The air in the Burrows had changed.
Where once there was heat and the endless rhythm of forges, now there was something colder a tension that pressed against the walls like a held breath. The tunnels seemed smaller somehow, the shadows thicker. The Fanglord’s empire had grown too vast to stay buried.
It was time to look upward.
Reports came daily now fragments of a larger truth.
The Moonless Choir whispered of elven emissaries traveling openly to Fairehaven, cloaked in white and green, their voices soft but their purpose sharp. The elves had not marched to war in centuries, but their banners the pale sigil of the Emerald Woods now fluttered alongside the Radiant standard.
Even Vris’s scouts, slick with salt and shadow, had seen the proof with their own eyes.
The light gathers, the Choir intoned in unison. And it does not gather alone.
At first, Vris dismissed it as fearmongering. The humans had always clung to allies when cornered. But when the Stone-Eaters brought word from the mountains, he began to see the pattern forming like cracks in old glass.
The dwarves of Harrowhall were moving.
The Stone-Eaters had long since claimed the abandoned veins of ore beneath the southern ranges, mining deep under the Fanglord’s banners. But lately, their work had been interrupted by scouts, by patrols, and by dwarves wearing bright, freshly forged plate.
At first, these meetings ended in taunts.
Then in blood.
“They’ve begun sealing their lower shafts,” growled Foreman Hadrik Veinborn, his hands still streaked with iron dust. “Our tunnels used to meet theirs in half a dozen places. Now every one’s caved in. They’re hiding something.”
Vris leaned forward over the war table, claws tracing the jagged ridges of the map carved into the stone. “Or they’re building something.”
Maggra’s twin heads shared a look, their voices layering into one eerie chorus.
“Dwarves dig when afraid. Perhaps they fear you.”
Vris’s mouth curved faintly. “Or perhaps they’ve found someone else to fear.”
The fighting started as chance encounters miners running into patrols, words turned to blades. But within weeks, the tunnels beneath the mountains became a battlefield of their own.
The Stone-Eaters fought like starving wolves, tearing through rock and steel with their bare hands, biting through armor, their metallic veins glowing in the dark. But the dwarves of Harrowhall were not ordinary miners they fought with precision, formation, and faith. Their hammers bore runes that blazed gold when they struck, their chants driving back Maggra’s undead and shattering cursed weapons with radiant heat.
Hadrik spat iron filings in frustration.
“They’ve found their courage again. The Radiant priests must’ve blessed them or bought them.”
Maz stood beside him, hands on her hips. “Then we’ll take their blessing apart and melt it down.”
Vris said nothing. He stared at the map again this time tracing the network of Harrowhall’s defenses: lower caverns, outer forges, the spine of the mountain itself.
Each passage meant labor. Each chamber, lives. But if they could take it...
If they could hold it...
The Burrows would no longer be a warren. It would be a kingdom.
The war council gathered in the molten chamber once more. The leaders stood in a circle Dunzok, Maggra, Maz, Hadrik, the Webmother’s shadow looming above them.
On the map between them, Harrowhall glowed faintly in red chalk.
“We’ve grown as much as we can in the dirt,” Vris said. “The tunnels choke us. The Burrows cannot feed the armies to come. If we want to thrive, we must rise take the forges, the granaries, the strongholds of the dwarves. Take Harrowhall.”
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The room filled with murmurs excitement, fear, hunger.
“The dwarves will not fall easily,” Hadrik warned. “Their walls are mountains. Their gates drink molten steel.”
“Then we’ll make them choke on it,” growled Dunzok. “We’ll tear their walls down rock by rock.”
Maggra smirked. “A fitting tomb for their gods of stone.”
Maz crossed her arms, eyes half-lidded, voice low. “It’ll take months to prepare. Siege engines that can climb, weapons that can breach runes, tunnels wide enough for ogres. The Red Maw can’t storm mountains like it stormed walls.”
Vris nodded. “Then we’ll bleed the mountain first. Starve it. Burn the trade roads. Collapse their veins. Force them to breathe the same smoke they gave to the world.”
He drew a clawed hand across the glowing map, bisecting the mountain’s mark.
“The humans hide behind faith. The elves behind forests. The dwarves behind stone. Let’s see which crumbles first.”
That night, when the others had gone, the Moonless Choir whispered from the rafters above. Their voices slithered through his thoughts like smoke.
Something wakes beneath Harrowhall.
Not dwarf. Not god.
It dreams of the day it was buried... and the hammer that sealed it sleeps beside its bones.
Vris looked up. “A hammer?”
The dwarves call it the Skybreaker. The Radiant ones pray they never find it.
For the first time in many nights, Vris felt something that wasn’t anger a spark of curiosity.
“Then that’s what we’ll take,” he murmured. “Their kingdom, their pride… and their god’s weapon.”
Weeks later, scouts returned from the foothills of Harrowhall.
They brought tales of vast gates sealing shut, of glowing wards carved into the mountain’s face, of priests chanting over forges that bled golden light.
The dwarves were preparing for war.
And deep within the Burrows, under the hum of the Heartforge and the whispers of the Choir, Vris the Fanglord began forging plans to unmake an empire built of stone.
He had conquered the dark.
Now he would conquer the deep.
The first sparks of war struck not in sunlight, but in shadow.
Deep beneath the snow-crowned ridges of Harrowhall, the tunnels trembled with distant echoes of hammer and pick the sound of dwarves sealing themselves in, and of monsters clawing their way toward them.
The Red Maw was moving again.
Vris watched the glow of the mountain’s veins from the mouth of a cavern. Streams of molten light pulsed through cracks in the stone like blood through arteries, feeding the vast dwarven foundries hidden within.
The Burrows had grown restless, full of whispers and steel. Every race and brood waited for the Fanglord’s word to strike.
That word came with a whisper of steel through the dark.
“We dig,” Vris said. “And we bleed the mountain from below.”
Hadrik Veinborn led the first wave.
The Stone-Eaters moved like miners possessed, tearing through walls of granite with their iron-hard teeth and calloused hands. Each strike of pick or claw left streaks of molten dust. Their song echoed through the tunnels a low, rhythmic chant that sounded more like prayer than work.
Behind them came Maggra’s plague-workers, wrapping the tunnels in slick black resin to strengthen them, filling dead ends with gas that burned the lungs of anyone foolish enough to breathe too deep.
Maz’s forge-goblins brought scaffolds and siege drills built of obsidian and bone, turning the tunnels into an army’s arteries. The air stank of oil and blood.
And above it all, Vris moved unseen the Fanglord’s cloak blending with the dark, his eyes catching the faintest glow of runes far ahead.
“The dwarves know,” he murmured. “They’re watching.”
They struck the first dwarven outpost two days later a ring of caverns sealed by glowing runes that pulsed gold against the black rock. The Stone-Eaters charged first, their bodies steaming in the radiant heat. They clawed at the seals, bellowing in fury as their flesh hissed and blistered.
“It burns, Fanglord!” Hadrik snarled. “The runes taste our blood!”
Maz knelt beside him, pressing her palm to the wall. The sigils flared, casting her face in molten light. “It’s not a ward,” she whispered. “It’s alive.”
Before Vris could ask, the runes shifted.
Lines of light crawled across the stone, weaving into shapes faces of dwarves, eyes hollow, mouths wide. They began to sing.
The song wasn’t words. It was resonance, a vibration that shook the lungs and turned bone to glass.
Several goblins collapsed screaming, blood pouring from their ears.
Maggra lifted her staff. “Enough hymns!”
With a bellow, she slammed it into the ground. Violet and black necrotic fire surged outward, eating through the runes like rot through silk. The singing turned to screams, the stone faces melting into slag.
The gate shattered.
The Red Maw poured in.