The gates of bronze were familiar to him, even battered and tarnished as they were. Krulm’venor had been here before, even though he did not remember when or why. He was sure of that much. The stonework iuhat lead to the twenty-foot tall doors was wide and open, presenting multiple yers of defenses and lines of fire in an unmistakably dwarven way. However, the shapes that moved behind the walls - the shadows he could see flickering from gap to gap in the shadowy recesses of the firing slits were unmistakably goblin.

  He was thankful that he couldn’t smell anything because, as befouled as the entrance was, the sight was almost enough to make him gag. Seeing the glory of the past desecrated like this was truly tragic, but the presence of goblins did worse things than sadden him. It made him itch. He could feel them crawling inside his bones now. That monster had locked the frayed souls of dozens of their kind in here with him, and they haunted him, muddying the edges of his precise dwarven soul with their filth and hunger. It was a disgusting process but one he could do nothing about. All he could do was take out his frustration oill-living goblins he entered.

  That thought made the blue fmes that licked his skeleton fre brighter. Boiling these creatures alive in their skin was the only thing that would make him feel better.

  The interior of the a fortress wasn’t in aer shape thaerior had been. Only the highest parts of the tapestries remained unshredded, and any oriohe ground had been ravaged and ruihe frescoes on the ceilings were rgely intact besides the bck stains that had accumuted from tless small fires in this room.

  The rooms of the dwarven fortress were s or battlefields, and sometimes they were both at once as the goblins stantly waged war with each other one room at a time. As Krulm’venor moved from room to room, the tiny creatures that ied the pce ran before him, eager to flee his eerie blue light. That just gave him more time to study the pd wrack his mind for some clue as to why he would have walked these halls before, though.

  It wasn’t until he reached the library, or at least what was left of it on the sed floor, that he discovered that ahe leather tomes and long ago been devoured, and the pages and scrolls were only ash now. The stone shelves carved into the exterior walls could never be erased by such crude creatures, and the mosaic of All-Father on the ceiling was equally out of reach. It was the beauty of that piece that brought him back. The a, white-bearded dwarf stood there in a finely appointed smithy wearing an apron oher and a look of judgment.

  Such was the skill of the nameless artist, though, that if you looked past the obvious, you could see that the Allfather was made up of hundreds of tiny dwarves, each a seamless part of the greater whole that had been found worthy. That was the dwarven afterlife. Krulm’venor khat because once, long ago, he’d been a part of that. He’d been… a jolt of pain assaulted him as fragments of discordant memories assaulted him.

  In his mind, he could see ossuaries stacked with the bones of dwarves. The you who died in battle were honored in their own way, but their gleaming white skulls would never achieve unity with the divi was only the older skulls that had lived hundreds of years aed their mettle against every adversity that were free to join him ierlife. All the other dwarves would have to take arip to the fire to have their mettle tested once more because only the crystal skulls of the aors could genuinely ect with the divine.

  If that was true, though, then why was Krulm’venor not still ierlife, helping the All-Father te creation forever more? A loose thread of a memory pulled at him - something about how in times of dire need, a dwarf would be selected and— He almost had it, but iime it had taken him to remember these things, his fires had begun to dim, and it was in that near darkhat the goblins crept closer and closer.

  He could feel them, or at least the goblins locked ihis cursed cage could, but he was so focused to remember that he did nothing and so emboldehey crept closer and closer. It was only when the first oacked him that those memories drifted away like smoke, leaving Krulm’venor with only the coals or wounded pride and ragiment that was all that was left of his dwarven soul.

  The sharp stohat the goblin struck his steel femur with could never hope to scratch this terrible body. However, the single clear note of the impact rang out, and like a single drop of water in a still pool, it crified everything. Revetion could wait. Knowledge and memory could wait. Even revenge on the Lich that had dohese terrible things to it and trapped it in this bag of rats could wait. What couldn’t wait was killing these disgusting, insignifit vermin.

  “Do not touch me,” Krulm’venor rasped.

  For a moment, the goblins that surrounded him flinched in unison, wavering at the sound, but when no a followed. They surged forward, emboldened. At that moment, the world burst into fmes. They emerged from where Krulm’venor’s heart should have been, like a nova, and flooded the room with liquid fire.

  For the first time in decades, this room was lit brightly enough for every detail to be seen, but the only thing anyone would ever see here was a massacre. The goblins closest to him could touch him with their ons, but that was all. Even as they achieved that remarkable victory, the hands that held them buro ash. Those goblins that were further away had a ce to scream as the heat of the fire made their rancid green skin steam before the fmes reached out to crisp them to shades of brown and bbsp;

  The goblins that were furthest away tried to flee, but the magnitude of Krulm’venor’s fury kept rising, so that was impossible. He paced through the three-story structure, burning away every goblin, as well as every sign that they’d ever existed. The totems and graffiti they used to mark the ever-shifting line of their territory vaporized almost as easily as the warriors that fought over them, along with any remnants of the dwarves that had once lived here.

  Only when all that had burned away did Krulm’venor start to feel again. He couldn’t erase the many stains on his soul that the s had put there, but the purity of fire could hide them with its all-ing light for a time. He would gdly stay like this forever if he could have, as the heart of his own tormented sun. However, when he saw the bronze fixtures were starting to melt and the perfectly dressed blocks of dwarvish stone were crag uhe heat, he couldn’t keep going.

  Being buried alive by the colpsing structure wasn’t his either. He was happy to die. He was getting to the point where he weled true death and the oblivion awaiting him, but he wouldn’t harm dwarves. Even as tarnished as this building was, an ambitious could one day recim it. Their job would be that much easier now that he had purged it of vermin and filth with fire, he thought, looking for some silver lining to all of this.

  Now he could go back downstairs and examihe mosaic to his heart’s tent until he remembered what he’d fotten. The Lich wouldn’t even protest su activity. It recisely what that foul creature wanted him to do. The st thing he wao do was give that evil access to more information about his people, but in this matter, he couldn’t resist his own terrible pulsion to find out more about himself. For years now, all he’d been ark of the divine, and for who knows how long before that, he was reduced to little more than smoke in a filthy cave. He o uand why he would ever subject himself to such a fate. Part of that anshy he’d been separated from the Allfather; he was sure of it.

  When Krulm’venor reached the library once more, his spirit sank. In his mind, he’d been expeg to see a now sed room that had been turned from the midden heap it had bee into the shrio the only god that mattered it should have been.

  Instead, he found he had sed the whole ptirely too well. The goblins were reduced to ash, and the trash had been vaporized as well, but he’d buroo hot for too long, and the artwork that had mao survive the goblins for who knows how long had been bsted to ruin by the full force of his dark fires.

  Krulm’venor could have wept for the feeling of loss he felt then, but there were no tears left to cry. Ihere was nothi at all. Just ay skeleton in ay fortress surrounded by the new and the old dead. He turo leave, and that was when he finally felt his master’s dark gaze upon him.

  “That picture. The one you destroyed. What was it?” the Darkness in the back of his mind asked.

  “That was the Allfather, lord of the dwarves, and I bitterly regret its loss. I wasn’t attempting to hide anything from you.” As he responded, Krulm’venor realized that perhaps it was for the best that it was gohe Darkness couldn’t quite read his mind, but it could pel the truth from him and leave him suffering in agony until he told it everything that it wao know. Less evidence meant fewer questions to ask.

  “The dwarves only have one god then, while the humans have multitudes. Why is that?” This time the Lich pressed harder like it suspected something, but Krulm’venor merely shrugged.

  “Who knows why the humans do anything,” he rattled. “The dwarves have one god because there is only one way to do anything right. That’s as true for stoting and steel f as it is for worship.”

  There was a long, uneasy moment where it worried the Lich would press harder still, but as quickly as it appeared, the dark pressure on his mind eased. His master was gone, leaving him alone in the infinite dark to worry in private.

  He desperately wao know more about his past than the growing pile of scraps he had, but the more he learhe more the Lich would too. What terrible deeds could su entity do with the knowledge that the dwarven god was made up of the souls of all the dwarven elders who ever lived?

  Krulm’venor prayed silently that it would never find out as it exited the ash-filled fortress and tinued his long silent walk into the deeps.