>>5678337>>5678289>>5678222>>5678217>>5678194>>5678146>>5678126>>5678097You take a deep breath and regard yourself in the mirror—clad in leather and elf-woven greatworm silk, died black and adorned with looted gems. Your quarters—the largest you’ve yet inhabited, taken from a Gems-Be-We corporate mine-manager—are full of symbols of your victories: helms of fallen foes; deep-spiders and cave-vipers which uneasily tolerate each other and await your command; and your bedmate for the day, asleep among your roughshod sheets atop a feather-filled bed so luxurious most dwarves would regard it as decadent, a n invitation to indolence and sin.
Sin…
What is sin? Your whole life, you were regarded as a sinful in some way. As ‘weak’. As ‘wrong’. That wasn’t the truth, though. The other dwarves were wrong—about you, the gods, the way forward. They break now because, inflexible and narrow of view, they cannot adapt to the new world—the world of dragons, and Dark Gods, and Duergar.
“Karz…?”
Ah, he’s awake. Your lover looks at you in confusion, and with a hopeful note asks:
“Why are you dressed?”
Implying you need not be—that you could return to bed. You smile slightly.
“because there’s work to be done,” you say simply.
No shame here, no, none at all. You are on the right side of history… And by your will, so soon shall the rest of your people be. It may hurt in the interim, but they will be made stronger for it—as you have been. They'll all hear the Ballad of Pride...
