Waking up the next morning, I saw that the view out my windows was obscured by an opaque sea of pure white. With howling winds sending the snow in a life threatening blizzard of cold and snow.
"Good morning, Kvalinn." One of Bekhi's older brothers came into the room holding a bundle in his arms. "I brought a couple extra coats for you. It's well below freezing outside and Bekhi told us you don't do well in the cold."
"Has your dad shared every letter from Bekhi with everyone?" I asked in frustration. The brother just nodded with an amused grin.
"Pretty much. Bekhi is the first kid to go back below the dirt so the whole town is worried about her. Any time we get a letter from her, the contents are usually shared the same night at the Halfling's Haven. Now hurry up, the animals get restless when the weather is this bad."
I grumbled about mail privacy laws while putting on layer after layer of warm clothes. The snow was so thick outside that it was impossible to see the end of your nose, much less see the barn. In order to get to it safely, we had to follow a rope that had been strung up between the two structures. Inside the barn, I found most of the kids were already busy doing their chores.
"Good morning, Kvalinn." Bekhi smiled at me from behind the cow she was milking. "Glad to see that Groomrit brought you the good coats, I don't want another sneeze to destroy the testing room again."
"It was one time!" I protested loudly.
"Only because Elder Thrikrondromm hasn't let you back in the testing room since you messed up, and I don't want you to be held back another year in his class because of a sneeze."
"Thanks, but Elder Thrikrondromm was saying he'd start teaching me this year no matter what. Apparently he's gotten bored of teaching me theory and wants to get back teaching me runes, even if it kills me. And I'm pretty sure he was being literal."
"So should we put in our orders now?" Groomrit asked with an eager grin. "Or should we wait until next year to see if you come back alive?"
"Wait until next year. I will probably still be alive, but I might be forbidden from making some of the runes I'll be taught."
Somehow, I could feel every single kid in the barn grin with the same feral battle excitement that they had inherited from their dad. Bekhi was no exception, she looked at me with high expectations for her future weapon.
The barn was relatively warm, but we still hurried through our chores. After all, a delicious breakfast was waiting for us inside the much warmer kitchen.
Once we were finished with breakfast, and were relaxedly sitting around the fireplace with warm spiced beers. Dak sighed contentedly and sat up in his chair.
"I was planning on giving Kvalinn and Bekhi some fighting lessons today, but since it's not safe outside, I guess we'll do the traditional stuff now. Mubrim, sweetie, do you have the thing?" When his wife nodded, Dak gestured for his youngest child, Vinga, to come over to him. Assuming a slightly more solemn demeanor. He took a bundle wrapped in cloth from Mubrim and took a knee in front of Vinga.
"Vinga, my child. You have survived your fifth winter. In honor of this, I present to you your first hammer. May it serve you well in battle, and in times of peace, use it at the forge of your ancestors to keep Hjerouhrdinn's flame alight." Unwrapping the bundle, he handed the small hammer over to Vinga, who bowed respectfully as she received it.
As soon as the ceremony was over though, they both dropped their pretense at solemnity and broke into grins. Dak pulled his daughter in for an enthusiastic hug. "Congratulations, Vinga! Ready to learn from me how to fight with your new hammer?"
"No, dad! I wanna learn from mom how to take care of the sheep!"
"Are you sure? You might need to fight off dangerous monsters and wolves. Then you'd be out there saying 'oh if only I had learned from my dear old dad how to fight.'" Dak was grinning playfully as Vinga tried to escape from the hug.
"Mom! Help! Tell dad I don't wanna fight any monsters!"
With practiced ease, Mubrim pinched Daks ear mercilessly until he released Vinga and sat down again. The rest of the family chuckled at his protestations of innocence so I guessed that this was normal in their family. I was a bit curious about the ceremony, so I asked Bekhi for more information.
"Is this a tradition up here? I don't think my father did this for me when I was five."
"Wait, when did your father give you your hammer?"
"When I was two, he then started training me how to use it at the forge as soon as it was in my hands."
"No wonder you are so good at making weapons, Kvalinn!" Bekhi said in surprise. "You've been making them practically since birth!"
"He's not that unique, Bekhi." A sister named Higvad snorted. "You kept borrowing my hammer as soon as you could crawl and would pester dad endlessly to teach you how to fight."
"Only because dad looked so cool when he was fighting everyone else. I wanted him to teach me how to fight like that." Bekhe's cheeks slightly reddened as her family told about other stories from her time before coming down to school. At least half of them were silly stories that no one wants their friends to hear about.
The next few days passed peaceably. The storm kept up unabated so we were prevented from doing much more than sitting around the fireplace and eating meals. It felt very odd for me to be inactive for so long, since my father and I worked pretty much non stop from dawn till dusk, but it did feel nice to take a vacation for the first time in this world.
"Are your bags packed, Kvalinn?" Bekhi was waiting for me in the kitchen on our last day in Vesturhildrun. I nodded, expecting that we would be leaving momentarily since the trade caravan would be going back home soon. But Bekhi just told me to put my bag by the door. "We need to be ready to go the second there's a lull in the storm."
"But won't we be late to meet Kholgaik at the surface door? Is he going to wait for us?" Bekhi just shook her head.
"Nope, but this isn't the first time I've had to run for half a day to catch up. We'll just need to hope that there aren't any goblin packs between us."
I thought back to the goblin pack that had attacked us on the way up the mountain. Their sharp claws, gnashing teeth, and their wild eyes that had the rune of wrath burning in them. I definitely did not want to go through that again if it could be avoided.
"What if I make a rune of heat to melt the snow?" Bekhi's hands paused in their dishwashing as she looked skeptically at me. "If I overload the rune with magic, it should produce enough heat to make a heat bubble around us. That way we can see where we are going and won't freeze to death out there."
"I'm not sure what you are talking about, but is it safe?" Bekhi didn't know anything about magic, but to be fair, most dwarves didn't. So she was mostly concerned about us living through my rune, and the storm. Her eyes kept bouncing between me, and the flurry of white snow pounding against the window.
"It should be. As long as we run to the surface door as soon as the rune is ready." I bluffed just a little bit. But I was mostly sure it would be fine. I had already overclocked one rune of heat and I knew how to tone it down a little.
After looking back at the blizzard outside for a few minutes, Bekhi seemed to come to a decision. "Alright. What do you need?"
"Well first of all, you need my permission to make a rune in my house." Dak had snuck up behind me and was now frowning dramatically down at me. "Secondly… You'll need a disposable weapon if you are going to force the magic."
Dak's overly dramatic glare turned into the excitement of a kid who's about to see how their favorite toy is made. He began ordering his kids around to make preparations for me to craft the rune. Less than ten minutes later, a blunted steel dagger was handed over, and a workstation in front of the kitchen fire was set up for me.
It wasn't a rune forge, or even a good workstation for me to craft at, since it was just a shield strapped down to a stool. But it was the best I was going to get, so I'd have to rely on my rune of forging to force the magic in.
Heating the dagger up as much as possible in the stoked kitchen fire, I began hammering away at it while singing the forge song.
Over the past year of lessons, Elder Thrikrondromm had taught me a lot about how the runes worked. They were basically batteries that stored magical energy, that energy was then released when the runes, or the weapon/armor that the rune was engraved into, received any sort of impact. That's why my very first overcharged rune of heat didn't kill me, it needed to receive an impact to set it off.
Eventually, I reached the end of the forge song, and I willed just enough magic to flow from me to overcharge the rune, but not enough to kill us. I gritted my teeth in pain as the magic flowed through the rune on my hand. Even though I used it often, I could never get used to the cold stinging sensation that the rune caused.
"Well, Kvalinn? Did it work?" Dak asked me from behind his shield. The rest of the family who had stayed to watch were also behind shields. Bekhi was as far away from me as she could get and holding two shields.
Looking at the dagger that now had the rune of heat engraved on it, I shrugged. "It has the rune, I can't say whether it's powerful enough though until we test it outside."
After a few minutes of discussion, we decided to get everything ready as if we knew it would work. But in case it didn't work, we would be tying a rope around our bodies and having the end secured inside the house.
A few minutes later, after Bekhi had said her goodbyes to her family, she nervously grasped my hand and nodded to me that she was ready. We stepped outside together, and a blast of wind cut through our warm coats like a thousand tiny knives. But the next instant, it all vanished.
The rune of heat activated and encased me and Bekhi in an invisible bubble of heat that melted both the snow underfoot, and the swirling flakes around us.
"Looks like it worked." Bekhi said in awe. "I guess my brothers owe me two silver when we get back. Now let's hurry before it stops working."
I followed her lead and ran through the town to the door leading underground. Just as we touched the door, the rune sputtered and ran out of magic leaving us in the blinding snow. Apparently we arrived just in time in more ways than one, Kholgaik was just about to start down the road when we slammed the door closed behind us.
"Ancestor's beard! Did you two come through that freezing inferno?!" Kholgaik asked in disbelief. His sentiments were echoed by the other guards.
"We somehow managed to get here thanks to Bekhi's knowledge of the town. It was amazing how she navigated while blinded by snow." Bekhi leaned over and whispered to me in a confused voice.
"What are you talking about, Kvalinn? We got here because of your rune."
"I know." I whispered back. "But I don't want any chance of Elder Thrikrondromm hearing that I made a faulty rune, and made it without his supervision." A look of comprehension dawned on Bekhi's face, but before she could continue my charade, Kholgaik cut in.
"If you two are done flirting. We need to leave now if we are going to make our deadlines." Bekhi's and my faces went red, and we released the hands that we had been unthinkingly holding. Kholgaik grinned at us before starting down the road, followed closely by the wagons.
The trip back home was completely uneventful. My fears over being attacked by goblins turned out to be for nothing since we didn't hear a peep from them.
"Thanks for coming to my home with me." Bekhi said as we were walking home. "It was a lot of fun having you meet my family. They always had questions about you in the letters they sent me."
"Thanks for inviting me. But you might want to be careful on how much you put in those letters. Apparently they're the talk of the town."
Bekhi's face went red at the thought of how much she had revealed in her letters and muttered something about studying harder with Elder Dworhick so she could finally beat her dad. Eventually she looked back at me with a smile. "Well, thanks again. See you tomorrow at school!"
I waved goodbye and started making my way home when I stopped dead in my tracks. "Crap! I forgot to prepare the gifts for the Elders!" Sighing to myself for my stupidity, I ran home and prepared to work overnight to get everything ready.
"Goblins grog, Kvalinn. You look horrible!" Zikruk looked at me with shock and surprise as I slid into my desk chair with an exhausted thwump. "What happened on your trip to the surface?!"
"It wasn't my trip to the surface." I sleepily started to unpack my school bag. "I forgot to prepare the gifts for the Elders until last night, so I was up all night working."
"Are you ok, Kvalinn? It's not like you to not prepare for today weeks in advance."
"I'm fine, and more importantly, I had lots of delicious food while on winter break."
"Really?" Zikruk looked at me intensely. "Was there anything that we could bring back down here to sell?"
His merchant behaviors, that had been taught to him as fiercely as my smithing knowledge had been taught to me, took over the conversation, and we talked over what was available on the surface and what we could take back down here without it spoiling. Unfortunately the number of things that could be brought back down en masse to sell was very small.
"Good morning, Kvalinn." Bekhi smiled as she took her usual seat next to me. "Goblin's grog, you look horrible. Were you up all night again?"
"Is it that obvious?" The two of them nodded in sync.
"Here, Kvalinn. Drink this." Zikruk passed me a small metal flask. "Father brought this back from his latest trip from Handel. Apparently it's gaining popularity there as a beverage to keep you awake and focused so he thought I would need it for school. But you look like you need it more than I do."
Unlatching the cap of the flask, I took a hesitant sniff. It smelled surprisingly familiar, if I was right, then I'd definitely be able to stay awake with this stuff. A bitter taste spread through my mouth as the unmistakable rush of caffeine hit my nervous system.
"Yep. I'll be able to stay awake with this. This is worth a runed hammer to me right now." I gulped more of the coffee, and felt my blood pumping as my brain started waking up.
"What did you give Kvalinn?" Bekhi asked Zikruk while looking at me with a cautious look on her face. "He's not gonna explode or something, right?"
"It's something the humans call 'coffee'. Apparently they make it by filtering water through ground up beans. It shouldn't do anything except wake him up and give him some extra energy. Or at least that's what it does for humans."
"Wait, what does it do in dwarves?" I asked in concern. I didn't want this to turn into a star trek episode where a normally benign substance had adverse effects in an alien species.
"No clue. But it will probably work the same." Zikruk answered with an amused grin. "Now you know how we feel when you show off one of your new runes."
I looked down at the coffee, and shrugged as I took another gulp of the tepid and bitter beverage. I needed the energy to make it through the day.
"Are you ok, Kvalinn? That drink smells foul."
"It is." I wrinkled my nose in distaste. "But it seems to work like Zikruk said it would. I'm feeling more awake than ever!"
"Good, because Elder Rongrim is here." Bekhi nudged me to put the flask away and pay attention to class.
After glaring all the students to their seats, Elder Rongrim began the school year like he always did. With each student presenting their gift to him, or showing off their skill, and Elder Rongrim passing judgment on each student. Those he deemed worthy of moving onto the next year were sent back to their seats, while those who failed were sent to another classroom where they would have to repeat the previous year.
When it was my turn, I presented a long handled greataxe. There were no runes on it, but it was an exceptionally well made weapon. Or at least it was in my opinion.
Elder Rongrim examined my present much more closely than any other students. Even going so far as to call for a test dummy to test the sharpness and durability of the weapon. Several agonizing minutes later, he gave a sigh and put the weapon down on his desk.
"Well done, Kvalinn Ekgorsson. You have followed the directives of Elder Thrikrondromm and did not add any magical runes to this weapon, yet you managed to craft a high quality weapon. You have proven worthy of my knowledge, and will continue as a sixth year student."
I returned to my seat and felt the need to add something stronger to the remaining coffee in the flask. I was mentally drained even though the day had just started.
The rest of the day continued in a similar fashion. With the elders scrutinizing every inch of each weapon I gave them. In Elder Dworhick's Advanced Combat class, he used the warhammer I presented to him against me to see if I had left any exploitable flaws that I could use to survive. Unfortunately I had not, and was left a beaten and bruised pulp on the floor at the end of class.
Elder Thrikrondromm was especially vigorous in his inspection of the weapon I presented him. It was a longsword with several non magical runes carved into it. Knowing that Elder Thrikrondromm had glasses that could detect and measure magic, I had worked until it was nearly time for school on that weapon. And it paid off.
"Well done, Kvalinn." Elder Thrikrondromm tossed the sword I had worked so hard on into the corner like it was a sandwich wrapper. "It appears you can fully control the magic in your rune of forging, so we will return to what I was going to teach you last year. The safest method to craft powerful magic runes."
With a heave, Elder Thrikrondromm retrieved his book of runes from behind his desk. It had been stashed there out of reach ever since I had accidentally overcharged the rune of heat at the beginning of last year. This time, I'd learn all I could so that I could get back to advancing the world's tech. There had to be a boatload of secrets in that book that might help me.
"To reiterate my warning from last year, by opening this book you are binding yourself to joining the Runecrafter's guild when you come of age. Do you accept these terms?"
I quickly nodded. The examination of my weapon had taken more time than I had expected already and I wanted to dive into this book of power as soon as possible.
"Excellent. But bear in mind, the next time you mess up a rune like you did last year, I will be leaving you to your fate and letting you meet your ancestors in shame." My head snapped up from the book in shock to stare at the one who would be teaching me. Elder Thrikrondromm just shrugged. "The amount of paperwork myself and the other Elder's here had to fill out for Thane Grovrac after the last fiasco was inordinate, and the expense of replacing the tools and shields that were broken was prohibitive for the continued existence of this school. Letting you die from your own stupidity would be a lot easier for everyone involved. Now, let's see how much you remember regarding the rune of heat."
The lesson then began in earnest, with several tips, tricks, and warnings that could only be learned over centuries of practice. Even though I had been crafting runes in secret all year, I still learned new information that the lack of would have killed me later. Overall, it was a very productive lesson that boded well for the year.
"Elder Thrikrondromm. Do other races use runes?" I decided to ask a question at the end of the lesson that had been nagging at the back of my mind ever since meeting the hobbit at the tavern.
Elder Thrikrondromm grunted dismissively while stroking his beard. "Runes are made so that we, a race without magic, can wield the power of the gods. So of course the younger races can use runes. But the secret of their creation is closely held by the Runecrafters guild, and no other race is permitted to make them."
"So how do humans use magic? Can they just fireballs and icicles around with their magic?" Several images of anime protagonists shouting 'Fireball!' popped through my head.
"Ha. If they tried to do that then they would suffer fates worse than death. Magic is after all the essence of the gods, and throwing their power around irresponsibly would only lead to their wrath raining down on the unfortunate nation. I believe that humans have their own way of harnessing magical power, but I, nor any dwarf that I know of, have ever studied their way. The way of our ancestors is sufficient."
After thanking Elder Thrikrondromm for the information, I started making my way home. I was on the verge of collapsing since my caffeine rush had dissipated hours ago, and I desperately needed sleep.
Due to how busy Father's and my schedules were, it wasn't until a full week after I returned from the surface that we got to sit down and talk about my trip.
"Ancestors ale, it's been a long week." Father took a long pull at his beer tankard before pouring another for himself. "Aundarord came to me with a large order just after you left and filling it without you was worse than a tousle with the goblins. So tell me, how was your trip to the surface?"
Taking a sip from my own beer mug, I began telling him about my vacation. All about the snow, the chickens, the food, and Bekhi's family. When I mentioned that she had eighteen brothers and sisters, fathers jaw dropped and his mug clattered to the floor.
"Ancestors preserve us! Thredak must either be incredibly wealthy, or this 'farm' you described must provide a lot of food."
It was then that I learned that normal dwarven couples would only have a kid every couple decades due to how expensive food was. This practice also allowed the couple to give their full attention to teach each kid how to master their ancestral craft. But it was mainly the difficulties in getting food beneath the mountain, and thus its high price, that kept dwarven population growth low.
"I'm over two hundred winters old, and I only have you to count among my descendants! I cannot imagine having eighteen additional children."
I continued telling the tale of my journey. Father seemed interested in my meeting with the halfling tavern master though.
"Tell me again, Kvalinn. You said he was speaking the dwarven language?"
"Yes, Father. It would have been tough for him to open a tavern that caters to dwarves if he didn't speak our language." Father seemed to be more concerned about this than he had when I had told him about the goblin attack. "Is it bad for him to be speaking it?"
"Potentially. It is forbidden in the book of laws for anyone but family to be taught the dwarven language or runes. But if someone adopted the halfling into their clan or guild then it would be frowned upon, but not criminal."
"Why would teaching our language be listed in the book of laws?" I wondered if it was a religious thing, before remembering that the closest thing that dwarves had to worship was honor and the ancestors.
"They must not have covered the origin of the cursed goblins yet in school. I'll let them explain more when the time comes." Father only gave that cryptic answer before prompting me to continue my story. I made a mental note to ask Elder Rongrim later before continuing.
When I finished, Father drank the last drop from his tankard in thought. "It sounds as if your trip to the surface was quite an adventure. Ancestors forbid though that I ever have to see the snow whipped into the blizzard you described. Or have to see snow at all. But then again, this meat and mead you brought back was quite tasty. So maybe I will visit Vesturhildrun someday, but only in the summer though. When there is no snow. Now it's getting late, and I have work, and you have school, so get to bed."
I went to bed that night, and dreamed sweet dreams of all the delicious food that was waiting for me on the surface, and hoped that I'd get to return there soon.