"So I’ll just ask it, since every hammer in this hall is afraid to. What do you want from the dwarven people, Conqueror?"
The towel at Quinlan’s neck stirred, poured back down over his chest and arms, and rewove itself into his shirt, and he took his time settling the cuffs while the royal smithy of Elvardia held its breath around him.
"What do the dwarven people want to do?" he finally asked with a sly grin.
"...We want to live our lives honestly. Work hard mastering our craft, drink good booze, and sleep in our beds without fear."
"Sounds like the kind of people any sane ruler would want to support."
Brokk looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, to the Conqueror of the Continent, smith to smith.
"... Any sane ruler, hmm?" she said.
Sera reappeared at his side without any of them catching her cross the floor, nestled her cheeks into his shoulder, and let a wounded little sound out against his ear.
"Are you forgetting about me...?" She melted in against his skin, the pout in her voice with nothing whatsoever behind it, her eyes warm and dancing. "I can’t beat metal into behaving the way Kaeli can, I know that. But I love you plenty too, and I was so patient and so good all afternoon, and you haven’t looked at me even once..."
Quinlan chuckled at that, apologetically looking at Brokk. "Gotta go. Duty calls."
Sera’s chin came off his shoulder. "Did you just call spending time with me a duty?!"
He answered by raising one hand, and the [Warp Gate] unfolded at the hall’s heart, pale and silent. Not a muscle in his face moved while he did it. Sera pouted so hard her ears folded down flat.
An arm settled around each elf’s waist, Sera on one side still mourning her stolen honor and Kaelira on the other, and he turned the three of them toward the seam.
Kaelira went with him a step before she set her heels. She leaned out of the circle of his arm just far enough to lay the humming hammer down on the anvil, settled the magma-banked shield beside it, and squared them both to the light the way she’d squared every piece she finished that day. Then she looked up and found hundreds of gazes staring right at her.
"Thank you for your hospitality, royal smiths." The words came quiet, and for once she let the whole hall hear all the way to the bottom of them. "Seeing these forges was a dream I’ve held since I was small enough to hide under a workbench. I won’t forget it."
She never said keep it. She simply left it there, humming on the anvil, and let Quinlan draw her the rest of the way to the gate.
Behind them, three hundred dwarves slowly worked out that the relic was not leaving with the people who’d made it.
The gate swallowed the Villain and his women and folded shut without a sound.
For a moment the royal smithy just stood there, three hundred professionals and one First Hammer alone with a humming artifact their guests hadn’t thought worth carrying home.
Brokk didn’t move. She stayed rooted where she was with her arms folded, turning his words over in the quiet behind her eyes.
The others had no such dignity left to guard.
Old Dain moved first, because some things do not wait for a mittee. The most venerable master of the mountain hobbled to the anvil, hauled his hammer up in both hands, and knocked its butt against the horn twice, hard, right beside the humming relic. The double-knock cracked through the hall like a starting gun, and the mountain came off its leash.
Every hammer in the room found something to beat on. The horn, the nearest anvil, an inspection plate, a support pillar, a neighbor’s pauldron, a neighbor’s helmet with the neighbor still inside it, and three hundred hammer-butts came down at once in no rhythm anyone agreed on and none anyone needed, until somewhere under the din the first voice went up, wordless and enormous, straight from the chest.
"OHHH... OH-OH... OHHHH!"
It was not a song. Nobody wrote it and nobody agreed to it, it just came up out of them, from somewhere underneath every treatise the day had murdered, from the same floor of the dwarven soul where the first smith watched lightning hit a rock and decided to argue with it.
The hall took it up in one breath and gave up on words entirely. The same masters who had spent the afternoon calculating mana thresholds and shear planes were stamping in a slow circle around the anvil now, beards swinging like censers, tools thrust overhead, grunting at a masterwork like it was the first moon any of them had ever seen.
"OHHH... OH-OH... OHHHH!"
A rune-master who a minute ago could not stand now could not stop, and headbutted a support column affectionately on his way past it without breaking stride.
Somebody hauled Dain up onto a bench, where the most dignified craftsman in the deep kingdom sang with streaming eyes and both fists beating the air, and did not miss one single knock.
The channel-master gave up on her inspection plate and drummed it against her own breastplate instead.
Vorn, whose arms had locked at the sight of the Villain and e loose for good somewhere around the fifth fold, stomped into the circle bellowing at the rafters.
"OHHH... OH-OH... OHHHH!"
Two apprentices grabbed the youngest of their number and hoisted him overhead like a battle standard, and he shrieked the chant down at all of them, already living inside the story he would still be telling when he was old.
The noise went down through two feet of living stone. The freshly mortared flue caught the din and carried it note-perfect into every gallery, stair, and drinking hall of the deep city, where dwarves who had no idea what had happened felt the beat rise through their boots and, being dwarves, started stamping right along.
The royal smithy of Elvardia danced around the hammer the way the first dwarves had danced around the first fire.
"OHHH... OH-OH... OHHHH!"
At the edge of it all, Brokk watched her hall lose its mind over a hammer three cheap metals had no business being, and she neither joined the circle nor moved to break it up.
It could have gone the other way.
Had the two of them pulled some legendary artifact out of hearth-steel and cart-spring iron, every master in this hall would’ve gone home knowing their life’s work had been a child’s game played at the foot of gods. That hammer would have emptied the mountain’s forges within a generation.
Instead they’d made a tool. A quality of life utility tool for working smiths, left humming on a royal anvil like a promise that the ceiling of the craft sat higher than any treatise had dared to draw it, and that the road up ran through plain honest steel her people already owned.
The Villain and his elf hadn’t shown them their smallness. He’d shown them the mountain still had rooms they’d never opened.
"Wait, he just left me here?" Elowen gasped as she finally realized what was going on. "In enemy territory?!"
"Enemy territory?" Brokk scoffed. "Open your eyes, you insufferable cunt."
"..."
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