The Diaspora of Magmalion
“And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes… As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.”
These are fragments of the lives of the dwarves who fled the burning of the Fortress Magmalion. They went out, each of them alone, to every corner of the world, and took up many lives. But none of them, not one, ever forgot those history-encrusted halls, the deep and sweat-won darkness of the earth, or the million intricate beauties wrought in worship of the tunneled world.
Those memories lay within each of them, compressed by anger and need, until like oil it bubbled out of their lips into ballads woven by tavern-fire to strangers. No dwarves now remain, but all who sing their songs are reminded of their glittering obsidian eyes. Their mountain-hymns will echo out into a world of surface-dwellers, for as long as folk bend their voices low and sing drunkenly of the lost homes and dead cultures that now slumber so thickly in the earth they threaten to swallow us all.
One of the hymns is about you, about the time you spent with us between the fire and the total extinction of your kind.
Roll 2d100 to remember your age. Rolls below 20 count as 20.
Find your age below and roll a d20 to determine what we will sing tonight.
20-50: “Dwarfling”
The first generation born in sunlight.
You were raised as a gnome among humans. You never knew why your body grew so thick and strong, or why the sight of mountains makes a spring well up behind your eyes.
Orphanage child. Blow-absorber. The furnace of your soul needs no nostalgia.
Your parents taught you the spiritual rites of craftsdwarfship. You bent it to human ends, but something of that old religion remains.
Half-human. Tall of stature, short of beard. Your mother sang you strange, sad petro-lullabies. You will not abandon your people, whether or not they will have you.
In Magmalion they would have called you “fooldelver.” The ambition of the Fortress, the lust for its labyrinths, is alive and dangerously unbridled in you.
Dwarves are not suited for courtwork, but you found you could play the jester well enough. In that caricature of your ancestors, you found levity, safety, and shame.
You were raised among greybeards who all drowned on fermented reminiscing. You came to despise dreams of the past.
The petty grottos that sprang up in the early days were universally hellish. Not places for children. That dark poverty left you with trauma of your own— and a crippling claustrophobia.
Your father, mad from loss, branded your body with a map to the family hoard. You don’t know what that crypt still holds, and you can’t yet tell if you care.
The humans sent you out into the underbrush, seeking game with the dogs. You are as feral as you are cunning.
Already you have discovered the dwarfcandy. Bituminous White, drug of drugs. You salivate over tales of the old crystal mines, and cannot bring yourself to heed the warnings.
Among the fables of Magmalion are whispers of temples where dead dwarves were sewn together with adamantine thread and given new life. Your parents cry out to you from their fresh graves.
The axe was unlike anything you’d ever seen— so glorious in its craftsdwarfship as to awaken something within you. You hefted it in your young hands, and understood for the first time that there could be nobility in treasure-lust.
Your only possession worth anything is an heirloom— a small bag of 1d20 sapphires in beautiful rosette cuts. Selling one could save your life, but you can barely stand to think of it.
You were brought up to cherish xenophobia, to despise non-dwarves with a passion. Race-hatred takes time and love to heal, scarce commodities in your life. But you are trying.
You have the gift, the voice of liquid gold. You know you will need old songs to realize its full potential.
You first tasted camaraderie on the battlefield. When your human squadmates were all dead or gone, you began to yearn for bearded company, and the warm embrace of your people.
You have taken a human lover. They ask you questions about yourself you cannot answer.
You have begun to suspect that your soul is not your own, but the Mountainlord reincarnated. There is no such tradition in dwarflore, but that cannot stop you. Surely, you were made for more than this.
You were born out of nothing, it seems, as if you sprang unbidden from the countryside. Nothing in your heart, your head, or your hand. Nothing is your way.
51-100: “Strippling”
Young when the fire came.
Everything before the fire is blank in your memory. You sleep little, and beat your skull at night, but you cannot recapture it.
In the last days, when everything fell apart, men came promising security for secrecy. You believed them, and left doors unlocked. You watched in horror as they plundered everything you held dear.
Former slave. Freed by your own hand. You were forced to build the homes of others. In each of them, you left pieces of your own.
Former slave. Freed by the hand of another. That debt has congealed into slavery of another kind.
You were down in the mines, crawled out through an air shaft. You took with you only a single opal, big as an egg and bright. You hold it close as a memento of cowardice.
You fell in with dwarfhunters— strange collectors that seek your people for what little trinkets they still bear. Your expertise has brought down many of your brethren.
You were just a terrified teenager clutching a spear. You fought harder than anyone expected, than anyone could have asked. On that night, you were a hero. Look what it got you.
You were an alchemist’s apprentice, heir to the dwarven sorcery. Your knowledge is full of unsolved secrets, lessons left unfinished. The esoteric power you almost wield is tantalizing beyond words.
Whatever ore-hormone that makes a dwarf a dwarf never ran in your veins. Diaspora life suits you fine. You carried an inadequacy with you even before, but it’s only grown with time.
Naturally willowy-tall. Without the beard, you pass as human. You’ve been forced to. You’re an expert at keeping your stories to yourself.
Oh, to be in love in Magmalion. The gilded courtships, the good-natured clan banter, the raucous wedding feasts. Oh, to lose everything in an instant. To watch your universe collapse. To hold a dying lover in your arms.
Little is said of dwarven cuisine, for it was as secret and occult as all the rest. The traditions live on in your pot, alien to human palates. With a little rock-salt and cave mushroom, you can weave a story as sad and full as any tome.
Shrine child, acolyte to Adamantium. The disbanded church of the earth calls out to you. In unguarded moments, you cannot stop yourself from uttering prayers.
In the Fortress, you were delinquent. Whiled away your time between the wine cellar and the dungeon. Now, you were always upstanding, first in work and first to the ramparts. By your own account, at least.
You were domestic help to the Elders, their silent service. From behind a tray and a broomhandle you witnessed their folly firsthand. No one will believe you now.
You know what you were born for. The ocre glow of molten pre-treasure. The godlike swing of a hammer. The clanging music of dwarven thoughts made real in metal. That is what was taken from you: a purpose.
There are, you say, still clades of dwarves that live and work in sealed pockets below Magmalion. You’ve seen it; more treasure than any dwarf could desire. So you say.
You are among those who say that the fire was started by a dragon. He came out of the night, bloodthirsty and burning, bringing with him the end of the world. It puzzles you to no end how few of your comrades corroborate this.
You deal the Bituminous White. From your secret cache, discovered by accident, flows the thought-numbing supply of an entire diaspora. From this you have gotten safety, even power, of a kind. You cannot bring yourself to check how much is left.
You were no-one then, and you are no-one now. No great talent, no real bravery, no tremendous work ethic. But you ache with love for your people all the same. It overwhelms you often, makes you weepy and weak. That is your gift, though you don’t yet know it.
101-150: “Hale Ones”
A fully formed dwarf, strong and crafty and true, is a glorious thing. Unfortunately, few now can achieve that, even when they live long enough.
You’ve spent your new life behind a human bar. Mostly it’s dull, undwarfish work. But every now and then, when the fishermen come in from the cold to get really good and drunk, and the songs swell up around the rafters, and new friends lean in close to hear your strange tales, you’re reminded of the world you left behind.
Priest to Tourmaline. In exile, your sermons have grown harsher, darker, more violent.
If your skill in bloodletting wasn’t perfected before the fire, it is now. Everyone falls apart like broken toys before your blade. You are afraid to put it down. Not because of any attack, but because of what you might become.
Craftsdwarf. Creation incarnate. Once you reflected nature in myriad baubles and beauties. You felt beautiful too, then. Now what you make is useful or wicked or base. You have become a ghost, you fear. Sometimes you use your hammer like you used to, just to prove you still can.
They tore you apart. Burnt, blind, scarred beyond recognition. But your soul flares bright, and your mind has made itself agile, driven by an enigmatic truth: it was dwarves who did this.
Among all creation, they say dwarves are cursed most of all with the love of drink. You have bravely put this to the test, and found it incomplete. It is not dwarfkind, nor dwarfkin, but you alone. You, you, you. You are lower even than the ticks that fall from you, dead drunk off your blood.
Back then you were just an antisocial clerk with a book addiction. Now you’ve found your use; they call you the Library. They can never find out what keeps you up at night, how little you really recall.
It is a hard thing to raise a family alone. Harder still to do it in exile.Your child looks at you with eyes that know nothing of mountains and treasure and fire. Can you change that? Should you?
You were anything you needed to be to get out under the stars. A roamer, a ranger, a scout and a courier. And then you returned once, to smoking darkness. Without your mooring, you’ve let yourself wander farther than anyone ever should.
You once bent alchemy to the will of the Fortress. Plumbed the depths of chemo-thaumaturgy for your people. You witnessed firsthand how your tools clove dwarfflesh, how your secrets were bent and misused even before the end. Your will is set: this power dies with you.
In another life, you tore things violently from the earth’s womb with wedge and shovel and pick. Now you do what few dwarves can— you coax things up, green and tender and beautiful. It took all that has happened to teach you the gardener’s secret: every life is an unimaginably precious thing.
Let the bow bend without breaking. Let the string sing its pained song. Let the arrow fly true like a comet. May it find the armor-chink and the artery. This is your constant prayer, even as it is answered less and less. Even after it was denied when needed most.
You are one of many that build, a Grotto Lord. Now there is little but mud and hunger and crude copper. But in your dream, the embryo of a Fortress is being made. The dream is only shaken when you look into your followers’ eyes.
Engraver. Storycarver. Chisel-charmer. Your hands move always, beyond your control, encoding dark histories and contorted images into every surface.
You were a slave for so long that you transcended it. Became someone. Now you clutch what little you have been given tighter than should be possible, even as you grow to despise it. To despise yourself.
In your hands, lyres cry. Harps weep. Mandolins scatter jeweled tears out into the dark. If you were blessed again with dwarven company around a fire, their voices would rise up together in a low and harmonious sonor. It seems to you that somehow, some small thing could be repaired like that.
Monsters crawl around inside your skull. You have seen a thousand secret tragedies, and they have almost eaten you alive. You are broken down, battered, obliterated as completely as your Magmalion. Whoever you once were, now you are really very little.
Fortress politics were arcane and poorly-understood, even to dwarves. You were deep into it, learned to read it and steer its flow. One thing you know, though all the evidence has been obliterated: you, both collective and singular, were not innocent in what happened. You are unsure how much of this is yours to reveal.
You walked the path of the wild one. In the highlands you found the great bear that feasted on your brethren, that ate their treasures from off their corpses. There you cast aside your weapon, there you made your stand in their memory. There you were mauled within an inch of your life, dropped like carrion. Now you cannot walk at all.
Humans have a tendency to call you “Job.” Dirt eater. Skeletal. Seeming always to bleed. Most would not know you are alive, looking at you. But you are. Oh, you are, in ways they couldn’t possibly imagine.
151-200: “Greybeard”
Pity of pities, to live to see such days as this. And yet, that is their way. Dwarves are not given to surrender, even when it would be wise.
Street corners, stables, the ankles of tavern-goers. These are your haunts. Sympathy and pity are your instruments, and you play them well. Alms, alms for the homeless greybeard.
In ancient days, dwarves were said to have mastered a form of meditation that was theirs alone. Their greybeards did not eat, did not sleep, did not move, it is said. They became as stones, still and cold and inert, but alive. For centuries and centuries. Who can say how old you really are?
Empty in all things are you. One with the landscape and drifting. You have taken on a kind of absence that makes you nearly invisible. Those who can focus hard enough to meet your gaze are struck by how phenomenally little they see.
Oracle of Dolomite. Seer of the mountain entrails. Diviner of seam and vein. You saw it all coming long ago, but were powerless to stop it. The minds of dwarves are often hard, blind to the future on purpose. Without the mines and the minerals, you are much the same. You see nothing now.
You were called Hammer Handle, highest among smiths. A good quarter of the legendary weapons spoken of in this part of the world were born on your anvil. With them, men drove out the dragons, slaughtered the trolls in their homes, and loosed every elven head from its neck. After all that, they came upon Magmalion as it was burning, and brought the death back home. You know, sure in the certainty of the cycle, that you will die on your own blade.
There was a time when dwarves were thought to be immune to sickness, so well-adjusted were they to their environment. You and those like you have disabused the world of this notion. Frail as a dry branch, heaving as your organs decay, swaddled in bandages like a child. You know you are not long for this world. There is a kind of power in that, you suspect.
A healthy dwarf can remain strong long into old age. Can retain the strength of grip to do dark things to necks. Can climb over windowsills and down passageways as quiet as the breeze, to enact savage arts on the innocent. Can hoard bodies like treasure. A certain dwarf could do that, yes.
Dwarves have never been known for their decency. But you know that this is no longer a dwarf’s world. Kindness flows from you like wellwater from Magmalion’s great gargoyles, filling up everyone you meet with a kind of bittersweet thankfulness. Just to have met you. To have seen the miracle of you.
An Elder, that was you. The politicians never did revere minerals with the common folk. They worshiped power itself, and to them you were a god. Only now, at the cruelest of times, have you learned the folly of those ways.
A spirit came to you one night, not long after the Fortress had gone. It was made of fire and spoke in ancient dwarven tongues only you could have understood, mutterings of revenge. You struck a deal then, to carry it with you. It rides within you still, and as you wane unfulfilled, it has only waxed.
You travel hooded and cloaked, with a shadow on your face. Your name you do not speak. Those you meet think you a sorcerer or errant king, which suits you fine. Really, you are just light-shy.
You are, to your knowledge, the only dwarven shipwright. It’s a shame, too— nothing is so dwarfish, in your estimation, as fashioning a boat. But your people were never much for water, never saw the cataclysmic beauty in its mountainous terrain like you do.
Before that long and lonely decline, there were some in the Fortress who spoke of the stars. Of the minerals in the heavens, reachable with the right application of bombcraft. All those projects fell away or self-destructed, but you carry that dream. At night you look up at the gem mosaic, and wonder what it would be like to escape the earth itself.
You have seen the signs clearer than any oracle’s vision. When Magmalion fell from without and within, it was sudden but not unforeseeable. There had been tells. You have spent all these years pondering them, wondering if anything could have been different. So you are certain beyond certainty when you say that it is happening again. This human world will not hold for long, in the face of that fire.
Bravery once came easily to you. You stared down death and plucked treasures from its jaws, feasted on its flesh. Your ability hasn’t left you, not quite yet. But when you move to draw your sword, faces appear before you. Dwarves clogging the mineshafts where they were thrown, the living drowning in the dead. Maybe it is cowardice that makes you falter. Or maybe, in the face of that, bravery is a flimsy stick shaken by a child.
You did your time in the bottle. Mined below rock bottom until geothermals nearly cooked you alive. But you got out. By the beard, you got free. You awaken every day in the shadow of that miracle, always a single step from going back.
When you held your grandson in your arms, the tears flowed fast and freely, until your beard was salt-stained as he gummed it. You knew at that moment what the Sage of Selenite had meant when she said so long ago: “This is our Fortress, here at my breast. This is our treasure, our coffers, our hoard.”
You breathe ghosts. Around you, below you, within you they are. Everywhere, in everything, for all of time, wail the restless spirits of dwarves. They cry out to you, pleading for things no-one can give. Just as powerless as they always were.
You have become a painter, a rarity among your people. For a time, your art was black in color and spirit, visions of cave-ins and crawling corpses and fire. Nowadays, you can’t help but paint the past. The magma hearth, weddings, ale among friends. Warmth spills from every canvas in jasper and sapphire tones. Your heart is more broken than ever.
“Looks to the Ivory Peak” is the meaning of the name they gave you. It is all you carry lately. You heed its command at the foothills, and survey that cruel summit. The life you lived is fading away within you, washed away by the muddy brook that wells from your fractured soul. Soon, the name will go too. What will become of you then, little dwarf? Will you watch those mountains still?
“There is no greater curse than resilience, brother. And in that, we got the worst of it. We are called the ‘stone ones,’ which can mean many things. Hard, strong, brittle, dead. In our language, a stone is that which is still here after all of time. So that’s it, then. That is the curse of my people. To be here. Here is all we are.
Here we will remain, though our bodies become stones.”
Special thanks to Tarn & Zack Adams, to Dabu & Simon Swerwer for their music, and to Tolkien.