On the Unlikely Heroship of Darwik Mossmantle, Dwarf

This short story was written for the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. The prompt was to write a short story in 6 days or fewer that featured:

Character - a goldsmith / Subject: side quest / Genre: fantasy.

On the Unlikely Heroship of Darwik Mossmantle, Dwarf

When my father was young, dwarves were strictly forbidden from questing. Evidently it was impossible to rely on our loyalty to the king — the hundreds of hours my father spent swordfighting and the high marks he scored on his merchantry examination apparently didn’t matter. Besides, the king insisted, with our small stature and slow, crooked gait, dwarves would not be able to keep pace with the challenges of a royal quest.

By the time I reached questing age myself, the king was freshly dead from gout and his four-year-old son, Curly, was just days away from his coronation. Times being what they were, the laws around volunteering for a quest had been significantly relaxed. While the royal court wasn’t explicitly accepting dwarves — or gnomes, faeries, orcs, or halflings — it was implied they weren’t going to check your paperwork if you volunteered.

When he heard this, my father, his rust-red beard now streaked with gray, ambled straight to the recruitment center in the town square and wrote down my name in his blocky script: DARWIK MOSSMANTLE.

I did not inherit most of my father’s distinguishing qualities, chief among them his adventurelust. I also didn’t take after his ability to spin common occurrences into breathtaking tales, or — as follows logically — his natural popularity with she-dwarves.

And then there was the family business: my first month as an apprentice in my father’s smithy had been a total failure. He’d put me on horseshoe repair duty for three weeks after I accidentally melted a client’s custom dagger hilt into a quivering pool of scorched silver. After that, it was obvious how he felt about my metalworking skills. It was hard not to think that the new questing regulations had come at a good time.

I embarked at dawn, flanked by a dozen men, all of them tall and square-jawed, horse hooves thundering. The castle and its surrounding villages shrank in a cloud of dust behind us.

I clung to my castle-issued pony, a nervous filly named Dewdancer. Some of my fellow questers had ridden their own steeds and worn their own polished chainmail, their gauntleted hands resting on jewel-encrusted scabbards at their hips. I was armored with only my leather riding boots, which provided a two-inch lift, and a pin-sharp iron pritchel I borrowed from my father’s smithy.

Our quest had been explained to us an hour earlier, as we gathered on the castle grounds in the dark, frigid morning. The portcullis had risen, inch by rickety inch, to reveal a thin man with silver eyes and oil-slick hair, leading a curly-haired toddler by the hand. I recognized the man from the town crier’s descriptions — the late king’s vizier.

His eyes swept over the small assembly. A chill ran down my spine as his gaze briefly landed on me — in that moment, I feared this steely man could peer directly into my soul.

The vizier unfurled a lengthy scroll of parchment and, in a strange accent I’d never heard before, proclaimed:

“The crown prince’s coronation chalice has been stolen.”

The knights around me responded in shock. The coronation would not be binding without the chalice.

“The royal sages believe a mysterious entity is to blame,” the vizier continued. “You shall ride to the East Wyvern Mountains. You shall face there a devious monster. You shall recover the golden chalice before the coronation in seven days’ time.”

Murmurs again broke out around me. Only seven days?

“Any further details are not known to the sages at this time.” The vizier rolled up the scroll with a snap.

After a long day of riding, we camped at the base of the East Wyverns. The mountain range was known to be treacherous, home not only to shifting glaciers and narrow passes, but also trolls, harpies, and dragons. The craggy peaks rose imposingly behind our campsite, cutting a stark, jagged shadow out of the ember sunset.

I lingered by the fire after supper, warming my hands, and noticed one of my fellow questers regarding me from across the flames. At first I thought nothing of it — I was, admittedly, an odd sight — but then, so was he. He was slight, only a few inches taller than me, and the dancing smoke seemed to concentrate in front of his face, blurring his features.

When he saw me watching him, he scooted around the campfire until he sat right beside me. Curiously, the smoke traveled along with him, puffs and wisps curling around his face and melting into the crisp night.

“Hello, dwarf,” he purred, his voice low and velvet. “I am Lieter. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Darwik,” I said, extending my hand. “And I am no dwarf. I am simply misfortunate enough to inherit my height from my mother’s side.”

I forced a laugh, looking into his eyes. They were as still and gray as the moon.

Lieter shrugged. “If you say so. In any case, I am not here to undermine your position. In fact, I am a kindred spirit: my kind is not often welcome on royal quests either. So I understand why you may feel you have something to prove.”

“Me? Not really.” I glanced around. All the others had retired to their tents, though I could have sworn a few stragglers were milling around the fire just a moment ago.

“Imagine,” said Lieter, “you return from your very first quest as a hero, a crafty dwarf leading a dozen mighty knights, golden chalice shining in your short arms. Why, it would look enormous against your frame. And you’d earn a chunk of coin, not to mention a title. Don’t you want that? Sir Darwik, the first ever hero dwarf?”

As he spoke, his voice dripping with promise, his words upturned in a delicate, musical lilt, I saw the picture he described in the pearly haze surrounding his face. I saw the pride in my father’s eyes.

I felt drunken. I shook my head to clear it, but it just made me dizzier.

“Alright then,” I said, trying to focus on his face. “What do you want me to do?”

I stumbled over rocks and weeds in the pitch-black as Lieter led me away from camp. After trudging a quarter mile through the whipping wind, we reached the rocky face of a mountain, and Lieter pointed out the mouth of a small cave. He darted up a cluster of boulders and branches — and I felt a pang of clarity. I knew, somehow, that I should not trust this stranger.

The winds changed and my head felt thick again. I followed Lieter awkwardly, scrambling up the rocks on my hands and knees.

The cave contained a small, working smithy, replete with a clay crucible hanging over a bronze brazier and several pairs of steel tongs, hammers, stakes, and files. Next to the makeshift forge sat a haphazard pile of gold bars and glittering gemstones. The sight of it made me go still. You could purchase a small army for that sum.

“The quest is doomed, unfortunately,” Lieter said. “The coronation chalice has already been destroyed.”

He pulled a parchment from his satchel and handed it to me. “If you produce a convincing duplicate, however, the coronation may continue as scheduled.”

The parchment displayed an impossibly detailed painting of the chalice, engraved with intricate, spiraling patterns and beset with thousands of minuscule jewels, sparkling in every color of the rainbow. It had certainly been forged by dwarves, probably centuries ago.

I would never be able to reproduce it.

I was possessed with a strange, unyielding focus while I worked, sweating over the sweltering forge as I heated and hammered and burnished and cooled. The clang of hammer on anvil echoed discordantly around the cave walls. Slowly, the molten gold began to take the shape of a chalice.

When I finally attached the final emerald, it felt like weeks had passed. But the moonlight glimmering through the mouth of the cave had never faded.

Lieter sat near the entry, still as a statue, while I worked.

“Are you finished?” He called, springing to his feet.

“I suppose so.” I stepped back, proud of what I’d created, although the final product did not much resemble the painting. While the jewels on the coronation chalice formed labyrinths, these looked more like ocean waves. My engravings were rustic. It was also slightly misshapen overall. I found myself wishing I could show it to my father.

“This is it?” Lieter turned over the imitation chalice and scowled. “What kind of dwarf are you?”

My heart sank.

“I can fix it,” I stammered. “Let me just add a few rubies to cover this part—”

I reached around for a sharp tool to poke a setting for the gem. Not finding anything, I pulled my iron pritchel from my pocket. I had used it to punch holes in horseshoes back at the smithy.

As soon as my fingers closed around the tool, my wits returned. Why had I let Lieter lead me away from the others? And to what end did he seek to use me?

Lieter’s eyes landed on the pritchel immediately. He leapt away from me and hissed:

“What is that? Put that away. I have provided plenty of proper tools for your use.”

When I was a child, my father taught me that every creature has a weakness. We'd drilled rhymes alongside the multiplication tables:

Silver blade slays lycanthrope,

Salted earth will stop a ghost,

And iron fells the faerie folk.

I brandished the iron pritchel in Lieter’s direction and he recoiled again.

“Stop it, dwarf!” He cried. “Your crude tool offends my sensibilities. Cast it into the flame!”

If Lieter was indeed fae, he could easily enchant the chalice I’d forged. As soon as the child-king sipped from the cursed object, the faerie would grasp immense power.

Lieter lunged, trying to knock the pritchel into the flaming brazier. I ducked and he sailed over my head.

Before he could recover, I hurried to his side and drove the pritchel into his chest.

When the iron touched him, the cloud of smoke obscuring his face dissipated, and I saw Lieter clearly for the first time. His skin was pale and wan. His iridescent hair dripped down his neck like wet paint, and his steel-gray eyes burned even as he gasped for air. Lieter was the late king’s vizier.

The vizier dissolved into thick, gray smoke. His eyes were the last to fade — the twin silver pools searing into me, reminding me for all the world of the melted dagger hilt in my father’s smithy.

The rosy dawn was just peeking over the cliffs by the time I returned to camp. I told one of the more senior knights what I’d experienced, but he brushed me off:

“If you are too cowardly to continue into the mountains with us, just say so. You may turn back here if you wish.”

The parchment the vizier had given me, the imitation chalice, and the forgery tools had all vanished into smoke when Lieter did. So I had nothing to offer in the way of proof.

I considered doing as he’d suggested and simply riding back home. But I still wasn’t entirely sure of what had really happened. I didn’t know if it was the faerie I killed, or just a projection. I also didn’t know if he spoke the truth about the real chalice being destroyed. It was possible it really did lie hidden somewhere in the Wyverns.

So I decided to find out.

I mounted Dewdancer and we rode out with the other knights, climbing high into the mountains. After surviving my encounter with the fae vizier, I sat a little straighter in my saddle, my shoulders pulled back, chin up.

As the day wore on, the sun emerged from a thick layer of clouds, and I removed my helmet so I could feel the warm light on my face. And a gentle breeze ran through my beard.