I wasn’t expecting any word from Delphanna on stopping anything going on, her being an Immortal and neither friend nor ally. All I had to do was follow the information that was coming in.
I used the one day: year paradigm to move back and forth from the Other Shore. This gave plenty of ti to pursue general planning and watch over the gods as they started their enthusiastic adventuring careers, and watch events unfurl in exactly the unwanted way on my ho tiline.
Given the short mories of surviving humans, and virtually no demi-humans around, Lady Edge was mostly a figure of myth and legend by now on the Other Shore, almost every human alive when the Doom went down now old or passed away, certainly anyone I had t personally. My Gina identity was widely known as one of the few remaining elves who traveled about, but was not ‘famous’, per se, being quite normal and right on elven trope in just about all the ways, without being so sort of elvish paragon or ideal that attracted too much attention, as I didn’t have any surviving clanmates or family anywhere clamoring for to take charge of the tribe or whatever and lead them all to greatness.
It did an I could pop up just about anywhere if needed, it was just there weren’t any elven settlents left within a thousand miles of the Doom, so I was often the only elf a human might see for their entire lives.
The dwarves were disappearing slowly. The ones near the Doom who had not gone to the Far Shore had now been whisked away by Clangyr and were vanishing into the depths of history. More distant clans would be vanishing as their numbers dropped from war and strife, bereft of magical ability and without Clerics to help them endure the violence of a magical world in return. Clangyr’s problem now was that the mountains he wanted to start his new dwarves under after changing them in an acceptable manner were directly adjacent to my Rings of Fire, not unclaid, abandoned, and part of a landscape easily reworked by Immortal wills.
I was naturally not going to let Clangyr succeed. Dwarves had a place in my future, and not the ones brainwashed to be devoted to the Immortal who had kidnapped and experinted upon them. I rely had to give them a way to overco their natural problems, and restore their magical knowledge to them.
Eezy-peezy. Interference from Clangyr was making sure the altered tides of magic couldn’t be used by them, so they couldn’t be wizards of any stripe. Without the ability to wield ANY magic, their doom was assured, and his plan to take and remake them all could go forward.
Typeless mana, however, didn’t care about the vagaries of the manafield, and Artifice was actually the higher form of Clangyr’s own interests in craftwork and smithing. He’d have to be fighting himself to let the knowledge go...
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I placed the leather case on the table between us. “Twenty-four Healing Potions, Elder Bronf. Twelve Light, six Moderate, four Serious, two Critical.”
The older dwarf with dark gray skin and steely gray beard was almost beside himself with delight as he beheld the stoppered crystal vials, swirls of silver, golden, and rainbow light playing within them. Each represented life for a wounded soldier of the clan, a resource they were sorely in need of. “How much?” he asked with a sigh, knowing this was going to strain the coffers of the clan.
“What have you to trade, Elder?” I asked calmly, never too concerned about stripping them of their liquid coin reserves.
His relief that I was not asking for precious tal was apparent. “Forgebars be what we have the most of, but…” he hesitated, looking at , but I was rely inviting him kindly. I’d been visiting here for twenty years, a Sim or I coming in with Healing Potions the dwarves snatched up every ti.
Once it had been while they were being attacked by a warband of human bandits and raiders led by a priest of Orcus, a forr noble chased away from the ravaged shorelines and looking for a place to found a new kingdom and deciding the isolated dwarves made a perfect target to plunder.
By the ti I knocked politely on the locked gates, what humans remained alive were fleeing for the hills, and between their horses and weapons, the dwarves actually made a profit on their raids, sans the wounded and killed.
I’d also healed scores of wounded without paynt, and by the ti I left I was called a Dwarf-friend, a title that spread rapidly through the hill clans of the continent of Rikada.
“You seem to be having problems, Elder Bronf?” I asked kindly, and he sighed and broke down.
“Lady Gina, the mines… they are going dry. The veins are running out, and we fear that soon we will be pulling up naught but rust and scree for the furnace,” he admitted. “Even the coal is running out. It almost seems cursed, as if we were being punished for standing firm where other clans had fallen…”
I frowned slightly. The dwarves of this age didn’t have quite the Earthbond as those in my own, but they knew their stone. “That does not sound like the Earthborn, Elder. Your feel for the bones of the world are deep and true, you would not set up near a resource that would fail so soon. Did not you open your newest mine a re ten years ago? It should last a generation, not a re decade.”
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He puffed up slightly at my recognition of their ability. “Aye, Lady Gina, you have the right of it. The vein of coal alone should have been enough to drive the main furnace for another century at the least. But the quality is falling and the veins are petering out, unlike every ti they have in the past.”
I looked past him to the east of the valley, where the mines lay. “If you don’t mind, Elder, I’m going to go out there and talk to the Land and see what it has to say and show .”
He looked a bit moved at that description. “You can do such a thing?” he asked, marveling at the ability.
“Yes. Elves are bound to the Land, too, even if we prefer the green and the growing world to the rolling hills and high austere mountains, they are all part of the Land. Let us see what the land has to say about this…”
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I opened my eyes, holding the Commune with Nature firm in my mind’s eye. Elder Bronf and half a dozen other dwarves, all of them with varying degrees of admiration and suspicion warring in their gazes, waited silently by for to finish.
“This… is not good, Elders,” I said quietly, and their faces were downcast. “Let reassure you, your surveyors and prospectors did nothing wrong, and the mines were exactly as you described them to . They should have supported you for another generation and more… but they have been drained and moved away, deeper underground, where it is not worth your ti to get them.”
“Drained?” the black-bearded Elder Growd sputtered in disbelief, the beads in his hair clacking. “How? Who would do such a thing? And why?”
“You have an Immortal targeting you, and no Immortal Patron of your own to protect you from their efforts. The Land is clearly telling that the veins you seek have been pulled back and deep underground, easily a thousand feet down and more. You have neither the ti nor the energy to pursue them with physical ans, and you don’t have the magical ans available to do so.”
I turned to look north. Two peaks away, Clan Guillkark’s farms and keep sprawled on the slopes and hills of Mount Umfer, their mines tailing out away from the central holding of the clan, much like Clan Boenfyrm’s here. “State of the mines is sothing of a tight secret among the clans, yes? Friends as well as rivals?” I asked them quietly.
They were only a little ashad, with Elder Bronf replying, “We’ve not ntioned it to our neighbors as yet, no…”
“Clan Guillkark’s mines have had the sa thing happen to them.” I looked east. “And the process is happening to Sparlvem’s holdings even now.”
They all sucked in their breaths. “This-!” Elder Bronf swore, looking that way helplessly. “Who is doing this? Why is Harnadin not intervening?”
I let his words hang there for a mont. “My guess is that your prayers are being diverted and He is not hearing you, and so thinks you have abandoned Him.” Oaths and curses rose in tandem at that, powering so deep and vehent swearing at such treacherous behavior!
“What cursed Immortal is doing this to us? A great foe, like the Lord of Beasts the humans followed back then?” Elder Shyama asked deliberately, her silvery hair counterpoint to her very dark skin, her braids many and tumbling about her with any movent. She was considered one of the wisest females of the clan, and the n were all kind of bashfully subservient under her dark eyes.
“No. An Entropic like Orcus would destroy you, they wouldn’t use this kind of subtle movent of resources. This is ant to be a slow, subtle bleeding effect, intending to slowly wear you down over ti, until you beco so weakened it is plain you cannot survive without an Immortal sponsor, or magic of your own.”
They bristled even as their faces fell. “We, we have had no children with strong ties to the Earth for a generation now, Lady Gina,” Elder Bronf said into his beard, soft and sad. “Without them, even the old magic to enhance steel and stone is lost to us, and the Runes lay sadly in their vaults.”
“So they are interfering with your bloodlines, too? Removing all the arcane magic…” My face turned down as I looked into the distance.
Of course I knew who was responsible. He would bid the dwarves call him Clangyr, but among humans of this age, he had been known as Wulshar the Maker, an ancient, neanderthalic god who was big on craftsman, community, and families. He very much did not like arcane magic, which so often was dependent on individuals and not bonds among kin.
On the Other Shore, he had ended up sweeping away all the dwarves as they declined in the wake of Darkmoor, their lack of magical Healing and silence of their creator Immortal basically a death knell in a magical world here.
He would remake them all into the dwarves of the Other Shore, tied more closely to land and kin… and capable of being dwarf-priests, bound to him and bearing the Healing magic that was so crucial to survival in these tis.
That he was the agent behind their decline was not sothing my Sims had sussed out back then, fiat accompli as their fate was, but now it was obvious he had engineered their slow and gradual downfall to justify his act of sweeping them away.
Remarkably subtle behavior from a god known for his bluntness and honest speech. He probably just considered it an acceleration of sothing that was going to happen, and so nothing was wrong with it. It would get him what he wanted a generation or two of dwarves more quickly, in the end.
I flicked out my Disk to sit down before them, as I always did when speaking with them. Although they didn’t consider being taller any great thing, they always appreciated coming down to eye level with them. It spun up in a whirl of polished silver plates, drawing admiring and envious glances from them.
“I have two solutions to you for this, Elders of Clan Boenfyrm. You may not like them, but these are what I have to offer you. Will you hear my words, and listen?” I asked formally.
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