Location: Akka Mountains
Time: Sixth Age, Summer to Winter 49
Lament with me – the slow, clumsy march of mortal progress. It took my little viperz, Ramssee, nearly two years to get his grand scheme in motion. Two years. A mere blink in the cosmic eye, of course, but for me, a being of perpetual, glorious ambition, it felt like an eternity. I had so many other projects to attend to—so many whispers to place, so many empires to undermine, so many wretched souls to collect and shape into my loyal Stellarones—and here I was, waiting for these pathetic, soft-bellied creatures to finally get off their collective behinds.
But wait I did. The prize, you see, was worth the inconvenience. My little minion had successfully secured a decree to annex the Akka Mountains. A lovely first step. The mortals thought they were moving into a place of abandoned riches. They had no idea they were marching into a mausoleum, a graveyard filled with the very souls I crave, with a special little artifact waiting for me. Did that mean I would soon get my hands on the Grim? Alas, not quite.
The universe, in its maddening, stubborn insistence on having its own way, always seems to have a counter-move for every one of mine. It’s a tiresome game, but one I’ve become remarkably good at winning. Eventually.
After King Diked’s pathetic proclamation, two things happened that were utterly predictable for a species as paranoid as these humans.
First off, General Alec, a truly unremarkable man who nonetheless possessed a modicum of mortal intelligence, made the “prudent” decision to compel the king to issue a new decree. He sent word to all the lords and landholders of Orkney, a polite little missive telling them to be on high alert. Should a rival kingdom—say, Pennal or Inle—decide to contest Orkney’s claim to the Akka Mountains, Alec wanted his army ready. He was thinking of military strategy, of mortal politics and land rights.
Although Alec’s preparation was wise, it was largely unnecessary – this is because The Royal Steward intentionally overlooked the standard statecraft decorum historically shared by the nations of eastern TerrVerde – specifically Ramssee failed to send any decrees about the Annexation of Akka by the Kindgom of Orkney to any of the other nation states on the continent. Because none of Orkney’s rivals knew about the annex, it remained all quiet on the southern front.
Ramssee’s oversight was not only intentional but also astute – first off because any war would have drastically reduced the available manpower for Akka’s mining operation, and secondly because the viperz didn’t plan on keeping Diked around very long and planned to blame the soon-to-be-gone king for any diplomatic problems that might arise in the future. It was a problem that he, as King Ramssee I, planned to solve by decrying the annexation – the viperz assumed that he wouldn’t need to institute this part of the plan until AFTER The Grim was found, thus removing the need for Akka to be part of Orkney, HOWEVER it was a concession he planned to make only in exchange for various peace-keeping concessions from whatever nation might dispute the claim AND the formal recognition by said international authority of Ramssee himself (and his heirs) as the rightful rulers of Orkney in perpetuity. And that, my friends, is how royal bloodlines are created.
Secondly, and far more irritatingly, a month of planning and resource allocation came to a screeching halt. The upper echelon of Fubar society, those dullards who toasted their good fortune at Diked’s feast, were all for the expedition. They saw only the promise of gold, and they were willing to send the peasants to fetch it for them. But the peasants themselves, the very souls who would do the actual mining, were a different matter entirely. They were stubborn. They were rooted in their superstitions, in their folk tales of the dwarf plague, in their visceral fear of the “land of dwarf death.” They were, in a word, obstinate.
And so, Ramssee had to get his hands dirty.
I watched with a mix of amusement and impatience as Ramssee, in the sweltering heat of that Sixth Age summer, went from one grimy tavern to the next. He wasn’t giving his grand, sweeping speeches to the guilds of masons and stonecutters. No, he was sitting across from men who reeked of stale ale and honest sweat, men with gnarled hands and faces etched with a lifetime of thankless labor. He had to feign “compassion,” a word so foreign to his nature it was a wonder it didn’t burn his tongue. He had to meet them on their pathetic level.
“Look, I hear your concerns, lads,” I could hear him say, his voice a low, soothing purr. The magic I had placed within him worked on a more intimate level now. It wasn’t the roaring tide of mass hypnosis; it was a gentle, insistent trickle, seeping into the cracks of their doubt. “I’ve been to the place, remember? I’ve walked those halls. There’s no plague. It’s just an empty place now, a dusty tomb.”
He would lean in, making it personal. He’d look into the eyes of a grizzled old miner named Gorm, a man whose back was bent and whose spirit was nearly broken. “Gorm, you’ve spent forty years in the earth, haven’t you? What have you to show for it? A small cottage, a worn shovel, and a bad cough. Is that all your son has to look forward to?”
The old man would grunt, a lump forming in his throat as the thought of his own failure hit him.
And Ramssee, the clever snake, would strike. “But what if… what if you could change all that? What if, inside that mountain, there isn’t just a bit of ore, but a vein of pure gold the size of a man’s torso? Enough to buy your son a farm of his own, to set your grandchildren up for life, to ensure your name, Gorm, is remembered not just as a miner, but as the patriarch of a wealthy family?”
He wasn’t selling them a vision of a great kingdom. He was selling them their own personal, miserable little fantasy. The dream of escaping their lot, of providing for their spawn, of finally having something to show for their miserable existence. The magic was in the specificity. The promise of “riches” was abstract; the promise of a “farm for your son” was a hook that sank deep.
It took all of that summer, but eventually, he whittled them down. The holdouts and the cowards fell away, leaving a core of the desperate and the greedy. Naturally everything Ramssee said was of course an outright lie – for any ‘riches’ the serfs might discover was BY LAW the property of King Diked Dinus I – said law being part of the legalese wording that was incorporated into the Annexation of Akka document – yes that same document that The Chief Advisor so conveniently forgot to share with the world. It was “on public display” for anyone who wanted to read it in the (new) Annexation Library – unfortunately the library (and the parchment it housed) was located in a most inconvenient location in the bowels of Fubar castle – beneath even the sub-level dungeons and available by appointment only via a quite complicated bureaucratic process that was unnavigable by design.
Nonetheless, the stage was set – forty-nine men stepped up to the plate to do the king’s work. They called themselves the “Fubar Forty-Niners,” a name with a tragicomic bravado. Forty-nine men, led by a man named Cael, a once-proud stonemason whose family had fallen on hard times. They were a motley crew, all of them convinced by the viperz’s honeyed words that this was a gamble worth the risk. A short journey, a little hard labor, and they would be wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings.
As the leaves turned from green to gold and the first chill of autumn settled over the land, The Fubar Forty-Niners set out. Even from afar I felt their fear like a whisper in the winds, a cold, cloying dread that grew with every step they took toward the mountains. They had heard the whispers, the legends of the plague—the sickness that devoured all who ventured too close. The mortal mind, so full of half-truths and folk beliefs, had conflated things until the fear nearly ground them up.
When they reached the base of the Akka Mountains, those fears became a palpable, suffocating thing. The entrance to the dwarf kingdom was not a grand archway as they’d imagined. It was a collapsed ruin, a jumble of jagged stone that had been sealed for nearly fifty years. They stood there, the Forty-Niners, staring at the debris, their hands hanging uselessly at their sides.
“It’s the mountain’s way of telling us to go back,” someone muttered.
“The dwarves sealed it for a reason,” another whispered, his eyes wide with terror.
The fear, once a mere undercurrent, had become a tidal wave, threatening to swallow my entire operation before it even began.
When Ramssee got wind of the miners’ hesitation he rushed to the mines himself – for he couldn’t risk the entire operation stopping now. He arrived on a swift horse, his silks a ridiculous splash of color against the drab gray of the stone. He found the men gathered in the process of breaking camp – clearly preparing to give up and return home.
“What’s this, my friends?” he asked, his voice full of feigned surprise and disappointment. “Are the Fubar Forty-Niners afraid of a little bit of stone?”
When the miners hemmed and hawed with a litany of excuses and concerns, Rammsee played it off. He walked right up to the collapsed entrance and placed his hand on the cold surface. “This is not a curse. This is not a warning. It is simply… an inconvenience. The dwarves left in a hurry, and their entrance collapsed over time. A simple matter to clear, isn’t it? Just like a stubborn tooth you have to pull to get to the true treasure within.”
He looked at Cael, the mason, and his eyes, spinning with that lovely red and black hue, took on an almost hypnotic gleam. “Cael, your hands have moved mountains your whole life. You can crack this nut. Imagine what lies behind this wall… a king’s ransom. And it will be yours.”
And just like that, the fear broke. The greed, so carefully cultivated, swelled and overcame their terror. The men, ashamed of their momentary weakness, picked up their tools and got to work. They chipped away at the stones, driven by the dual promises of immense wealth and the desire to prove they were not cowards.
The mining operation to open the entrance began in earnest in the last week of the first month of autumn. But even as Cael’s men worked, unspoken questions remained – “if the men managed to get inside, would they get sick?” and “Would they carry it back to Fubar and destroy the town?”
The news trickled back to Fubar, a slow, steady stream of confirmation updates – the entrance was slowly being worn down…the miners were almost inside….so far nobody had gotten sick, yet…Could the plague really be just a legend?
Whether they really wanted those answers or not, they were about to find out…
The Apocrypha of Azazel 