The Lure of Dwarven Spoil

The afterimage of that… that thing in the deep cavern – the impossible, shifting blackness that had screamed silent horrors into Gnikpaugh’s fleeting glimpse – had done wonders for his motivation. Greed, while a powerful goblin motivator, paled in comparison to the sheer, bowel-loosening terror instilled by an entity that clearly didn't operate on the same plane of reality as, say, a slightly larger cave beetle. The "Upper Mines," once a tantalizing prospect of "easy shinies," now represented something far more valuable: a distinct lack of sanity-devouring, geometrically improbable voids.

Gnikpaugh, bless his pointed little head, still limped from our troll-wrestling extravaganza, but his pace as we ascended from the truly Deep Deeps was surprisingly brisk. He clutched me tightly, no longer just as "Ol' Rusty" the lucky shiv, but more like a drowning man clings to a particularly pointy piece of driftwood. Every flicker of a distant fungus, every echoing drip, sent him into a paroxysm of nervous twitches.

“Big floaty dark badness… no like Gnikpaugh… no like Ol’ Rusty…” he’d mutter, his voice a low, fearful drone.

Couldn't agree more, my little green friend, I’d think, though my own internal landscape was a whirlwind of different anxieties. The closer we got to areas that hummed with the faint, distant thrum of dwarven activity, the more that strange sense of foreboding mixed with an almost magnetic pull intensified within me. And the memory flashes… they were changing.

No longer just disconnected sparks of heat and sound, they were beginning to coalesce, forming brief, almost coherent vignettes. I’d be enduring Gnikpaugh’s off-key humming as he navigated a narrow passage, and then, for a heart-stopping instant, I’d feel it: the searing kiss of the forge fire, more intense than ever before, followed by the deafening, rhythmic CRACK-thump, CRACK-thump of a master smith’s hammer. Not just any hammer, but one I could almost picture – its face broad and slightly convex, its haft wrapped in worn, dark leather. I could feel the very grain of the metal I was, or was part of, shifting, compressing, taking shape under those powerful, deliberate blows.

Then, another flash: the same booming voice I’d heard before, not just a single battle cry this time, but a string of commands, guttural and resonant, spoken in that unfamiliar yet stirring tongue. The words themselves were lost to me, but the intent behind them was crystal clear: Temper true! Edge keen! Purpose unwavering! For the Clan! For the Hold!

The sensations were so vivid, so real, that they left me reeling when Gnikpaugh’s clumsy stumble would inevitably snap me back to the present – a present filled with the smell of damp rock and nervous goblin. I was being shaped. Forged. Intended. The thought was both terrifying and exhilarating. Someone, somewhere, had poured immense skill and will into my creation, and it certainly wasn't for poking grubs or scratching goblin itches.

Right, so we're trading 'soul-devouring eldritch abominations' for 'heavily armed, notoriously grumpy individuals with a penchant for mining and grudges,' I mused, as the air grew slightly less fetid and the tunnels began to show the first, faint signs of deliberate excavation. It's a lateral move in the 'ways to meet a pointy end' department, but at least the architecture might be nicer. And maybe, just maybe, these dwarves know how to use a whetstone properly. These memory-flickers… someone definitely put a lot of effort into making me. I truly hope they had better taste in initial wielders than my current, trembling ride. Or perhaps this is all some elaborate cosmic joke, and I was originally a very fancy letter opener. The thought was almost enough to make me… well, if I could have sighed, I would have. Profoundly.