Location: The Final Corridor, Fubar’s Dungeons
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
The sound came first as a rumor beneath their boots — a tremor in the stone so faint that Nathily might have mistaken it for her own pulse, if her pulse hadn’t already been hammering too hard to keep any rhythm at all. Then it resolved, unmistakably, into what it actually was: boots. Many of them. Marching in step, in numbers that no narrow dungeon corridor had any business housing, drawing closer with every breath any of the three of them dared to take.
Nathily’s mouth had gone dry. She had faced impossible odds before — the outriders on the Iron-Haul, the ford days past, even the reading room above — but there was something different in the particular arithmetic of this moment, something that settled cold and final into her chest as she counted the footsteps and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that there were simply too many of them. Not a patrol. Not even a company. An army, summoned by a scream and a slaughtered guard detail, come to erase three trespassers from a kingdom that had already buried far better men without ceremony. She thought, briefly and with a strange detachment, that this corridor — reeking, blood-slicked, lit by torches guttering low in their sconces — might be the last sight she ever saw. If it was, she found herself less afraid of that fact than of what it would mean for Emcorae, and some old, fierce vow she’d carried since the moment she’d chosen to follow him out of Arbola rose up in her again, silent and absolute: whatever comes through that passage, it reaches him only after it has gone through me first.
Beside her, Emcorae’s knuckles had gone white around his katana’s grip, and the fury in his face was not, for once, aimed at the approaching soldiers at all. Months of graves and riding and bleeding, all of it spent chasing a single name, and that villain had escaped him. King Diked was gone — riding free somewhere beyond this palace’s walls, with the Scourge of Monthaven Kaoz at his side, while Emcorae himself stood trapped nine levels beneath the earth with an army between him and the vengeance he’d sworn to Lynsy’s memory, to his father, to every member of his family whose graves he’d left unavenged behind him. I promised you better than this, he thought, with a bitterness sharp enough to taste, addressing ghosts who could not hear him. I promised all of you, but now I am going to die in a sewer-pit beneath a dead man’s throne having kept none of it. If this corridor was where his story ended, then let it end with as many of Diked’s men in the ground beside him as his arm could put there — a debt paid to the only family he had left standing, even if he never lived to see the true reckoning through.
Only Barkla seemed, if anything, to welcome what was coming. The husky dwarf stood amid the wreckage of his own earlier rampage with something almost like serenity settling over his bloodied, scarred features, and when he spoke, his voice carried none of the desperation gripping the two Azoras beside him.
“Listen to them,” he said, tilting his bald head toward the swelling sound of boots, and there was, unmistakably, something like hunger in the words. “An army, come at last to give a Drokka the ending his people would sing of. I have been waiting in this hole for death to find me worthy of it. Perhaps tonight, it finally has.” He hefted his stolen sword, testing its balance with an almost tender care, and for a moment his ruined face wore an expression that even I would have been proud of — had I been anything so indiscreet as visible in that corridor. I would have recognized that look instantly, it was the look of a creature who has stopped fearing his own ending and started, instead, to plan how he means to spend it. “Ragnaroken comes for us all in time, little ones. I would rather meet mine on my feet, blade in hand, than have it find me cowering. Let them come. Let all of Fubar come. Tonight, or never — I care not which, so long as I meet it as a warrior should.”
Nathily looked at Emcorae. Emcorae looked back, and in that brief, wordless exchange passed everything neither of them had time left to say aloud — that they might not survive what was coming, that they had followed each other into worse odds than this and somehow kept walking out the other side, and that whatever happened in the next few minutes, neither intended to let the other face it alone. For Emcorae, the feeling was as yet unnamed, but Nathily’s heart knew the truth – it was love. Even at this last moment of doom, it was enough to make her young life complete – and it surely added to her resolve!
The first soldiers came around the bend at a dead run, and Nathily’s arrows found two of them before the rest had even registered the corridor was occupied. Beside her, Emcorae threw a borrowed dagger and claimed a third, and for one brief, deceptive moment it seemed the fight might end before it properly began.
It did not.
More men simply stepped over their fallen fellows and kept coming, and by the time Nathily’s quiver ran dry she understood, with a cold certainty settling low in her stomach, that they had not been sent a patrol at all. This was a battalion! The angry men were pressed shoulder to shoulder in the passage beyond, jostling and shoving for the honor of being first to claim the bounty on three impossible prisoners, and there seemed to be no end to them.
“Too many,” The elfess breathed, drawing her falchia and saying a quick prayer to Alyssa that the blade might live up to its legendary name Falcone on this day.
“You’re wrong, amora.” Barkla spat gleefully, and there was something almost cheerful in the grating rasp of his voice as he hefted his stolen sword. “Look at your battlefield, elf-child. This corridor wasn’t made for a battle – Ramssee’s men can only come at us two or three abreast, and even then they’ll be climbing over their own dead to do it.”
He was right – the passage narrowed just beyond the ruined cell door, walled in raw stone on either side, and what should have been a massacre of three against a hundred instead became something closer to a door that could only be forced open one desperate body at a time. But that still didn’t mean they had any hope of escape.
The soldiers pushed from behind by their own numbers as much as by any courage of their own — and the corridor quickly filled with the ringing crash of steel on steel as the true fighting began.
Emcorae met them first, and I must admit as I look back now, there was a particular pleasure in watching a man finally given permission to be exactly as furious as he’s capable of. The young Azora practically embarrassed the dark side as his katana moved in vicious arcs, each strike cutting down Fubar’s soldiers as though each one wore Diked’s own face beneath his helm. Where his razor shape blade passed, men did not simply fall; they came apart, the sheer aggression of each stroke driving through guards and parries alike.
Nathily fought beside him in a language entirely her own. Where Emcorae spent his strength, she spent almost none of it at all — her falchia turned aside a spear-thrust and let the wielder’s own momentum carry him onto her return stroke; she ducked beneath a wild overhand swing and rose inside her attacker’s guard to open his throat before he’d finished falling forward from his own missed blow. Grace, not force. Every motion economical, every parry becoming a killing stroke with barely a heartbeat’s delay, so that watching her fight looked less like violence than like some terrible, beautiful dance whose steps her partners never survived long enough to learn. El-Janus would surely have been proud.
But it was Barkla who eventually maneuvered himself into position so that he took quickly ‘ownership’ of that tiny battlefield so far below the earth. The dwarf fought like a creature unleashed from hell — no armor to protect him, no legendary blade singing in his grip, and it made not one whit of difference to the carnage he wrought. He waded into the press of soldiers with his stolen sword in one hand and the iron cell-bar in the other, and where Emcorae’s fury was hot and Nathily’s grace was cold, Barkla’s violence was simply total — a dwarf built low and broad and immovable as a boulder, absorbing blows that should have staggered him and answering each one with a strike that ended whoever had delivered it.
Yet Barkla was not invincible. Nathily saw the first blade find him — a glancing cut along his unarmored forearm, opening a shallow red line that the Drokka didn’t so much as acknowledge — and a moment later a spear-point scored across his bare calf, drawing a deeper wound that left a smear of blood behind him on the stone with every step. He would feel that cost later, she knew, once the battle-madness burned off and left him with whatever remained. For now, he seemed not to notice it at all.
I will grant Barkla this: I have watched armies clash across a thousand battlefields, watched heroes and monsters both – to include his ancestor Hacktor Derkillez – and there is something to be said for a warrior who needs no enchanted blade to become a legend. Barkla was making his reputation the hard way tonight, one dying soldier at a time, and I confess I found it rather more impressive than any magical weapon could have managed.
The General
It was perhaps a candlemark into the slaughter — though none of the three of them could have said with any confidence how long it had actually been, time having dissolved into nothing but the next strike and the next — that a new figure pushed forward through the press of soldiers, distinguished from the rest by a captain’s crest and a voice pitched to carry command over the chaos.
“Hold the line!” the man bellowed, driving his own men forward with the flat of his blade when their courage began visibly to fail. “They are three! Only three! Are you Fubar’s finest or are you cowards—”
He did not finish the thought. Barkla had heard him, and something in the dwarf’s bloodied, scarred face sharpened at the sound of a man still trying to command a slaughter he’d already lost.
“You,” Barkla growled, and began to carve his way toward the voice with a singular, terrible purpose, soldiers falling away from his path like wheat before a scythe. The captain — Corvin Dessa, though none of the three would learn his name until it no longer mattered — raised his blade in a defense that was, by any ordinary measure, competent, even brave.
It made no difference at all. Barkla’s sword met the general’s guard, turned it aside with brute strength alone, and the cell-bar in his other hand crashed into the man’s ribs hard enough to fold him half over — and before Corvin Dessa could so much as scream, Barkla’s blade came down in a single, furious stroke that opened him from collarbone to hip.
The general dropped without another sound. Around him, what remained of his men — perhaps a dozen, out of however many had crowded into that corridor to begin with — broke and scrambled backward over their own dead, the fight gone out of them entirely at the sight of their commander cloven in two by a bald, half-naked, blood-painted dwarf who did not so much as slow his advance.
They did not come again.
After the Storm
The silence that followed was almost worse than the battle itself — a ringing, hollow quiet broken only by the dwindling gurgle of the newly dying and the ragged, ferocious breathing of the three warriors who remained standing amid a corridor now doubled over in corpses.
Barkla lowered his blade at last, chest heaving, and let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh that had nothing of humor in it and everything of release. He wiped the worst of the gore from his sword against a fallen soldier’s cloak, breathing hard, blood — some his, most not — striping his bare scalp and shoulders in dark, drying rivulets.
“By the Right Hand of Rhokkii,” Emcorae managed, staring at the carnage with something between horror and awe. “Barkla — that was unbelievable.“
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Nathily agreed, still catching her own breath, her falchia hanging loose and red at her side.
Barkla waved this off with something almost like irritation, though a flush of pride colored beneath the grime on his face. “Pah. It is nothing beside the glory of the old Ajax wars. Snorri Sturluson himself would not have wasted a single verse on a corridor skirmish such as this.”
Neither Azora had the faintest idea who Snorri Sturluson was, or what the Ajax wars might have entailed, but Nathily let it pass. There would be time for dwarven history later — assuming, she reminded herself grimly, that there was a later at all.
“We need to move,” she said, already scanning the corridor’s far end for any sign of a second wave. “Even you can’t hold this corridor forever, Barkla. We should go, now, while they’re still reeling.”
Barkla’s expression shifted at that — the exhausted satisfaction of the moment before curdling, slowly, into something far harder and far less negotiable.
“Go,” he repeated, as though testing the shape of the word in his mouth. “Go where, elf-child? I am not going anywhere.”
“What do you mean, you’re not going anywhere?” Emcorae stared at the dwarf as though he’d suddenly begun speaking in tongues. “Barkla, we fought through nine levels of this cursed pit to reach you. We nearly lost each other to it. We are not standing here arguing while more of Ramssee’s men gather themselves to try again.”
“Then don’t argue. Leave.” Barkla planted the point of his blade against the stone and leaned on it like a walking staff, surveying the field of dead men around him with something that might almost have passed for contentment. “I did not ask to be rescued.”
“You didn’t have to ask,” Nathily said, sharper than she meant to. “That’s rather the point of a rescue, Barkla.”
“Then it was wasted on me.” The dwarf’s dark eyes swept the corridor once more — the bodies stacked two and three deep, the blood still slicking the stone beneath their boots — and something in his ruined, bald, blood-streaked face settled into a grim and terrible peace. “This is where The Balkeryz have led me. My Kroniklz ends in this hole, or it doesn’t end at all. Either way, I will not run from it.”
“That’s madness,” Emcorae snapped. “You’re telling me you’d rather die in a dungeon than live to see your people again?”
“I am telling you that a coward believes he can live forever if only he shuns war.” Barkla’s voice dropped, grating and absolute. “I am no coward. Let them come. Let all of Fubar come. I will meet every one of them here, in this corridor, until my strength finally fails — and when the Kroniklz are written, they will say a Drokka held this line alone against an army, and did not yield an inch of it.”
“Barkla, please.” Nathily stepped closer, some of her earlier fury bleeding away into something rawer, more desperate. “We need you. Not your corpse in a story — you, alive, standing beside us. There are wrongs in this land that need righting, and you are exactly the kind of ally who could help us right them. Come with us and live to see it done.”
“I can do that here,” Barkla said, unmoved. “Here, among this death I have already wrought, is epitaph enough for any dwarf.”
A long, ugly silence stretched between the three of them, broken only by the last wet, fading sounds of the dying around their feet. Emcorae looked at Nathily. Nathily looked back, helpless, and found no answer in his face either.
A Story Half-Remembered
It came to Emcorae strangely — not as a plan, not as any deliberate strategy, but the way half-forgotten things sometimes surface precisely when a mind has stopped straining to find them. He was suddenly, vividly back in a small cluttered house in Arbola that smelled of old parchment and dried herbs, an ancient elf’s dry, rustling voice filling hours he’d barely attended to at the time, too raw with grief over Lynsy to properly listen. Perhaps a story or two might help, eh? Dallegheri had said, and then talked, and talked, while Emcorae stared at maps he didn’t care about and let the old scholar’s words wash past him like water over stone.
He hadn’t thought he’d retained a word of it. He was wrong.
“Barkla.” Emcorae straightened, some new and unlikely certainty steadying his voice even as the dwarf turned back toward him with open scorn already forming. “I charge you with a…Kwest!”
The effect was immediate, and nothing like what Emcorae had expected. Barkla went utterly still, his weapon slipping in his grip, his scarred face draining of the grim satisfaction it had worn a moment before. “What did you say?”
“I said I am offering you a Kwest,” Emcorae repeated, straightening his shoulders, committing now with a conviction he hadn’t fully possessed a breath earlier.
“How do you even know that word?” Barkla’s voice had gone low and dangerous, more unsettled than Emcorae had seen him even in the heat of battle. “Is this some trick of yours, man of the flat earth? Some mockery you overheard and thought to throw back at me?”
Nathily’s breath caught beside him — a sound of sudden recognition, her own memory catching up half a step behind his. “It’s not a trick,” she said slowly, wonder creeping into her voice even as she found her footing. “Nonna told you that, didn’t he, Em? Dallegheri. The day you went to him after the lodge.”
“I don’t even remember hearing it,” Emcorae brushed the memory away. “Not until just now.”
Something in Barkla’s expression shifted — suspicion warring visibly with a dawning, reluctant belief. “The old Amorosi lore-keeper. The one your people call Advisor Emeritus.” His jaw worked. “He would know such things. Few outside my own people do.”
“Then you know I’m not making a mockery of anything,” Emcorae said, pressing the advantage before it could slip away. “Nathily and I are your allies in this. We fought to reach you. Now I am offering you a Kwest — a chance to carry your name into the Kroniklz not as a corpse in a forgotten corridor, but as a Pietromi who answered a sworn quest and saw it through to its end. According to your own people’s law, that is not a thing to be refused.”
Barkla did not answer at once. He stood amid the wreckage of his own vengeance, sword still loose in his bloodied hand, and something moved behind his eyes that neither Azora could fully read — old grief, perhaps, for a brother whose death had driven him to exactly this kind of glorious, final stand; or something else entirely, some older dwarven reckoning neither of them had the lore to name.
“Do not speak lightly of such a thing,” he said at last, low and rough. “A Kwest is no small offering. It binds the one who gives it as surely as the one who accepts it.”
“I understand that,” Emcorae said, though in honesty he understood only the shape of the word and none of its weight — a gamble made on instinct and a half-remembered afternoon, nothing more.
“You do not,” Barkla said, not unkindly. “But you spoke the word regardless, and the word, once spoken, cannot be unspoken.” He studied Emcorae for a long moment, then Nathily beside him, as though weighing something far heavier than either of them could see. “Tell me, then. What is the nature of this Kwest you offer? I would hear its shape before I—”
The sound reached them all at once — the distant, unmistakable rhythm of more boots, many of them, echoing down through the maze of corridors they’d fought so hard to clear. A second wave, gathering itself somewhere above, drawing closer with every passing breath.
“They’re still some ways off,” Nathily said, already turning toward the sound, calculating. “But not far enough. We could slip into a side passage, let them pass, then double back toward the stairs before they know we’ve moved—”
“It won’t work,” Barkla said. “And it isn’t necessary.”
“What do you mean?” Emcorae demanded, frustrated at the delay.
The dwarf didn’t answer him directly. Instead he turned and walked back toward his ruined cell, stepping over the tangle of bodies without any particular ceremony, and began kicking the nearest corpses aside to clear a path to the cell’s rear wall.
“Barkla — where are you going? Surely you’re not simply retreating back into your own prison to wait for the next wave—”
Still the dwarf said nothing. He reached the back corner of his cell and stood facing what appeared, in the guttering torchlight, to be nothing more than an unbroken expanse of ancient stone block.
“Has he lost his senses?” Emcorae muttered to Nathily, watching the dwarf stand motionless before a blank wall while the sound of approaching boots swelled steadily louder behind them. “Look at him. He’s just staring at it.”
“I don’t know,” Nathily admitted, turning back to study the corridor they’d come from, already calculating retreat, already dreading the answer she suspected they didn’t have. “But we cannot linger here much longer, Kwest or no Kwest. Emcorae, we need to move, now, back the way we—”
A low, grating scrape cut her words short — stone dragging against stone, deliberate and unmistakable. Both Azoras turned as one to find that Barkla had shifted one of the great blocks in his cell’s rear wall aside entirely, revealing a black, gaping hollow behind it that had not been there a moment before.
“I did try to tell you,” Barkla said, and for the first time since they’d found him, something almost like a smile touched the corner of his ruined mouth. “You cannot leave the way you came. The soldiers already own that road.” He gestured into the waiting dark behind him, and the boots grew louder still. “Instead why not try mine?”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 