━<><><>< 472 A.P. ><><><>━
The next trial room you enter is a strange one. For one thing it looks like a dead end, and while that would normally be a poor sign of your progress, the lone Aldrhun glyph carved into the far end tells you all you need to know.
Cleave.
You look at the others, then back at the symbol, then begin making your way closer.
Cleaving is something you can do.
Humming quietly, you unholster
Zharrgal and hold the edge of the hammer's head against the wall in front of you. With a mental tug the stone falls under your sway, and you immediately force the rock to split apart like it was made from soft clay, revealing pristine tiling like in the Trial of Preservation that will no doubt direct you to where you need to go. The others release sighs of relief as they realize that they won't need to pull out their picks and get digging.
Nothing for it but to go where Thungni's pointing you suppose.
You resume your walk, retainers and heir following behind the path you carve through the stone.
━<><><><==><><><>━
"Fire Keeper," Selda mutters, looking around in open confusion, "Shouldn't we have passed a few chambers before getting here?"
Ylva grunts.
She'd dealt with strange things in the centuries she's served under Lord Klausson, but this certainly ranks somewhere near the top.
They had begun the long trek back to the entrance and their wagons only minutes prior, but when they should have entered the room of the previous trial Ylva and her compatriots instead found themselves turning a corner that should not have been and spilling out of the cavern mouth to where their wagons and supplies were.
She spares a glance back at the cavern entrance, eyes the glowing Rune above it, and shakes her head.
"Just appreciate that we didn't have to walk as long as we expected Selda. If Lord Klausson was flummoxed by what he saw in there, what chance do we have?"
"Aye Fire Keeper."
Ancestor made or not, this damn Rhunki nonsense could drive someone —namely her —to reach for a drink or twenty.
━<><><><==><><><>━
The trail ends, predictably, in a chamber with a solid slab of richly decorated and
Rune inscribed Gromril barring the way forward.
A quick once over confirms that there's no hinge for you to break and you'll bet good coin that it would be a waste of time to break the surrounding stone in the hopes that you could simply ignore the metal barring your way forward.
Not that it would stop you from trying, just for thoroughness sake, but you're not holding out any hope.
No other way but
through you reckon.
You swap out your Windsight Eye for the
Eye of the Ancestors, the glow of magic disappearing from your vision to be replaced by the brightly glowing flaws in the material around you. Even the door and floor light up with myriad imperfections, something that does make you inhale in surprise, but then you notice the oddity in it.
Cleave.
Thungni had purposefully left imperfections in His work so that, altogether, they formed the same Aldrhun symbol you saw earlier.
Because of course He would.
"Sit down and rest up all of you," you shout back casually, "I'll be at this for a while."
Zharrgal ignites in a flash, bathing most of the tunnel in the glow of its ethereal flame and casting your shadow large against the walls.
Mhorni silently steps beside you, the glow of its pseudo-
Zharrgal joining yours and creating a second set of shadows in the tunnel.
Out of obligation you
do attempt to part the stone around the Gromril slab and are not that surprised to find that
Zharrgal's ability has had the door, heh, shut in its proverbial face.
Moments later the rhythmic sound of metal striking metal fills the otherwise silent air in an odd facsimile of a proper forge.
━<><><><==><><><>━
Gromril is unbreakable.
This is a piece of wisdom most Dwarfs wholeheartedly believe, and indeed for the average Dwarf it very well
is true, for your people have found no mundane metal can hope to match the durability Gromril provides for its weight. Blades bend, Hammers dent and even the stones of a Grudgethrower would sooner kill the Dwarf in the armour than so much as dent the Star Metal that encases them.
It is nevertheless, still a polite fiction.
Gromril can break, for how else can the Smiths shape it into mighty arms and armour? Why would there stories of broken Gromril weapons being reforged? Of ancestral armours restored to the fullness of their glory by the descendants of their makers?
In the end nothing is truly eternal, and with enough effort even Gromril can break.
Heat and time, as with all things, seems to do the trick and is the basis for how it is done traditionally.
But brute force?
It takes an especially freakish level of strength to dent, let alone break Gromril. A rarity, but in this world finding someone or something with that level of strength isn't exactly
hard either.
For all that
Barak Azamar does to strengthen you though, wearing it does not put you among that number. What you
do have however is Runes, time, and the stubborn persistence needed to hammer away at the damn thing until the manifold imperfections Thungni left become structurally unsound.
It takes what you reckon to be four hours of constant and insistent hammering between the two of you before the dent you've been making fails and the first crack becomes visible to the naked eye. It takes half that time to grow that crack by a handspan, an hour for it to grow to half the door's length, and so on and so forth as your hammer and your eye find more and more imperfections to seize upon.
Until finally, accompanied by the sorrowful chime of sundered Runes and shattering metal, Gromril falls before your unyielding Will.
You turn back around to do the time-honoured tradition of grumbling at the youth for lazing about, willfully ignoring that you told them to rest in the first place of course, but stop when you look at the changes that have been wrought to the chamber after the door's destruction. Immediately you are hit by the sudden change. Where there had been the tight confines of the tunnel you had carved was a chamber a great deal more open than it was before complete with a vaulted ceiling supported by fourteen hexagonal columns and artistic murals on the walls, ceiling and floor.
Idly, you realize the path you had followed was now a simple arrow leading from the entrance to the exit, rather than the twisting snake of tiles that led you this way and that through, at least what felt like kilometers, of virgin stone.
You switch out your eyes once more, again out of obligation than anything else, but find no hint or clue as to what Runes Thungni used to do that.
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As anticlimactic as the Trial of Cleaving— a naming convention you've caught yourself starting to use— was, you're grateful for the reprieve it offered everyone else in the aftermath of the Trial of Might.
But from the looks of it you'll be jumping right back into the nonsense.
The entrance to the next Trial was up front about it at least, a grand archway with the Rune of Sanctuary emblazoned above. Though you didn't see anything out of the ordinary when you first saw the archway, the moment you pass beneath its threshold your vision briefly goes dark before you find yourselves standing in a room far larger than what you first walked into. The cavern is enormous, tall enough that you cannot see the roof and expansive enough that you cannot see the other end. In front of your group is yet another pedestal with a stone tablet, but what catches your eye are the four massive structures that stand off some unknown distance behind the plinth.
It is the Ancestors, or at the very least statues of them. Each carved with such exacting detail as to almost seem alive and in a way you have rarely seen.
Grungni in His aspect as Lord, with Drongrundum held in both hands yes, but rather than a helm as most Dawi would use for, it is the Dragon Crown that graces his brow. But even that is strange, the gem in its center blazes with light, some unseen Rune has been carved into it. Another oddity is in His clothing, rather than being armed in plate Grungni dons a set of scalemale that
glitters in a familiar S
ilver you have seen only once before
.
Beside him is Grimnir the Doomed. Bereft of His armour but not His arms.
Az-Dreugidum and, strangely enough,
Urkdrengi held easily in His mighty hands and His towering crest granting the Doomed a great deal of height over His fellows. Though you should be too far to tell, let alone read, you
know what the tattoos carved into his stone form are. Deathsongs and the direst of Oaths, Lamentations and promises of terrible,
bloody, Vengeance; the final words and promises of a man Doomed to die.
Third was Valaya as the Defender of Dwarfkind, donning the raiment that the Valkyrie Guard based their own appearance off of. Though She held
Kradskonti, it was a Runestaff of all things in Her other hand rather than the shield most would expect. A gem that sparkled so brightly to be seen, lit the area around her in bright, multihued light, while simultaneously casting shadows darker than the
Void around her as well.
And to round off the quartet was Gazul the Slayer of Monsters,
Zharrvengryn held in front of him in an almost ceremonial position, with his head bowed so that the flat of the blade just kissed the rim of his hood. His cloak flares out behind him, though you found it difficult to decipher just where the cloak ended, seemingly melding into the very shadows that Valaya's staff cast. Slung over His back, the tip of a Crossbow only just peaked out, the gleaming tip of a Gromril Quarrel glittering in the dark like a star.
Tearing your eyes away from the statues and their various aesthetic oddities, you step towards the plinth and read the inscription upon it.
Kneel and find reprieve for what is to come.
Lovely.
Choose One:
[ ] Grungni the Lord
[ ] Grimnir the Doomed
[ ] Valaya the Defender
[ ] Gazul the Monsterslayer
━<><><>< Khazalid Trivia ><><><>━
Drongrundum - Thunderhammer
Az-Dreugidum - War-axe of Doom
Urkdrengi - Foefeller/ "Enemy Slayer"
Kradskonti - Peacegiver
Zharrvengryn - Flaming Vengeance
━<><><><==><><><>━
There will be a two-hour long moratorium.
AN: Hope you enjoy this shorter one. Not happy it took so long but IRL decided to be busy. Anyway, please don't forget to C&C. :^)
