I was in Fauell. That Torc had rejected me and that I was unworthy of returning to him or entering the Other Realm.