The Rattan elites advanced behind the onrushing tide of fur-covered, stinky, homicidally insane bodies. The Rattan rank and file fanned out through the rubble-strewn streets that once made up the Dwarven Fortress City, moving with intent and purpose that was heavily laced with blind fury and genocidal anger. The best of each clan had gathered for this onslaught, and even the rank and file were the best of the best from their clans. Only the ones that marched in an orderly fashion behind them were the true elites, the ones taken from each individual clan at birth to be drilled and trained to serve as Rippa’s personal army.

Fighting raged through the ruined city. Even though the city stretched for just less than 100 miles in all directions, this did not mean that there were too few Rat-men to scour everything. Instead, the massive size of the city meant that the Dwarves had more ground to worry about holding, for they were far fewer in number than the Rattan menace. The Dwarves had reasoned that creating rubble, even at the cost of their own glorious structures, would slow their foe.

They were horribly wrong.

Dwarves were built like shorter but more burly humans, but the Rattan were their same size but far nimbler and lither. Like the rats they were so similar to, they found the debris strewn streets and shattered structures to be an ideal playground of destruction. Indeed, the Dwarves had only done them a favor and themselves a disservice in turning their own homefield into one that favored their foe.

Like the rats they were so very similar to, a Rattan, even when fully grown, could just about slip through any crack they could fit their head through. Therefore, even the rubble designed to block off the Dwarven flanks could potentially be bypassed, given enough time and effort. Even if the Under-Empire deemed it necessary to rush headlong into the front of a steady and near unbreakable Dwarven Shield Wall, Rippa had her own idea about how to break the nearly unbreakable.

The time to try out her new tactic was approaching sooner than either side realized.

…

A tavern on the outskirts of a major human city was the host to an old Dwarf. He was an exile, an outcast and a traitor to his people, but he took solace that he had been able to escape the apocalypse that occurred in his homeland. Every night he would come to this tavern which had a constantly rotating host of travelers and mercenaries, and every night he would tell the tale of the Fall of the Ironheart Kingdom and earn a bit of money to keep him from being homeless, hungry and naked.

There was always at least one person who wanted to hear the tale of how he became ostracized and why someone who was once a legendary smith and warrior would never again be viewed as anything other than trash by his own kind. A young man who had arrived in town with his elderly father was interested in his story, and for a few copper coins the old Dwarf now had enough to pay for a drink, another day at the tavern’s inn and a day of food.

He turned to the people who were itching for the story and began. A few minutes later, and after much urging, he was finally getting to the ‘Good Part’.

“The rats were sweeping every pocket of our resistance away; one by one our holdouts in the city fell to the tide of hideous mockeries of the form of The Races. It made no difference to the monster whether someone was a warrior or a civilian and knowing that ahead of time was all that was needed to press every single Dwarf, both young and old into service. Still, the sheer barbarity that the vermin showed them was beyond cruel. The rats normally took slaves when it was possible, as they would likely be used for both labor and rations. But this… This was a level of cruelty and evil beyond anything that had ever been seen before.

The survivors of the two Kingdoms that had fallen had told tales of brutal slaughters and torture, but what was happening just beyond the range of our great and powerful rifles and crossbows was truly horrific. Dwarves that had been captured would be brought forward and then they would be eaten alive in front of the eyes of our brave men. It was like a scene out of a nightmare, and yet we knew we were awake.

Maniacal laughter and horrible screaming accompanied the sounds of flesh and bone being ripped and crunched, and some of our number began to lose their cool. But that was what they wanted, those monsters. They wanted us to give in to rage and righteous fury. They wanted us to break ranks and charge them, for they knew they could not best a mighty Dwarven Shield Wall.

After hours of the terror and torment continued on and on, with rage building in our hearts and our eyes being nearly clouded by red, the monstrous rat-men stopped their twisted feast. The tide of vermin began to move, and we prepared for their rush. What we did not expect was that they would part and let a procession of rat-people unlike any we had ever seen come forth to face us.

The rats we had been facing were certainly well disciplined, armed and armored, at least for a rat, but these were something else. Their armor was polished to a brilliant sheen and had numerous runic etchings that glowed a bright green covering them. They were armed with weapons that were unlike those that the rats had normally used; these were purpose made, not improvised at all. What fur we did see peeking out from under the armor was a deep black, and their eyes were ones that belonged to a seasoned warrior who had killed many without the slightest remorse.

They did not speak, they did not even make a single noise as they advanced, their shields down and their blades aimed straight at us. They stopped just beyond the range of our marksmen and as if they were a single organism, they began to beat their shields with their blades. Slowly the noise built up, slowly the tempo rose and then, as if on cue, they charged, still as silent as death. Even as they ran towards us, they moved in lockstep, their feet all hitting the ground at the same time. So stunned by this were we that we did not react fast enough. They had already reached the middle of the range of our crossbows before the shock of it wore off.

“Fire!”

The command was given, and bolt and bullet flew towards the silvery tide of rat-men. Despite the fire they took, they continued moving forward as if there had been nothing sent their way.

“Fire!”

Another volley managed to connect before they reached us, but the bullets and bolts seemingly did nothing to them. Their shields and ours impacted each other, and the shoving match began. That is, it began, and then was immediately disrupted. With shit-eating grins on their twisted faces, the line behind the rats that had been pushing crawled onto the shoulders of their fellows and leapt into the midst of our formations.

Then the third line of rat-men did the same, followed by the fourth and the fifth and so on. Soon enough the rats were in and amongst us, tearing through us with strength that would not be out of place if we were fighting our fellow Dwarves instead. These monsters continued to jump directly into the middle of our formations, and some even clambered up onto the ruined buildings that were helping us funnel the rats, before jumping into the fray with blades swinging.

Eventually, one of the Dwarves keeping the shield wall in place fell to a blade in his kidney and one in his liver. Then another one fell as he was stabbed in the back by the blade of a rat-man. One by one the brothers and sisters that made up the shield wall fell, until at last there were too few Dwarves left to keep it up. A single small breach was all it took for the dam to burst. The single small gap in the lines allowed the rats to surge through, making the gap wider and wider as more and more of the vermin pushed in.

It was absolute pandemonium as the silent, silver-covered rat-men carved a bloody swathe through our forces. It was in the middle of that carnage that I spotted it. A Rat-man that towered above both its own kind and our own. Clad in armor and swinging a pair of poison-covered falchions like a murderous whirlwind, the roughly human-sized monster sent limbs, heads and body parts flying as it silently carved the noble defenders of our kingdom to bits and pieces.

I did my best to hold out as long as I could up till that point, but when its eyes locked with mine, I was overcome with a fear far greater than any I had ever faced. I knew then and there that there was no hope for the Under-Kingdoms of our kind. I knew that to try and fight that thing and its forces was beyond suicidal.

And so, I ran. I ran knowing full well that I would forever be a traitor in the eyes of my people, but I did not care, and truth be told I still do not. I survived and am one of the few Dwarves from that doomed land to do so. I can survive, even though I am forever disgraced and forever despised by my own kind, but survival is all that matters. I am not one of those who fell in that hellhole, and I did not fill the belly of some twisted mockery of The Races. I am not enslaved to the will of twisted and cruel rat-people, and I am not being used to breed another generation of slaves and livestock for the monsters down there in the dark.

That is my tale of the last days I spent in the Ironheart Kingdom, the last days I spent in the Underground, for that matter.”

The old Dwarf downed his mead and looked at the rest of the people in the tavern. He had been out on the surface for a few years since the fall of the Ironheart Kingdom, since his flight from oblivion. Every day had been spent looking over his shoulder, paranoid that the rats would come for him. Only in places where there were so many people did he feel safe. After what felt like a lot longer than it actually was, he managed to find his niche and live in a place that allowed him to live without fear. Mostly.

“Seriously? Rat-people the size of Dwarves? What do you take us for, you charlatan? Gimmie back my mead that I bought for you!”

The old Dwarf tossed the empty mug to the young human man and walked out of the tavern; its door swinging closed behind him. As he walked, the familiar feeling of someone or something following him was ever-present in his mind.

“Damn, even after all this time, I can’t help but be afeared that those monsters will come and silence me… Still, after telling that tale so many times over those long years, I should be long dead by now if they were after me…”

All of a sudden, he was pulled into an alleyway, only to see the face of the young man who had bought him some booze in exchange for his story.

“Give me back my money, old man!”

The Dwarf sighed. This kind of thing happened more often than he cared to know. There were always those who did not believe his story, even though it was 100% true.

“I don’t have a single copper, so just beat me black and blue and be done with it.”

“No, you wrinkled shit! If I don’t get my money…”

The man pulled a dagger out of his cloak and drove it towards the old Dwarf’s heart.

“Then you don’t get to li-!”

The man stopped mid movement with a look of horror on his face.

“Pa?”

The Dwarf looked back and saw a figure cloaked in a leather outfit made of tanned faces. Covering the hooded person’s face was the freshly removed skin of an older human man, complete with beard and eyebrow hair. The young man dropped the Dwarf and lunged at the figure, but to shock and horror of both the human and the dwarf, the tail of a large rodent sped out from under the cloak of face and seized the young man’s sword hand.

This a single motion, the hooded figure severed the young human man’s head from his neck and used its tail to toss the body aside like it was a piece of trash. The figure walked up to the dwarf and as he waited for the end, a feminine yet monstrous voice came from under the human face that adorned that of the human-sized rat-person.

“Can’t have you die-dying yet. So many more need-need to hear-listen to what happened. You live-live and die-die when we want you to, so don’t bother attempt-trying to kill-die before it is time.”

A puff of horribly stinky black smoke later, and the monster was gone, leaving the old Dwarf alone with his thoughts and the realization that he had never escaped that hell of his own power. He had never escaped that hell to begin with! He was still at their mercy, and not even suicide would be enough to free him, not that they would even allow him to do so.

Despite all his attempts to control and escape his fate, despite his suffering and PTSD, despite the fact that the hell he had witnessed was his only way to earn any money or food, he ultimately was nothing more than a rat in a cage, to be toyed with and abused by the monsters that kept him entrapped.