Today I have a guest piece of fiction written by Riley Nadeau, thanks to Riley for submitting this to us!
They’re making us cut the stone. My entire existence, our Gods—these dwarfs—They make us cut stone day in and day out. I can feel my littermates around me putting tool to rock, with only the sting running up my palms and into my exhausted arms differentiating their blows from my own. A constant rhythm played on walls that could only come from the forced discipline of slavery. Clang. Clang.
The incessant beat of a drum that fills our lives. Fills my life. No matter how numb my arms grow, or what pains radiate down them, I cannot resist the call of tool strumming on stone. As the buck to my left’s pick is about to strike, I can already feel my arm falling into position. We’re but drones directed by eternal music.
And the ringing—oh the ringing! It’s almost as if the rock screams when we separate it from the wall that surrounds us. It’s so omnipresent that I can hear it in my sleep. Always there, filling my head with the loathsome wailing of earth. Each handful of pebbles a pained screech as if they yearn to be back in the wall, trapped in the stone. I can’t stop hearing their screams.
The Slavedriver is near. I know his scent, sweat sweet from the decadent meals of the above world. So different from our own musk—one of fear and filth, toil and stone. I can’t hear him yet over the din of our labor, so he must be at least a twist in the tunnel away. But he does near. Our reeking cowardice is pooling in the air to the left of me as my brothers recognize the coming of a Master. My arms are still mid-fatigue and my back hasn’t begun to spasm under the continuous blows of my pick, so it isn’t to be first watering. This doesn’t bode well. It never bodes well. I can smell my own musk, heavy with fear and anxiety by now, begin to rise and soak the air around me. My pick glances, and the missed note clamors down the winding tunnel. Flinching, I await my mistake to be answered by a Master’s lash.
But the strike never comes. Instead, I hear the clash of metal traveling down from the Master’s direction. Initially I confuse it for my failure’s echo returning before I recognize the sound for what it is. It’s the sound of tool colliding with tool returning again and again, confusing my ears. Who would dare risk damage to the Masters’ tools so close to a Slavedriver? The fear of my litter around me became palpable—as was the tang of…blood? That copper taste was one that often came with the visit of a Master, but always after. As I turned from my work to sate my confusion, I saw them. Two Masters moving as if licked by flame filled the tunnel. My heart began to pound and the scent of fear subconsciously began to seep from me once more, but something was wrong. Why did Their eyes dart from one of my brothers to the next? Why were their swords and not their whips and prods drawn? Why were their eyes so dark?
The first reached our line and my left-most brother prostrated himself before his God. In return, the Master didn’t waste a moment before sinking their sword deep into my brother’s neck. Beyond a faint mewling sound, the packmate I’d shared my entire miserable existence with made no acknowledgement of the blow. The Master pressed into my brother’s ribs with His steel-toed boots for a final time, struggling to remove the blade. “Let GO, vermin!” The steel twisted back and forth, but just the wet sound of loss emerged. “Help me get this out!” the Master yelled to the other between hard tugs lifting my brother’s ruined remains. The other Master shrugged, “Leave it. You’re already slowing us down.” He eyed us that remained, still before them with picks in hand. “And we need to leave—” He said, never turning away from us, “now.”
He advanced towards me, sword in hand. “On your knees, rat.” The Master’s eyes weren’t alight with the typical cruel glow they had before torture. This was something else. I tried to bend, but my knees wouldn’t give—my fear ripping what control I had from my body along with my breath.
“I said, on your knees!” I was so frightened that I couldn’t feel, only smell the urine running down my legs and tail. I wanted to melt into that puddle and be the excrement the Masters had always claimed me to be. But I couldn’t.
There was no third order. Rather, the Master raised His sword up before me, His thick, black beard rising with the effort, only to be met with my pick—which had somehow found its way across the arc of His blade—wood splintering under the violence of his swing. I tried to squeal my apologies for the ruined tool, but the Master was already on me—his gauntlet groping for the soft folds of my throat. I winced to avoid the menacing hand only to hear him gasp. I opened my eyes to see a large splinter from the shaft of my pick had wormed its way through the Master’s beard and out the back of His neck. He fell to the ground, choking on his own wet breath. I turned to my left once again to see my remaining brothers skittering across the corpse of the other Master, the one closest with its teeth ripping at his jaw like a juicy bone.
Beyond our fallen gods, I saw the reason for the masters’ sudden change as new brothers with unfamiliar scents, clad in dwarven armor and carrying weapons, came from the same twist the masters had. I could not comprehend what they were then, but I did know I would never be made to cut stone again.
