Heart of Oak

The dwarven city was unrivaled in its engineering wonder. It was carved out of the cave rather than being built afterward. The Dwarves had plans to live in this city long term, not just until the mines ran dry. It was dark and damp, but also airy enough to not reek of mold and mildew, or be poisoned with fumes.

Dmahdi peaked out into the open chamber. They had a small window of opportunity to get out of the storage closet and into the big city. “Come on, we need to move!”

The warband made a break for it, running across a hundred yards of open cave before entering the alleys of the dwarven city. As they got all cozy in their new hiding spot, another gnoll and wagon approached the entryway of the food cave.

”Good call, Dmahdi.” Roderick patted her shoulder and then peered down the city streets. It seemed the outskirts of the city were devoid of gnolls. To Roderick’s right was a door into one of the two-story square houses. “Quickly, inside.”

The door slammed shut behind them. The interior of the house was quiet, but not empty. Staring back at them was a pair of beady red eyes and the barrel of a device unfamiliar to them but they knew well it was a weapon. A feminine voice snapped at them, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” She spoke quickly with not a breath between sentences.

Roderick placed a finger on the top of the weapon’s tip and slowly pushed it down. “Friends of Jodi and Kathanac.”

One of the eyes on the dark blue raton got larger. “Who?”

”Right, a century. A pair of dwarves who escaped a hundred years ago,” Roderick’s hands were back up in the air when the weapon’s dominance was reasserted. “We’re here to free the dwarves.”

Dmahdi towered over them from the back row, “Whatcha got there?”

The raton lowered the weapon, still questioning the sudden arrival of the group of foreigners. “A mousket. Dwarves called it a boomshot.” She outstretched her gloved hand. “Name’s Ghosse, Firish Ghosse.”

”Roderick Helsmouth. This is the Green Thorn Warband, Dmahdi, Sedel, Finnegan, and Roshka.” He gestured to each one as he said their name.

”Warband? I’m guessing the king didn’t send you? Damn, I was hoping for a better deal.” The raton grumbled.

Roderick eyed the weirdly dressed raton. She wore pants, a trench coat, and a flat-brimmed cap with goggles on it, all colored brightly in white and gold, a stark contrast to her dark blue fur and deep red and orange face paint. Only the hair on her head, all pushed to one side, matched her unusual outfit with a strong yellow color.

The raton saw Roderick’s curious gaze and jabbed the barrel of her gun at him. “What you looking at?”

”I was expecting dwarves, not a raton. Speaking of which, are you by yourself?” Roderick scanned the room but saw nothing else in the shadows.

”They’re around. It’s easier to evade the gnolls solo. Admittedly, I am a bit shocked you all haven’t alerted them.” The raton sat down on the staircase and examined her mousket. “If you want to find the rest of the dwarves, head to the opposite end of the city, follow the signs to the mining zone, and you’ll find the slave cages.”

”Why aren’t you with them?” Roderick asked her.

”I escaped. I escaped slavery, but I’m still trapped here. It’s hard to get out the front door when it’s guarded by a dozen gnolls. Before you ask, no I will not travel with you all back into those tunnels. I have my own job out here.” She pulled a smaller hand-sized large-mouthed mousket from her coat. “When you free the dwarves, activate this with it pointed to the ceiling. The rest of us will join the rebellion.”

Roderick took the hand mousket from her. “What is it?”

”Signal launcher. Pull the trigger and it’ll send up a bright colored light and make a very loud popping noise.” Firish crossed one leg over the other. “I’ll be waiting here.”

Roderick pushed open the front door and leaned out. The streets were empty. “Come on.”

The warband jumped from street to street, steering clear of gnollish patrols. As they traveled through the heart of the city, a realization came to them. Going through some of the houses to hide, the interiors were trashed and pillaged. A few of them however showed signs of someone living in them. At the heart of the city was a tower, going from floor to ceiling of the cave, and boasted several outlooks and balconies where gnollish archers were stationed.

The warband entered another house, hiding in its confines from a scarily close encounter with a gnollish patrol. Upstairs, they all heard very loud snoring. Finnegan scrambled up the stairs with Roshka following behind him. The second floor opened up into a large bedroom with a pair of gnolls fast asleep in a dwarven bed. Their legs hung over the foot of the bed and the blanket was balled up and on the floor.

Finnegan and Roshka looked at each other and then silently moved to opposite sides of the bed. Their targets were fast asleep and unaware of what was about to happen. Roshka pulled his daggers and cut deep into the first gnoll’s throat, giving it a silent death. Finnegan grabbed the thick cotton blanket and shoved it into the second gnoll’s face. It awoke in a panic and tried screaming, only to get a fistful of cotton shoved into its mouth.

A few minutes later, Finnegan and Roshka walked back down the stairs and gave a thumbs up to Roderick, who was on edge the entire time. Knowing the upstairs was no longer a risk, Roderick turned to the others, “Alright, we got one more stretch before we enter the mines. It is going to be crowded and we’ll probably be going in fighting. As long as we keep it contained to the tunnels, we shouldn’t need to worry about reinforcements.”

Dmahdi looked through one of the windows and saw something unusual. “Hey Ricky, what’s that?”

Roderick looked out the same window and saw a wood totem covered in dry leaves, vines, and moss netting, iron shackles rested on it. “Looks like some sort of tribal totem?”

Standing beside it was a gnoll in flowing tattered robes, bowing and standing in repeated succession to it, burning incense in a dwarven thurible. It was howling and growling and making other dog-like noises.

”That is a shaman,” Roderick said, stepping away from the window. “This just got a lot harder.”

Sedel moved up to get a look. “What makes you say that? They’re alone.”

”I did some quick reading on gnolls before we left. Gnollish shamans channel their deity in horrific ways and apparently know mind domination spells.”

Dmahdi and Sedel both slowly turned their heads and displayed a very horrified look. Dmahdi gulped. “Dominated? By gnolls?”

Roderick shrugged, “Look, I don’t know how it works. I just know that their god, Thezec specializes in slavery. It only makes sense that if they worship him, they’d get his boons. Mental domination is very useful if you’re running a slave empire.”

Roshka white knuckle gripped his daggers. “Lowly filth,” he grumbled.

Roderick took a second look out the window. “Dmahdi, charge down the middle, get that shaman’s attention. Sedel, cast counterspell once that gnoll starts spouting garbage. Finnegan and Roshka, you two disappear down that tunnel and deny it any reinforcements. I’ll come in from the flank and break its connection.”

Dmahdi took a deep breath. The gnoll’s back was turned towards her. It was very distracted on the totem which was now showing unnerving amounts of purple mana swirling around it. She took a deep breath and slowed down her heartbeat. “This is for clan Mulhol. I am strong. I am Strong. I. Am. Strong.” She narrowed her gaze upon the unaware gnoll and tightened her grip on the halberd. She charged forward, clanking all the metal plates of her heavy armor.

The gnoll turned around, confused by the new noise, only to see a charging orc in black iron armor. It threw back the tattered hood and raised the dwarven thurible up high, barking in gnollish.

Sedel held out her staff and began casting a counterspell.

Dmahdi continued her charge forward, entering melee range of the gnoll, and took a wide swing, digging the ax head into the gnoll’s abdomen and spinning with it. The gnoll was launched off to the side, staggered. It outstretched its hand and threw a cloud of burning smoke at the orc, blinding her.

Roderick charged in from the side, running around the smokescreen and shield bashed the gnoll, knocking it prone. With a second attack, he brought down his ax and lodged it into the shaman’s chest.

The gnoll howled out in pain and whipped Roderick across the face with the dwarven thurible. The smokescreen quickly dissipated thereafter.

No longer blinded, Dmahdi dashed towards the gnoll and brought it down in a great mighty swing, cleaving open its chest and fracturing its spine.

The gnoll fell silent, unconscious from the shock of the pain it experienced. Its chest was split open wide and very quickly, it bled to death.

Roderick turned to Dmahdi, “Quick, grab its legs and follow me.” He then grabbed the arms and the two of them carried the corpse into the tunnel. As Sedel ran to follow them, waved a hand, and disappeared the spilled blood.

A couple dozen feet into the tunnel, they set down the body. Up ahead, Roshka and Finnegan were crouched behind some stalagmites. Roderick approached and crouched down behind them. “What’s it looking like?”

”I see a thousand dwarves and one labyrinth of a mineshaft network. Among them, I see about a hundred or so gnolls.” Roshka then pointed to the wall of cages. “Over there is the slave master. He’s the largest one in the cave and wears the most armor. If we take him down and sound the alarm bell, we can rally the dwarves to rebel.”

Roderick nodded, “Good work. The shaman went down easily, so nothing should come to hit our flanks.” Roderick side-eyed the gnollish slave master. He was a massive brute. Even from a hundred yards away looked like a giant. “Same plan as before, you two skulk in the shadows and ambush him.” Roderick then turned to Dmahdi and Sedel. “Dmahdi, you and me are going to get up close and personal with that slave master. Sedel, you’re on crowd control.”

Sedel smiled, holding a small flame in her hand.

The path forward was not an easy one to navigate. Stalagmites proved themselves a most useful resource. The cave was fairly large, having been excavated on purpose as a central resource-gathering chamber for all of the hundreds of mine shafts that spiderwebbed out of it. Minecarts were filled to the brim with stone and metals, being rolled around on rails by physically deficient dwarves. Gnolls stood around, hyenas laughing and barking at each other in their own language. The slave master was an eight-foot-tall brute with a cat-o-nine-tails with metal tabs on the ends for extra damage during floggings.

The back wall where the slave master paced in front was a massive collection of animal cages. Some of them were dwarves who looked physically ill or so gaunt that they were useless to the gnolls. Centrally located in the whole cave was an alarm bell, about helmet-sized with a dongle rope, mounted to a lonesome wood beam.

However, there was something else they hadn’t seen originally. Beside the cages was a flogging post with a dwarf strapped to it. Across the dwarf’s back were a dozen scars, healed and freshly ripped alike. The gnoll was pacing back and forth, playing with the whip in an almost joyful way, wiping the blood off of it and licking it from his fingers.

Dmahdi and Roderick got as close as they could from their cover. They looked at each other, then at the bound-up dwarf. They needed to move soon if they wanted to save them.

Dmahdi stood up and roared, “I want to Rage!” Then broke out into a mad sprint towards the gnoll, halberd at the ready. Quickly closing the gap, Dmahdi thrust the spear tip at the halberd’s head towards the gnoll.

The gnoll sidestepped the jab and retaliated with a crack of the whip, scratching and gouging the back plates of Dmahdi’s armor.

Roderick followed suit behind the orc and flanked the gnoll giving his ax a wide swing. It clipped the back plate of the gnoll’s armor, skipping off the surface. Roderick swung again, this time at its exposed legs and the ax took a nasty bite out of the gnoll’s haunches.

Roshka turned to Finnegan with a smile, “Go stabbing.”

Finnegan dashed out from his hiding spot on the opposite side and rushed the gnoll. He thrusted his pike forward and pierced through the gnoll’s shoulder.

The gnoll screamed in pain and grabbed Roderick by the head, and threw him a dozen yards across the cave. It then turned to Dmahdi and cracked the whip at her. The orc’s pauldron was ripped off her shoulder and with a ferocious vengeance, the gnoll leaped at the orc and bit down on the exposed flesh.

Roshka saw something from his spot. Not too far away from the fight was another shaman, similar to the one at the mouth of the tunnel. This one was much older and had a lot more shrunken heads and skulls dangling from its belt. It waved around not an incense burner but a large witch staff decorated in black feathers and bone fragments. Purple magic glowed from the gemstone-like source mounted at the peak of the staff.

He stepped back from the slave master fight and stealthily made his way towards the shaman. It was much easier to get up close with no one else near him. He drew a poison-tipped dart from his ammo bag and threw it. The dart hit home, piercing the neck of the gnoll, and interrupting whatever spell it was trying to cast.

The shaman yanked the dart out and threw it to the floor, looking right at Roshka. The shaman pointed a finger at him and its eyes flashed purple for a moment.

The slave master gnoll yanked back and ripped out a chunk of Dmahdi’s shoulder, then snapped the pike off in his shoulder and growled at Finnegan.

The orc threw down the halberd and tackled the gnoll to the ground, punching it several times in the snout. The gnoll’s jawbones echoed a breathtaking series of cracks and crunches with each hit from the orc’s metal-reinforced hands.

Seizing the opportunity, Roderick doubled down on his strikes, sending two hard swings into the gnoll’s leg, severing it at the knee.

From on high, Sedel was watching the slaver master fight go impressively well. The other gnolls in the cave were now very aware of what was going on and began to move in force. “Fireball, oh Fireball, show them their folly,” Sedel grinned sadistically and threw a large sphere of raging inferno down at the largest gathering of gnolls. It exploded violently, knocking down many of the gnolls and pelting others with rocky shrapnel. Then she raised a hand and blue lightning crackled in her gasp. Slowly lowering her arm, she pointed a single finger towards the same crowd she’d just hit and a series of bolts of lightning jumped across the air and gave the gnolls an electrifying experience.

From the ground, the gnoll struggled to break free of the orc’s grip, instead, opting to punch back, albeit unsuccessfully. Feeling its leg being horribly removed from its body, the gnoll shrieked again but only for a moment. A splintered wooden staff was suddenly and violently shoved into its wailing mouth and down the throat, leaving a trail of splinters and puncturing the creature’s internals.

Finnegan wiped his paws and spat at the now-dead gnollish slave master. He hurried over to the cages and began unlocking them. The task was trivial as most of the locks were simple latch bolts with no actual keyed lock keeping them closed.

Roderick dropped his backpack to the floor and searched through it, quickly drawing a potion of health. “Dmahdi! Drink!”

The orc snatched it from the human’s hands, drank half of it, and poured the rest on the open wound. It stung like a colony of yellow jacket wasps but within seconds, the torn flesh and damaged bone were fully healed.

Roshka was walking towards them, stiffly, stuttering with each step. Roderick caught sight of the weird movements. “Roshka? You good, bud?”

With a singular swift movement, a dart hit Roderick’s chest. It stung but it didn’t hit anything important. “Sedel!” Roderick screamed.

Sedel was having fun, throwing spell after spell at the gnollish horde. The utter chaos on the open ground had drawn the full attention of everything in the chamber and connecting mine shafts. Even without needing to sound the alarm bell, the dwarves had already begun their uprising. But the bell still rang, not by the warbands’ hands but that of the gnolls, and one of them channeled their magic to louden the bell. Sedel redirected focus and concentrated a shockwave of sound at the bell, shattering the pole into splinters and killing the gnoll instantly. Among the sounds of war, she did not hear Roderick’s call.

Finnegan unclasped the dwarf who was chained to the flogging pole, but their wounds were too great, and had perished during the floggings. Finnegan turned around and saw Roshka. However, Roshka was behaving like Roshka. The movements were wrong, the stiff and jerky head gestures were wrong. Finnegan got down on all fours galloped towards the racoon-kin and jumped to tackle him.

Roshka slid sideways as if pulled by puppet strings, narrowly avoiding tasaki’s tackle. The red tasaki belly-flopped onto the stone floor and knocked the wind out of himself. The raccoon-kin drew his daggers snapped his gaze down the momentarily stunned tasaki and plunged a dagger into his back.

Dmahdi shoved the human companion aside and charged at Roshka, punching him down onto the stone floor. She then looked up and saw the shaman a dozen yards back and ran towards it, throwing Roshka’s rag-dolled body at the gnoll.

The gnoll sidestepped the flying raccoon-kin and broke concentration on him. It then outstretched a hand and spewed acid all over the floor in front of Dmahdi’s warpath.

Roderick changed the grip on his ax and threw it at the shaman. The bottom of the handle pummeled the gnoll and bounced it upwards, only to bring the blade squarely onto the gnoll’s skull.

Bleeding from the gaping wound, the gnoll wobbled in place but continued to cast more magic, electing to throw a few shards of pointy ice at Roderick in retaliation.

Sedel heard a noise behind her, a noise that signaled the arrival of gnollish reinforcements. She ran from her vantage point at the tunnel’s mouth and towards the rest of the warband. It was only then, that she saw the shaman. With a snap of her fingers, the gnoll’s movement came to a sudden stop.

Awakened by the mind-control magic, Roshka pushed himself onto his feet. He grabbed his dagger and walked up behind the immobilized gnoll plunged the dagger hilt deep into its kidney and gave it a firm twist.

Dmahdi ran past the rigid gnoll, grabbed its head, and slammed its ax first into the cold hard ground. The axe bit deeper in and split the gnoll’s head into two, down to the spine. The orc grunted and huffed as the gnoll’s corpse suddenly went limp and flopped onto the ground.

Then suddenly there was a series of loud bangs. From the cave’s entrance tunnel, a line of dwarves stood with smoking poles, at their side was a steel blue raton. “Reload!” Firish called out. With haste and precision, the line of twenty dwarves reloaded their muskets. “Aim!” All twenty-one raised their guns and pointed the barrels at the crowd of gnolls. “Fire!” A successive blast of twenty-one muskets fired into the open chamber, dropping a dozen gnolls instantly. Firish then attached a blade to the end of her weapon. “Affix bayonets! Charge!” She shouted as loud as she could.

From the tunnels dwarves with pickaxes and whips ran out into the central chamber, chasing down their gnollish tormentors. It wasn’t long before the chamber fell silent. Near the shattered remains of the alarm bell, the warband met up with Firish and the dwarven rebellion. Roderick held out his hand and shook Firish’s paw. “Glad to see you heard the signal.”

The blue raton placed both of her hands on her hips. “It was ‘a’ signal, that’s for sure. Anyways, we’ve got more gnolls in the city, plus the clan chieftain. We take out the chieftain, the rest of the Iadosh clan will scatter.”

”How many are in the keep? I imagine it’s not easy getting to the top,” Roderick said, gesturing the height with his hands.

”Lucky for us, gnolls don’t like heights. The actual tower is only inhabited on the first five floors, where the archer balconies are. They won’t go any higher.” Firish pulled out a large piece of parchment which had a crude map drawn onto it in charcoal. “We are here, in this chamber with the massive network of tunnels. Roderick, your Warband is seasoned enough that you all could handle the big gnoll himself while the rest of us give the gnolls a taste of their own medicine.”

Roderick nodded. “Very well.”

Firish then pointed to the city itself. “Most of these houses are empty, but the larger ones, are home to many of the cooks and personal slaves. We need to spread ourselves out and clear whole swaths of this city quickly before they start executing them.” The raton then turned to a couple of the recently freed dwarves. “You four, get a dozen more and form raiding parties of ten each. I and the firing squad are going to be organizing this from afar.”

Roderick had his mission and stepped back from the planning. He turned to Sedel and Dmahdi. “How are you two holding up?”

Sedel was very energetic and jittery, seemingly vibrating at the thought of doing more battle. “I got plenty of mana left in me for anything and everything.”

Dmahdi rubbed her exposed shoulder, making sure that it had healed. “I can still fight.”

Roderick turned to Finnegan, “You need a new weapon, want to play with a whip?”