“One, two, three, lift!”

Me, the mage, the drow, and the priestess heaved the dwarf onto a stretcher. We’d gotten him out of his ruined armor by this point, and could see the full extent of the damage done to the poor guy. A wicked incision snaked up his abdomen, blood so dark it was nearly black welling up from it. We got the bandages on as soon as we could, even then it wasn’t soon enough. We could see him turning pale despite his high-colored complexion. An ugly bruise began to form under his left bicep, where he had taken the hit which threw him into the air. His armor warded off what could have otherwise been a lethal blow, but there’s only so much a breastplate can do against a foe like that, and I didn’t dare imagine what kind of fractures, what kind of hemorrhaging the sheer blunt force of the bandit’s polearm had caused.

I really have to hand it to the guy, he was remarkably stolid in a situation most beginner adventurers would find themselves babbling, wailing, vacillating between prayers and curses. That brute really did a number on him. The dwarf had this faraway look, a trail of blood had worked its way past his eyes and into his mouth, which bared a set of clenched teeth. Despite the urgent appeals on the part of the priestess to say something, oh please say something, he did little more than keep his teeth clenched, and exhale at regular, though tortured intervals. I was dumb enough to stand with my arm by his side, and he grabbed me, took my arm with an iron grip. Like I was hauling him out of the underworld, he was holding me so hard. I did nothing to break free of him.

We get to the hospital and the dwarf is wheeled in while the drow and mage go to sort out the paperwork, leaving just me and the priestess in the waiting room. She’s on the verge of tears. Would I have to be the one to comfort her? “Have to”? When had I grown so callous? Honestly, I should be ashamed. It was just that I had seen this same scenario play out so much, with every sort of person imaginable, every kind of permutation that I could no longer meet the demand for emotion that was required of me then. Pull yourself together, I exhorted myself. Isn’t it the duty of a veteran adventurer to advise my juniors, and comfort them in the way I never was, but wished I could have been? At least make an effort, yes, even if it’s not quite right they’ll appreciate the effort put in. They’d at any rate appreciate it more than a neutral response.

This sudden resolve impelled me to reach out my hand and take her shoulder, at which point she shrank from my touch and made for the door. I figured there was nothing much I could do at that point, so I took a seat.

The drow came back and asked if I still had any of that advance they’d given me. I said I spent all of it, and the drow cussed me out, which I guess I deserved. I’ve had party members blow up at me before, but this scene he was making now somehow got to me. Kids these days really know how to get to you. Our oaths were always the same, largely reflecting the values we held at that time, nothing much to do with our individual personalities. Whoreson this, whoreson that. Now that nothing is sacred, the new generation gets to be as psychological as they want, and it turns out they want to get psychological a great deal.

“You get something out of this, don’t you?”, he began. “Out of being a wretch. You throw away all this money, not cause you enjoy it, you drink like a fish, not cause you enjoy it. Every single thing you do is playing a part, like when you drank all that potion in front of us. You don’t enjoy anything. Except for playing the victim, right? You love the way Vigdis looks at you, don’t you? When you’re at your lowest?”

I didn’t contradict him. What do you say to that? I find it so strange when these kids use words they don’t understand. They talk like they were tramps half the time, then for the other, they’re suddenly an undergraduate. You put your leg through one of their tripwires and they throw a whole dissertation at you. Where do you think they get it from? Lords know they don’t read a thing. He was quick to try and mollify his words after, though.

“Look, I didn’t mean that. You fought well back there, and,” it was apparently difficult for him to say this next part; “I don't want to think of what might’ve happened to the other party members if you hadn’t done what you did. It’s just -” He paused. I stepped in:

“I know”, I said. “I know I’m not exactly in my prime-”. He cut me off. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“No, it's not your age. It’s just, if we’re going to be a team you can’t, can’t..”

“Can’t what?”

“Have that!”, he shouted, pointing at my hip flask. “I can smell the liquor on you. You think you’re being smart, taking swigs from it when you think we’re not looking. Well we all know about it, and Vigdis..”, he looked around for her. “Where’s Vigdis?”

“Outside”, I said.

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know, she ran out.”

“And you didn’t go after her?”

I didn’t answer, and the drow walked briskly out the door. I took a look around, seated myself again, and took a swig from my hip flask.

-

We were all gathered in a partitioned section of the emergency ward, waiting for the doctor to come back and tell us the damage. The dwarf couldn’t move half his body and was expecting the worst. Despite that he was oddly chatty, and sought to prolong every mundanity we ventured as material for our conversation as much as humanly possible. I was a little drunk by then and steadied myself, finding a trolley nearby, which I found little support from, seeing how it was wheeled, and so I settled on a filing cabinet a little to the right of it. I hoped they didn’t notice, but my earlier skirmish with the drow made me think they probably did. When the inevitable silence came the dwarf gave a protracted sigh and made a gesture for us to gather round. We obliged him.

“Do you think I’m a good man?”, the dwarf asked. The drow was puzzled, but did his best to answer for us.

“Hamish, of course you are. What kind of question is that”, he said with a half-smile, hoping that by acting flippant, but not flippant enough to offend, might prove to both him and Hamish that the question was ridiculous, that this was some kind of joke. Hamish persisted however.

“I’d never been so close to death before. And -” he broke off, let that statement sit, then followed it up: “it got me thinking. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. And I don’t want to live anymore, not in the way I was living”.

“I think that bandit must have got you in the head, Hamish”. The mage spouted out of nowhere. “I think we’d better get you some grub. Let me call a doctor”. He made to call someone but the dwarf stopped him.

“No, no, that’s not it. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. And, if the doctor comes back with some bad news, there’s something I’d like to get off my chest. Is that all right?” At this point I might have been a little maudlin, and enthusiastically invited the dwarf to tell all, to not spare a single detail. The drow stared daggers at me.

“Alright then”, said the dwarf, and he took a deep breath, letting it out at his leisure.

We gathered in, me more excited perhaps than the others to hear what Hamish had to say.

I have done my best to reproduce his tale realistically and artistically.

-

-

-

I’m a badlands dwarf. No shame in telling you that. We get a bad rap from just about everyone, and I won’t lie, there are some among us who deserve it. But some of the finest people I ever knew came from the badlands, more than enough to outweigh the bad, and I’m sure every corner of the world has its fair share of ne'er do wells so there’s no use harping on about it.

I’ll never forget the wind. How it comes barrelling through the valley. Every moment of the day you can hear it whistle, except if you were deep in the mines. In the summer the wind was hot and dry, and so much as a spark could light the hills on fire, covered as they were with fields of yellow grass. We couldn’t leave town, the wildfires blocked our exit. When I left the badlands the first thing I noticed was the silence. It still gets me now, to this day, and I’ll likely always be missing the roar of the wind on the plains.

Dwarf society is different from what you humans have. There, pedigree doesn’t mean a thing anymore: you could be born in the gutter, a beggar for a father, a whore for a mother, and still come out on top, as long as you’ve got the money. In fact, our mayor, Erskine bragged endlessly about his humble origins - the son of nothing more than a silver miner, who worked his way up the ranks until he owned the mine his father gave his life to. Erskine’s holdings were certainly impressive, but the way he came to own them is less so: I’d like to append that statement about dwarf society, that there’s a second dimension to what makes you someone there. That would be luck.

Erskine worked his way up through his own industriousness for a time, however, his skills only got him to the position of some administrative role, quite far from being executive officer. What happened was, the silver mine he worked for, and still owns today, which looms over my hometown from the top of Mount Intermezzo, was accused of poisoning a spring that a human noble liked to frequent with industrial runoff, sourced back to tailings from the mine dumped entirely too close. This gross oversight, which had ruined this human’s holiday, had to be answered for. The higher-ups who owned the mine would do anything to avoid an incident, so they got themselves out of there with golden parachutes, or retreated into obscurity, at the same time looking for someone to take the fall at the hands of a livid human public. Who better than this bright-eyed errand boy, who served his company as readily as he lived and breathed? So it isn’t long before he finds himself rising up through the ranks.

And though the public is against him, they soon find that an outbreak of werewolves in the forests of Albion demanded a great deal of silver weaponry, a lack that Erskine was only too willing to accommodate. All the sins of the past are forgotten, the company’s doing gangbusters, and somehow Erskine found himself in the middle of all of it. That’s how he afforded that palace on the hill, his gowns and cravats, his roasts and iced drinks brought from half the world over. Dumb luck, pure and simple.

I was the opposite. I was the bastard son of a washwoman and a wandering bard. He went by the name of Yngve, maybe you’ve heard of him. In dwarf lands he’s loved just as much as he’s hated. He wandered from town to town, regaling the townsfolk with ancient sagas, wooing the local women with his inimitable charm before, just like the wind, he disappeared beyond the mountains. He had a twinkle in his eye, a thick and flowing beard. He could pick up and play nearly any instrument like there was nothing to it, his talent was so great. You can imagine how many bastards like me were left in his wake. The kids in town would terrorize me for it, since everyone knew about him and my mother. They called me whoreson, whoreson, so I had to fend for myself from an early age.

I spent a great deal of time alone, just wandering through the hills. I brought back rattlesnakes in a pail and showed them to the other kids. The rest of the time I was helping my mother: she’d been a washwoman her whole life, and it showed. Her hands were red, swollen, scaled like the skin of a reptile. They seized up towards the end of the day, and then later from doing the simplest of things. I had to feed her her soup, seeing as how her hands would lock up just from lifting the spoon from her bowl. We bought this ointment from a traveling salesman that he said was made from elven herbs, and that it would keep her hands from seizing up. Of course we were sure he’d never been anywhere near Elsewhere, but we were desperate. I applied it dutifully every night and lords how it stank! The smell filled up the room. It was so bad I had to open up all the windows, letting in the wind. My mother said it helped, though. She said she was sure her hands would never lock up again, and for a time they didn’t. We went, say, a week before it happened again, and in that time the two of us couldn’t be happier. When the attacks came back, and they came back even worse than before, we were crushed. I would have to get a job at the mines.

The mines took my father, my father’s father, and every father before that. My mother did everything she could to put away enough money, so that she wouldn’t lose another man to them. It wasn’t enough. I became a water-bearer in Erskine’s mine.

There were these terrible machines, we called them widow-makers. Steam powered drills that tore through the mountain’s face. They kicked up a toxic white dust that filled the mine, and it was impossible not to breathe in, the spaces we worked in were so cramped, and the dust was so thick. The miners who operated them or had to work around them died of mysterious wasting diseases, growths in their lungs. Everyone knew how dangerous they were. They were in constant danger of overheating, and made the mines suffocatingly hot, so it was my job to rush in and out of the mines with buckets of water to pour into the machines. They put away so much of the stuff that I spent entire days just rushing up and down these mine shafts, buckets on buckets of water, carried on my back. Move too fast and you spill, move too slow and the machine will overheat. I couldn’t indulge myself in the luxury of being lost in thoughts, of daydreaming, like you might expect for manual labor. It was startlingly cerebral work.

I would get home, shovel food into my mouth, and fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. The pay was crap, too, so my mother still had to work. I couldn’t taste my food: it tasted like all that dust kicked up by the widow-maker. I was covered head to toe in the stuff. My mother wasn’t much for jokes, which made this quite strange, when she remarked, smiling, over dinner that I looked like a nobleman. I asked her what she meant. I didn’t think that after a day in the mines I could resemble anything in the way of a highborn.

“Your skin”, she said. I looked down at my hands. The dust gave them a pale color, like the lack of tan that you see in aristocrats who spend their days indoors.

-

My mother had a habit of singing to herself to sleep. She would never sing otherwise, music being somewhat of a sore subject in our house, and I got the feeling she would only sing when she thought I was asleep, not listening. But I was. Every night I would put my ear to the wall that separated our rooms and listen. It was an old, sweet song, so unlike the other music I had known. It wasn’t some bawdy drinking song, or like the courtly concertos which filtered down from the theater on the hill. It must’ve been somewhere in between: that grand old sentiment, mixed with something new. It was like music from another planet, and, on hearing it, I knew I could never hate my mother for loving my father. It went something like this:

In the farthest Faroff oceans

In that glittering green stretch of sea

I make out by the point of a compass

Where I am, and where I ought to be

You’re there, I’m sure you are

In that milky white mareel

At the end of the world you wait

Waiting, praying, and real

I’d listen intently all through the night, mouthing the words to myself, hoping to learn it completely. I couldn’t tell a soul about it, but when I was alone up in the hills I’d sing it out loud to no one in particular, as I looked for rattlesnakes. The wind covered up my voice, so I could sing as loud as I wanted.

I lived a simple life then: my job didn’t allow me to do much thinking, but there weren’t many thoughts that occupied me. Then I saw her.

It was the same feeling one gets at daybreak, when the sun is just peeking over Mount Intermezzo, and the town is cast in clean, blue light.

She accompanied her father on a tour to the mines, wearing a bonnet, a flowing dress, and a pink ribbon in her beard. Erskine was talking with a group of executives, every now and then making an accusatory gesture towards his workers. Among them I saw her looking around at her father’s business a little bashfully, holding a frilly umbrella in one hand. She caught my gaze; I didn’t even realize I was looking. Never had I seen her like. Golden, braided tresses that fell about her face, a look that was stupefying in the quiet way it sized you up, yet was at the same time oblivious to the appraisal it was making. She didn’t know how beautiful she was, to put it simply. There was nothing haughty to her character, but all the same she was rarefied. I lived and died, based on that little appraising look of hers. I knew if she were to refuse me in her unconscious way it would kill me. Was it her innocence that appealed to me? I’d like to think there was something more to it than that. I won’t deny, though, that she was significant for me much in the same way that my mother’s song was: there was something not of this world to her, and through that spoke to me, told me that there was a life beyond what I knew. Beyond the dust, the thin soup, the wasteland and wildfires. There was something higher than all that. She meant so much to me in this way that I wonder if I really loved her at all.

Then Erskine looked at me looking at her, and gave me a venomous glare, before turning back to his associates. The sheer derision in his face brought me back to earth, but not for long, and, after giving her one last longing glance, I went back to my work in a kind of stupor. I felt the music welling up in me, threatening to break loose, which by no means I could allow. I couldn’t reveal my mother’s secret. I was so distracted that I dropped a bucket halfway to the widow-maker, and was beaten for it.

That night after dinner I found myself making my way through the streets of the uptown, filled with the villas and palaces of the wealthy elite. I must have looked mighty strange, some kid covered in dust, already developing a stoop from work in the mines, getting lost and about-facing in a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the night. I did find my way there eventually, though. There’s no missing Erskine’s palace: a sumptuous spire that towers over the rest of the town from high up on its rocky perch. I made the trek up a seemingly endless staircase that went up at nearly a right angle, and found myself at the edge of his property, behind a wrought iron gate. I could see through the bars a vast pleasure garden with an artificial pond and all sorts of exotic plants. Water was a scarce commodity for poorer dwarves, but the gentry apparently had enough at their disposal to grow a whole orchard of fruit trees in badlands soil.

With a running start I flung myself over the gate, tearing a pant leg in the process. I hoped that she wouldn’t notice. I crept through the fringes of the orchard, under the cover of its trees, trying my best to stay out of the light cast by arcane lanterns placed throughout the property. After what felt like forever I find myself under her window, grubby and ragged. I collected bits of gravel in my hands that I’d picked up from the path in the pleasure garden, and started throwing them one by one at her window. I don’t know what I expected to happen. I tried to temper my expectations, but I couldn’t stop myself from banking my entire life on if she came to her window or not, so that didn’t do much good. Then, all of a sudden, the light goes on in her room. I think I hear footsteps. The door opens, and there she is, leaning over the railing of her balcony, looking down at me. She was leaning there in the moonlight, completely white like an Ancient statue. It goes without saying the sort of effect she had on me just then. I was so taken that I couldn’t speak, couldn’t do much of anything other than stand there and gawk while she silently appraised me. I knew I had to do something just then. But what?

I began to sing. Before I knew what I was doing I began to recite the song my mother always sang in bed, first timidly, then louder. It turned out my dad had left me with something after all: when I sang in earnest, I found I had a rich, dolorous voice that perfectly carried a sentimental folk tune. Ironic, so that there remained some distance from the piece and didn’t render it sappy, but intellectual instead. Yet at the same time it was removed from its removal, scornful of its mocking tone. Desperately wishing that it could embrace the sentimentality of a love song with no reservations, cursed as it was with the knowledge of how futile it was to fall for things like that. The knowledge of how it's all been said before.

I returned to her balcony every night and sang for her. She fashioned a rope out of bed sheets that I climbed up to get to her room. At first all we would do is talk: though it occupied a great deal of my time I tried as much as possible not to mention my work in the mines. I felt it might somehow break the spell, and make this castle in the air fall back to earth. I talked instead about my walks in the hills, the rattlesnakes, the howling wind. In return she told me about her life, the endless meetings, suitors, drawing room repartees, whalebone corsets. As much as we talked we knew that we would never understand the life of the other, but that was fine, since when we got together we could make a new life of our own that both of us could ken.

-

There was this sort of flower she loved more than anything. They were called Sky Lilies. A very rare variety, all attempts to grow them in captivity failed. The only place to find them was high up on the rocky precipices of Delos, the floating archipelago which reigned over the plains that bordered our town. I was determined to find one for my lady love, and spent every moment I had clambering up and down those floating rock faces, a single slip-up spelling a gruesome death. Even in their prime habitat Sky Lilies are difficult to find, and I was using up entire days in search of just a single one. That is, until I found Black Boots.

The thing about Sky Lilies is, and no one is quite sure why, that while normally rare, they grow in abundance in and around the corpses of dwarves. Something about our chemical composition provides the perfect conditions for them to sprout, and wherever you find the dead body of a hiker in Delos who has fallen from a ledge, or perished from the cold, with enough time you’ll find a whole tangle of Sky Lilies popping up from them. That was exactly what I found with the late Black Boots. Some hiker traversing Delos who fell to his death, and was never recovered or identified. The only thing marking him was a pair of black patent shoes he’s wearing, a strange choice to be sure for hiking gear. There must be some story to how he found himself up there, with fancy footwear like that. I would never hear of it. But I availed myself of his death, every holy day making the trek up to his body, plucking a flower, and visiting my love. I prayed every night for Black Boots’ sake, thanking him for his help, and hoping that he was in a better place now.

I remember giving my love these flowers, wondering if she knew the awful truth about them. I couldn’t decide which option I should like more: that she was perfectly innocent of their origins, that while I loved her and gifted her there would be something she would never comprehend about me, or if she knew the truth about Sky Lilies, and covertly accepted theirs and my true nature, loving me all the same. We talked long into the night. Soon we did more than just talk.

-

The air is so clear and crisp in Delos, you’d think it was pure. But really there is no such thing as pure air. If it were to exist, then it would come into contact with impurities instantly, and thereby no longer be perfect. Maybe in an alchemist’s laboratory somewhere, he’s isolated it, and it exists behind a thick sheet of glass. But those are the only kinds of conditions I think it could last.

Her father got wind of it. How couldn’t he? I find myself on the lam, knowing full well that if his men catch up with me, that if they found the lowborn who’d taken his daughter’s innocence, I wouldn’t be long for this world. I fled and fled, leaving the dwarven lands and finally settling in Albion. The whole time I carried in my hands her letter, which I wasn’t to open until I was free of my pursuers. She had confessed everything to her father, that she was no longer a maiden. She wasn’t fit for any marriage Erskine would have arranged her for. She was sent to a convent, our child dropped off in some orphanage. Now I’ve done just the same as my father, left a kid in the world who doesn’t know where they come from.

I opened the letter many years ago. It said simply, that we’d meet again when the Sky Lilies bloom.

-

-

-

The party was silent at hearing the conclusion to this tale. I clapped my hands loudly.

“That’s a touching good story!”, I slurred. The drow shoved me, and went flying into the trolley, sending all sorts of medical implements scattering and crashing to the floor.

The doctor parted the curtain and walked in with a clipboard in his hands.

He remarked soberly that with some time, and months of physical therapy, Hamish would make a full recovery. He would walk again.

“Oh. I guess I feel a little silly, telling you all that now.”, said Hamish.