Challenge Submission What Was Once Lost

[Demonreach]

During the years of the Tyrant King, dwarves as a whole had been thought wiped to extinction; their tunnels collapsed, their cities lost; their men, women and children dead until only one remained, Hourdrith Stonebeard, and he lorded over the realms of Hayvn after the Tyrant had been slain with another four others at his side. The cousins of the dwarves, the gnomes, had isolated themselves in the search for any dwarven survivors, but found no success. The gnomes spoke of the shadows that haunted the halls; the oppressive silence in rooms that knew raucous commotion. It is said some gnomes ended their own lives in their grief and the searches were ended, though some never stopped looking; never gave up.

Of course, as the years went on and the absence of the dwarfs led to thieves and adventurers seeking the lost cities for their loot, though the gnomes had long since taken anything of value, there came rumors of people seeing or hearing things, becoming lost for hours or days, forever. The gnomes pleaded to Hourdrith Stonebeard to intervene, who had already been in the works of taking action.

With Hourdrith's blessing, the gnomes were allowed to process any and all who came to offer their services in exploring the lost cities of the dwarves. This led to some being turned away; this built resentment and would lead to illegal activities, though the gnomes were quick to deal harsh yet fair judgments to mitigate future offenses. The dwarves had built the entrances of their cities into the mountain ranges of the West; tunnels spanned far and wide, burrowing deep into earth and stone. Not just known entrances existed, but soon hidden, or secret, entrances were found as well. These were of course trapped and after losing a handful of people to these hidden door traps, the gnomes dedicated special teams in dealing with these special doorways.

In the first few months, as expeditions were sent deeper and deeper into the lost cities and tunnels; each passage, building, road, and highway were to be marked. These markings were used to indicate whether it had been searched, needed to be searched, held dangers, or was safe. During a checkup on a district in the fortress city, Thayer, that had been marked for future searching, a party became lost after some rubble had settled, revealing a large tunnel. When a few days had gone by without word, another party was sent in search of the one before it and like the one before, they too found the unmarked passage, however, they exercised caution and made camp while they waited for their messengers to come back with word.

This district would force this coalition of races into months' of work, following their lost comrades; discovering the fate of those too weak to go on, some driven to taking their own lives as hunger gnawed at their bones. More and more tunnels forked, expanding further east. As the tunnels diverged and their lost comrades died, the markings had begun to stop, though some noticed that there were older markings in the mouths of the tunnels; old and faded, these markings were an older 'dialect' of what the coalition was using. Most of the older markings spoke of being lost, pursued, begging for help.

Many wept at the realization that what they were seeing would have been the last words of the dwarves as they were being chased by the Endarkened; forced to dig as their warriors held off the enemy for months, cut off from the rest of the alliance. After nearly fifty years, the district-turned-battlefield held little remains of that long fought war. Those lost dwarves from the past held out for weeks, buying their Builders and Masons time before being forced into the very tunnels they had bled for. This had been much to the advantage of the dwarves, as they had made the tunnels just big enough for their own warriors to be comfortable swinging their weaponry; small swords, maces, one-handed axes. Crossbows were also well used. As the coalition explored deeper, they found ambush spots, tunnels that led to dead ends; places of concealment; entire systems had been built just to collapse, from either the floor or the ceiling. Other one-off tricks had been made to kill their pursuers, to buy themselves more time; more life.

In the end however, it would come down to a lone, human man named Turin who would come through the tunnels of the lost; a member of the lost expedition who had found the surviving dwarves of the Tyrant War, and their city. After the attacks had ceased, the dwarves couldn't make it back through the tunnels that they had collapsed or even dared to for they were exhausted, fearful of attacks. And so, more effort went into tunneling until they found sanctuary.

Turin spoke of a city called Sundria, a city that had been lost to the dwarves since the warring times with the gnomes, thousands of years ago; a city that the dwarves had been seeking to find and reclaim. A city only known to have existed through texts as ancient as the racial war itself; a city of a thousand wonders. Sundria had been the Heart of the dwarves, stood against the gnomes and their devices of war for nearly a century, and it had found purpose once again in housing the dwarves of this new age. Its protective walls offered respite after years of war, of survival. After the gnomes had taken the city, the greatest insult they could think of was to deny the dwarves its walls while rendering it useless. Eventually, once peace between the two races was reached, the city became forgotten save through those texts of old.

The fortress-city was grand in scope, and had been built inside a coastal cave, even supporting its own beach with a channel leading to the Black Sea; the beach had a severe drop off a few feet out. Stairways with thick crenellations lined the walls of the cave, the mouth of it having been widened and smoothed, the sharp turns becoming more subtle; giant iron-wrought gates hovered in the mouth like teeth. Giant aqueducts transferred snow melt to farms, a process uninterrupted for millenia. The lost dwarves of the Tyrant War found sustenance in the overgrown fields; even some small animals had found refuge and were made into meals. The walls were dark granite crafted at obtuse angles designed to keep ladders at bay --- hidden arrow slits along the walls provided additional defense for any would-be assailants, though in the near future cannons would be poking their black gaze outward. While the black granite had been imported to this location, the buildings and such that made up the city had been carved from the mountain, which had proven advantageous during the century-long siege and in the time since.

Sundria, once a rumored city now found, had been a masterwork in engineering, each rock had been placed intentionally, with care for a much more grand design; a genius that had yet to be reproduced. The city had withstood the test of time, stood as a testament to dwarven architecture, enduring in its own solitude, awaiting its new purpose; or, perhaps, to fulfill an old one.

The finding of the lost dwarves themselves was a grand thing, of course, but that's a story for another time. Just know, dear reader, Hourdrith Stonebeard was not ignorant long of his found kin.