The March of Ire & The Deepening Shadow

With King Throrin’s fiery rhetoric still echoing in their ears, the Bloodied Axe Brigade marched from Mount Hearthstone. They were a formidable sight, five hundred of Hearthstone’s strongest warriors, their beards braided tight, their polished scale mail glinting under the harsh glare of the entryway torches. Axes, heavy and wickedly sharp, rested on their shoulders, and their grim-set faces promised retribution. They moved with the earth-shaking tread of an avalanche, a physical embodiment of their king’s wrath, sent to reclaim a denied pleasure and punish the unknown transgressors. Throrin himself watched them go from a high battlement, a satisfied, almost hungry glint in his eyes.

Back within the mountain’s stifling embrace, however, a different kind_of fear was taking root. Days after the war party’s departure, two more miners, a veteran pair named Fendrel and Borin the Younger, failed to emerge from their shift in the "Deep Deeps." This time, their disappearance could not be so easily dismissed. A search party, their lamps casting nervous, dancing shadows, found their heavy mining picks abandoned mid-swing. Beside one, deeply scratched into the tunnel floor with the point of a broken chisel, was a single, jagged word: BELOW. Nearby, a section of the tunnel wall, which should have been solid bedrock, looked disturbed, almost bruised, with faint, unidentifiable scrape marks leading into an unmapped fissure no wider than a stout dwarf’s shoulders.

The news sent a tremor of genuine dread through the mining guilds. These were not novices to be lost by misadventure. The word "Below," stark and desperate, resonated with ancient, half-forgotten tales of things best left undisturbed in the mountain’s roots.

A delegation of three senior mining foremen, their faces pale beneath their customary stone dust, sought an urgent audience with King Throrin. They found him in his private war room, hunched over maps that charted the surface world, his fingers tracing routes towards the blighted Red Kingdom.

“Your Majesty,” stammered the eldest foreman, Grond, holding up a rubbing of the scratched word, “Fendrel and Borin… they’re gone. Vanished. This was found where they worked. The Deep Deeps… they are not safe.”

Throrin barely glanced up from his maps. A new, particularly rich seam of chalcedony had recently been reported near the area where the dwarves had disappeared, and his mind was already allocating its projected worth. “Not safe?” he scoffed, a vein pulsing in his temple. “Are dwarves now afraid of shadows and scratches? That mine is our lifeblood, Foreman Grond! Its treasures sustain us! Perhaps your men are simply looking for an excuse to shirk their duties now that the promise of Red Fruits has been… temporarily interrupted.”

“Sire, this is no trick!” another foreman, Olif, interjected, his voice tight with urgency. “The wall itself… it seemed almost… breached. From within. There are marks—”

“Marks?” Throrin slammed his palm on the map table, making the carved wooden markers jump. “I care for the marks of a pickaxe on gold ore, not fanciful scribblings! Are you suggesting we halt operations? Cower because of a few missing idlers and some scratches in the dirt?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Is this a ploy to disrupt the excavation of the new chalcedony vein? A plot to diminish Hearthstone’s glory while our finest warriors are away securing our future?”

The foremen recoiled, stunned by the King’s paranoid accusations. They saw not a concerned ruler, but a tyrant obsessed, deaf to any threat that didn’t directly involve his immediate, tangible desires – the Red Fruits from without, the endless stream of riches from within.

As they were dismissed, their grave warnings unheeded, several members of Throrin’s own Royal Council, who had witnessed the exchange from the chamber’s periphery, exchanged deeply troubled glances. The King’s focus was becoming dangerously singular, his temper more volatile. The ground beneath Mount Hearthstone, both literally and figuratively, felt increasingly unstable. The stakes, on two fronts now dangerously divergent, were rising with every passing hour.