Oretheo Spikes was the first dwarf to the floor, five others beside him, six more coming fast, and six more right behind them.
But on came the goblinkin and the demon hordes, ready for the expected battle, and surely expecting to overwhelm this puny force in short order.
Toliver called out to the others, “No surprise! Our enemies were waiting for us.”
“Aye, and that’s the way we knew it’d be!” Bruenor roared. “Who’s to stop a dwarf charge, I ask ye?”
And the cheering erupted all along that side corridor, and dwarves began banging their weapons against their shields, and all crowded in on Kipper, who was in the thrall of spellcasting.
Old Kipper prayed that he had the location correct, that Toliver was relaying the information properly, as he at last completed his spell, connecting this corridor to the floor just to the right of Oretheo Spikes.
“Fools,” Jaemas said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We repelled them last time, and now they come down even more slowly? And more vulnerably?”
He looked to his cousin Faelas, who was just completing his next lightning bolt. The spell shot off, and Faelas nodded in satisfaction. The flash of his first bolt had shown him the target, and now this second streak of lightning had hit the mark, the magic slashing through one of the rappelling ropes far up from the floor.
The lowest dwarf on that rope was just jumping the last few feet to the ground. The next tumbled fifteen feet or so, bounced and rolled back to his feet. The third on the rope fell from twice that height. He hit, buckled, and groaned, grabbing at his legs.
The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth crashed hard onto the floor. One of them was moaning, the other two lying silently and very still.
Faelas looked to Jaemas and shrugged, as much at a loss as to why the foolish dwarves would try something so obviously desperate as this after the first catastrophe, and indeed, among the piled remains of their dead kin. Drow would never be so stubborn or stupid as that, after all.
But then the cousins heard a sudden onslaught of cheering and the cavern brightened, a brightly glowing square of light just to the side of the main fighting.
“What is it?” Faelas asked.
“A gate!” Jaemas yelled, and indeed it was.
Through that portal came the Battlehammers, led by Bruenor himself, pouring out into the cavern just to the side of Oretheo Spikes’s position. Many of those dwarves came out bearing a small light stone, and they flung those illuminating orbs as prescribed, scattering them sequentially throughout the reaches of the huge cavern.
The drow shied in pain and surprise. The cavern became as bright as daylight, brutal to Underdark eyes.
Demons and goblinkin hunched away and shielded their eyes, and the wall of Battlehammers crashed into them like a stampede of crazed rothé, stomping over them, smashing and slashing at them, burying them.
Bruenor ran right up the side of one vrock, his axe whacking away with wild abandon, driving into the demon, pounding it down bit by bit.
Standing atop the broken, destroyed thing, Bruenor glanced back at Oretheo Spikes, the two sharing a knowing nod.
“Vengeance,” Bruenor Battlehammer muttered quietly, but loud enough for Fury Fellhammer, Athrogate, and Ambergris to hear and echo the sentiment.
“Be quick!” Kipper Harpell implored the dwarves still pouring through his portal, and to the other wizards who were only then enacting their spells. “They are trying to dispel the gate!”
Across the way, Catti-brie and Penelope focused on the sight through Kipper’s gate, using that to aid in the placement of their own dimensional doorways. Neither was prolific enough with these types of spells to safely do as Kipper had done, locating and opening a gate merely on the words of Toliver, but now with the target area clearly in their view, both had their spells successfully away.
At that very moment, Kipper’s gate went away, but it didn’t matter. Two portals were in place now, and soon enough three, as the old mage opened yet another to replace the first.
Several hundred Battlehammers would be in that cavern before the drow or their demon allies could hope to close the gates.
“Go! Go!” Catti-brie yelled to the other wizards, and all three rushed around the charging dwarves and back out into the main corridor, pausing to cast as they went.
“You remember the ritual?” Penelope asked, and both Cattie-brie and Kipper nodded.
The Adbar dwarves, still rappelling along the ropes-five now, but with a new sixth line soon to be in place-moved aside for the magicusers, and for the royal procession, King Emerus and Ragged Dain and a host of elite Felbarran warriors close behind them.
As soon as they passed through the last door, Catti-brie and the three Harpells flew away, Toliver leading them down to the correct position near to the floor.
Up on the landing, King Emerus, Ragged Dain, and the others chanted out a battle song, using the cadence to count as instructed.
And when the second verse ended, fully confident in the wizards and their timing, the Felbarrans leaped out into the open cavern, plummeting to within ten feet of the floor before passing through the newly enacted Field of Feather Falling, then floating down to begin solidifying Oretheo Spikes’s left flank.
The shield walls were formed in the blink of a trained dwarf’s eye, the dwarf ranks thickening precisely in the well-lit cavern. Drow darkness spells took some of that light away, but there weren’t many Xorlarrins in this cavern and it was a feeble attempt indeed against the overwhelming number of lighted stones the dwarves had brought to bear.
And now they were the tide, breaking waves made of rolling dwarves, following the leads of Bruenor Battlehammer, Oretheo Spikes, and Emerus Warcrown.
Goblins, orcs, and demons died by the score, and the shield line would not be broken.
Drow lightning and fire came at them, but so quick had the Felbarran assault filled the cavern that Catti-brie and the Harpells, too, began to focus on more offensive spells.
Thick ran the blood. Goblins and orcs piled deep in death, scores of manes lay smoking and melting on the floor, and many dwarves went to Moradin’s Hall in those early moments of wild battle.
But the line held, frustratingly so for those hungry demons who could not get to their bearded enemies, and so began attacking the other living creatures, the allied goblinkin, to satisfy their undeniable hunger.
They were winning. Bruenor understood that as again the dwarven line rolled forward and engulfed their enemies, curling up and down the length of the cavern like a breaking wave on a long beach, as inexorable and undeniable as the tide itself.
They were winning, and it seemed to Bruenor that the fight was quickly turning into a rout. Once they had this hold on the lower levels, with easy resupply from above, they could not be denied. The Forge and the adjoining primordial chamber, the heart of Gauntlgrym, would be theirs for the taking. Gauntlgrym would be Delzoun once more, as Moradin had demanded.
But something was off-kilter, Bruenor felt, some emptiness within him that muted his joy at the moment of supreme victory.
Drizzt was not beside him now to share in his greatest triumph. For all their decades together, in this, the culmination of Bruenor’s achievements, Drizzt Do’Urden was not there, and perhaps would never again be.
His dearest friend, the greatest warrior he had ever known.
He remembered his own dying words in his previous life, when he had looked into the eyes of his dear friend and whispered, “I found it, elf.” Aye, he had found Gauntlgrym, the most ancient dwarven homeland, the greatest dwarven treasure of all, yet not because of dwarven help but because a dark elf had stood beside his journey for decades, had suffered his wrong turns, had helped him through near-disastrous battles, and in the end, had led the way to put the primordial back in its captivity.