A Bitter End

Created by Adam Tingley // Wreckerdwarf

Not much information was able to be gleaned from the dying breaths of Old Verd’Ain. Once the cavalry had arrived to clean out the goblin scum, the entire city was caked in layers of despair, death, filth, blood and soot. It’s incredible how quickly something so grand can be reduced to a cesspit when in the wrong hands. The military reports that returned admirably tried their best to record the scraps of information that remained. In which, an oddity was noted. A singular locked door to the old outpost.

The Current Reports

It is clear that all sorts of foulness attempted to gain entry. The depth of claw marks on the surface of the heavy stone door were astounding. The protective runes still glowed dim with latent power. Large hefty axes and hammers were strewn about amongst the fragmented remains of the corpses of kin and foe. The foul had picked them clean of armour and flesh of both sides of the skirmish that had occurred here. The oddity of the scene wasn’t the picked corpses or remnants of battle though… It was the position. The door sealed a small outpost tower from the original settlement before the discovery of the emerald deposits. It was toward the center of the city and was clearly indefensible. It would have been folly to make a last stand at this position. Hundreds of other locations around the city showed signs of defensible bottlenecks to funnel the foul into manageable numbers in order to inflict maximum casualties before being snuffed out. Small alleyways blockaded to stem the tide, large archways barricaded along their inner edges to tighten the throughway, blocked entrances to divert the foul into more armed routes. From a young age, all dwarves are taught the fundamentals of siege and city defence so to a last stand here only tells us that something of great importance was stashed here. We will need to melt the lock away.

A Glimpse Into the Breach
“The walls broke first at the store rooms of the lower levels. Our food stocks were immediately swamped and devoured. How lucky must our foes have been to claw through the thickest of walls directly into their prize. I bet the scum had never seen so much food. To spite us further, we can no longer afford to outlast this breach and starve them back out of the city. If we survive this, we will need to calculate ways to ensure their malnourishment.” Bru’Gan stood taller than most and a half-head taller than the majority of his peers within his patrol group. He had been on duty at the time of the breach although was in the tavern district when the alarm was rung. His first contact with the foul tide was when they spewed out of the store houses and attempted to take the taverns that they once stocked. The initial bloodshed was brutal on both sides but eventually, the dwarven patrols were overrun. Luckily for Bru’gan, the residents of the surrounding homes had caught wind of the breach, equipped themselves for battle and begun their concerted efforts to bandage the wound of the city. He called out to the civilians to fall back and begin building bottlenecks before moving to do the same. Bru’Gan moved to the tavern square to direct the construction of the next bottlenecks. The tavern square of Verd’Ain encircled the old outposts that the city was originally built around. Now a disused military building, it had been left standing solely as a monument to the city's history and had now taken on the guise of a museum more than its original function. Something made him stop for a moment. The military had not arrived to cleanse the city layer. The screams of the foul blended with the cries of his kin. Was it possible that the higher levels had been forced to isolate the lower regions? Was help even on its way? These questions struck Bru’Gan to his core. “Well… I guess we can’t win them all… It seems my role here is done but I am not going out without spitting in the face of those that would harm us.” He accepted his fate before opening the outpost’s storehouse door, grabbing the iron key from the wall and then began moving emerald bitter kegs from the taverns into the outpost. “They deserve to starve.”