The impact delivered to the gates cares nothing for simple physics, for the power of the rune on Kragg's hammer, one that exists nowhere else in the world, delivers an impact greater than that of a cannon.
Now there's two
He has no response, as what he expected to be the climactic battle of the Expedition's reconquest ends with one of the younger and more boisterous members of Clan Angrund using the corpse of a dead rat as a projectile to finish off the last living Night Goblin in the slave pit.
Belegar gets the first inkling that this campaign will not go as expected.
So this is interesting. Who is Alrik? It could be his father, but he was disinherited. Now, still claiming his name could be a deliberate insult, but dwarves takes family and clan very serious, and falsely claiming inheritance seems like the sort of thing to produce grudges. Expecially when you were disinherited, and so the relation was deliberately severed.
So, more likely Alrik is some sort of father figure/mentor to Ulthar. At a guess, whoever was his master when he started as a ranger. Which is still a pretty nice dig at his biodad. In that context, it also makes sense that we've stopped hearing him referred like that, now it's Prince Ulthar, not Prince Ulthar Alrikson. Now, that could be custom (how does it work with Kazik?), but I suspect not. Going around with a name like Xson when X isn't your fathers name is rather strange, and it would be a constant reminder of the whole affair. And as much as Ulthar dislikes his family and enjoys needling them, I doubt he finds the whole affair pleasant either. It's one thing to consider your family dicks. Getting proven right can be satisfying. Getting proven right by them demonstrating themselves as the worst since the chaos dwarfs and your father continuing to fail in his societal expectations for redemption through suicide is another thing entirely.
Honestly, the whole situation reminds me of the stories I've read of narcissists. His father as the origin, and his brothers getting it through a combination of nature and nurture. He himself as the scapegoat until he got out. A subsequent implosion now that the pressure relief valve was missing. And now the attempt by his father to rewrite history. All of that is familiar.
Dwarven society makes it even more tragic, because getting away would be even harder, and even with humans there's a lot of "But Family!". It would make Ulthar very receptive to the idea that what you're born as doesn't determine who you are, and he was friendly from the start. And when Kragg was like "one good axe doesn't prove the workshop", he was like "One load of gold and fifty loads of muck make a goldmine", so credit for backtalking to Kragg in our favor.
You could make a reading kinder to his father too. He might just be a staunch traditionalist who believed proper adherence to be critical for the good of the hold, and who had the seriously bad luck of two really shitty children. Until that gets substantited more, I'll stick with the first reading for my headcanon though.
I guess one way to distinguish these two would be to see how long it takes for his father to take the slayer oath. If he's a true traditionalist, he'll try to get Ulthar ready as fast as possible so he can ensure his hold has a successor, and then leave.
If he's a narcissist (or whatever the dwarf equivalent is), then he'll put it off as much as possible. Might not even occur to him that it's expected, he did nothing wrong after all. In which case things might get unpleasant, and would probably land before the High King.
Makes me wonder though, what is the procedure when society believes a dwarf ougth to take the oath, but that dwarf disagrees. For normal dwarfs, probably exile. But for high ranking ones, it probably gets unpleasant. At least the throne of power guarantees that the final instance will not suffer from this, so there always is a higher authority to appeal to.
"One bolt at the right time can win a war," he says distractedly. "Not quite the stuff of legends, but it might be the stuff of victory. So, here to join in?"
Ulthar is pretty great. I'm actually somewhat sure he would've made it on the romance list if he hadn't left.
He waves at a particularly twisty set of sketched chambers. "From what we can tell, the greenskins haven't been in control of about half of the Chiselwards for some time. Instead, it's spiders. Might be cave spiders, might be escaped forest spiders, though the descriptions don't quite match either. Whatever they are, they're damn huge and they're clever enough to only fight on their terms. We've pushed them back beyond some moderately defensible choke-points but there's still a few avenues that could go either way, and the further back they retreat, the higher density they'll have when they decide to stop retreating."
Wow, that's actually super badass, kudos to the We. I mean, carving out a good chunk of territory in a greenskin held mountain? That ain't easy.
"Look, it's- oh, by the-" You scrabble as the stub of pencil rolls across the slab of stone, then swear as it drops off the far edge. Overwhelmed with frustration, you reach out, grab a handful of Ulgu, and slap it into the air. "This is the pocket, right? We've barricaded it in here, here and here." Grey smoke thickens, then flows obligingly down invisible channels. You can see it so clearly in your mind and projecting it into the air in front of you seems a thousand times easier than explaining again to the obstinate Dwarf how a bunch of Rangers hacking away at half-grown Squigs could be about to get about three hundred fleeing Goblins to the rear. "Here's what we thought was the dead end coming off it, here's that weird interwoven bit, here's the edge of the Squig caves, and if Rekthor's report is right, here is where that junction branches off towards the hall."
My personal headcanon is that this moment did a lot to win Mathilde the respect of the dwarfs. Killing greenskins and skaven is nice and all, but even beasts can do that. Matching a ranger in his tunnel sense, now that's something to be respected, and it was done without any weird zhuf either. For a while, at least.
You can only imagine his reaction when he reached his next destination, the Temple of Grungni, and found that its doors had been breached and the insides had been transformed into a shrine to greenskin gods. You don't have to imagine his reaction shortly after, as everyone is telling of how he walked through the spell the resident Goblin Mage-Priest had tried to defend itself with and then hit it so hard that it left a crater.
The only thing that might be worse for a spellcaster than a furious Kragg is a Bloodthirster, and I'm not sure on that.
You've never heard of a Dwarf wielding a polearm, but apparently in ages long past it was quite common, before the onslaught of Skaven and Night Goblins necessitated new tactics. You wonder if they'll start once more.
Hmm, the pikes ended up with the Undumgi, but are there any plans for the dwarfs to start using them too?
@BoneyM Has Mathilde heard anything on this? For that matter, why did they stop using pikes in the first place?
Belegar called back those that went to pursue, and as they barricaded the entryway between the Avenue and Karag Lhune, the fleeing greenskins cried out in terror one by one before being silenced by whatever new foes lurked out there.
I think that's Skaven, right? I don't remember. Bok was in another mountain, and the We are contained, so it must be Skaven.
