With the evacuation (and in some cases, failed evacuation) of the Dwarven Upper-class having been completed, those that remained behind were now without a leader of any substantial merit to rally them. The heads of state, the generals, the High Rune-Priests and more had fled the underground, leaving the rest of their kind to face the Rattan scourge by their lonesome. There were cases where the Rattan did not even face a decent resistance once they entered the Fortress-Cities due to the utter chaos caused by the lack of leadership.

The Dwarves were stubborn, durable and strong-willed, but these were as much bad traits as they were good. Each Dwarf had ambition seemingly hardcoded into their being, whether that be the ambition to rise to the top of the social ladder or merely the ambition to become the greatest smith of his/ her age. Combine that ambitious nature with their stubbornness, strong will and general thin skin for insults and slights and you got a race that was always teetering on the brink of civil war over the most minor of slights that happened generations ago.

Without the rulers to mete out justice and judgement and keep people from enacting their revenge for crimes (real or perceived) that happened hundreds of years ago or more, there was no one to stop any Dwarf left from claiming vengeance for the most minor of grudges.

The Rattan forces capitalized on this disunity and made sure to help nudge the Dwarves that were not interested in violently killing their neighbors over minor inconveniences towards the path of self-destruction. Even as their Fortress-Cities were sieged, Rattan assassins and saboteurs defaced structures, posted graffiti and tossed firebombs into stores during the dead of ‘night’. Soon enough even those that tried to keep themselves above the conflict were at each other’s throats, just as was planned. With neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother, the defenses that kept the Dwarves safe became nothing more than cages that kept them uncomfortably close together.

It was a simple matter of simply letting them kill each other off while the horde waited for their numbers to dwindle. Every day that the Dwarves lasted was another day for more Rattan to come of age and be sent to the front. Every day that the Dwarves endured added another few thousand bodies to the growing hordes outside their sturdy walls. Their walls kept them safe (mostly), but they also kept them trapped. They were caged beasts that were slowly going crazy, turning on each other over increasingly escalating resentments. One Dwarf would make a minor slight (real or perceived), which would cause the slighted Dwarf to retaliate, which in turn cause the first Dwarf to do so, and on and on and on it would continue until it came to blows and finally to death.

But death was not the end for a grudge, the family would demand blood which made the other family demand it and this would continue to escalate unless some authority figure stepped in to mediate. There were no such figures left in any Dwarven Fortress-City, and so the cycle of violence spun ever faster and ever more brutally. At this point the Rattan needed to do nothing save wait for the Death Spiral that was Dwarven Vengeance to render each city defenseless.

Sure, every moment that they waited was another that brought them closer to starvation, but that was why slaves existed, among other reasons. They could afford to bide their time just a while longer. Not too long, though, for the desire to destroy their hated foe burned like a white-hot star in their bodies. They just needed to hold out a bit longer….

…

“Skwiik.”

“Yes-yes?”

Chuu sat on a mountain of bones as she gazed out towards a Dwarven Fortress-City that was off in the distance.

“Where are the Beard-thing Kings?”

“What-what do you mean?”

Chuu pointed towards the Fortress-City and, more specifically, towards the massive structure that reached to the roof of the underground.

“Go there and tell me what you see.”

Skwiik nodded and Bamf-ed out of the immediate area. A few moments later, she returned with a look that mixed fear, anger and despair covering her face.

“Well? What did you see?”

“They collapsed the exit-entrance…”

“Now, go to the other places that are similar to that in their nest-lairs.”

“Y-yes-yes…”

Again, Skwiik Bamf-ed away, this time returning after several minutes and with her countenance being even worse.

“Well? What did you see?”

“They… They are all…”

“I know.” Chuu said as her voice filled with frustration and rage.

The four other members of the Rattan Ruling Council began to exchange looks of fear and anger. They knew that this meant one of two things. Either the Beard-things had taken their beloved Vaile to the surface and sealed the path behind them or that Vaile was still down here somewhere, likely already dead by now.

“Skwiik.” Chuu’s voice was colder than dry ice and laced with such vile hatred and malice that it made the normal Rattan around them soil themselves in fear. “Go to the surface and find our Vermin-King. Now!”

“Yes-Yes! Going now!” Skwiik managed to get her words out and Bamf away before Chuu’s wrath grew any more intense. Still seething with what to her and her kind was righteous rage, Chuu conjured up a massive emerald lightning bolt that was wreathed in green flames and hurled it at the Dwarven Fortress-City in the distance. The massive bolt of magic hit somewhere in the middle of the Armory that was embedded in the walls and set off the stored gunpowder within. An earth-shattering kaboom echoed through the caverns that made up the world beneath the mountains and killed not only a great number of dwarves but also a massive amount of Rattan who were too close to the initial impact point and the pressure wave that came from the secondary explosion.

Chuu’s wrath was not yet sated, and she directed her four summoned monsters to advance on the now exposed Fortress-City. Without even getting an order, the hordes of Rattan surged forwards like a tide of furry death, not making way fast enough for the colossal summoned monsters to pass and being run over in the process. This did not stop them from advancing, though, and they pushed forwards through the breach despite never getting orders to do so.

“After this, teach them that they should not advance without the order to do so being given. And teach them that lesson slowly and painfully. Do I make myself clear, Rippa?”

Rippa shivered in fear as Chuu indirectly chastised her for not controlling the hordes. They both knew it would have been nigh impossible to have kept them from advancing, but the anger Chuu was feeling needed an outlet and Rippa was the leader of the military, so….

“Of course, your greatness. It shall be done, yes-yes.”

Rippa gazed into the mass of teeming bodies with a hate-filled gaze. How dare they make her look bad, even if indirectly! To make Chuu get angry at her was a crime she was not willing to let slide.

“Snikty, Grima.”

“Yes-yes?”

“Hm? What?”

Turning back to the other two, Rippa let a sinister and ominous grin cross her face.

“Any who live-survive are yours to play-toy with. Be they Beard-things or Rattan makes no difference, no-no. Take-take them, mess with them, do whatever you want to them. No one survives intact.”

The two mad geniuses looked at each other, then back to Rippa, then back to each other and finally at Chuu. With gazes filled with anticipation, they silently prayed that they would be given the go-ahead. Chuu narrowed her eyes and uttered one word that sealed the fate of countless thousands.

“Fine.”

The mad doctors squealed with glee and began to imagine what kind of experiments and creations they could make with the fresh influx of test subjects at their disposal. Rippa smirked at the unknowing masses off in the distance as she monologued internally about how they were getting a fitting punishment for making Chuu mad at her. Chuu merely continued to lounge on her throne of bones as she searched high and low in the underground with her magic, trying to find even a single scrap of cloth that belonged to her beloved Vaile.

Skwiik, on the other hand, was frantically bamf-ing around above ground looking for the one person that she believed would keep her from a painful and drawn out death. She checked every city, town, village, hamlet, fortress and keep but kept coming up empty handed. As she bamf-ed away from the easternmost village in the man-thing Kingdom of Trelawny, she noticed a caravan heading off down the road deeper into the Kingdom. She wanted to search it for a moment, but then decided against it. She would have to silence them after they saw her and she did not believe that there was anyone amongst the caravan’s number worth claiming a trophy off of.

She fearfully ended her search and returned to face her leader with her fear being palpable to all who were nearby. The thing was, had she only searched that caravan she saw before giving up she would have found her prize. A simple decision made by a single being caused a ripple that would be felt for years to come, if not decades to come.

…

Vaile shivered as he felt Skwiik bamf away. He narrowly missed being found by her and dragged back to face whatever she and the others were going to do to him. He took off a ring from his finger and let his power once again return to what it was before. He was lucky that he put it on mere moments before when he suddenly had a very bad feeling wash over him.

He checked his minimap for any other potential threats before letting out a sigh of relief. He was safe, for now. He just needed a few more days of travel before he got to the first major city, then he could take it easy and rest on his laurels. Yeah, things were looking up for him. All he had to do was keep a low profile and everything would be peachy.