Why?
He came to this point of reasoning and questioning often, his anger driving his thoughts onward and onward until they reached that fantasy of seemingly pointless supreme victory.
What would he win?
“Ah, but ye got yerself a nasty one,” said Uween, his mother, stepping into the room. “I heared ye fought well against Priam Thickbelt, though, and he’s a good one, I know. Fought him meself …”
Her voice trailed off, and Bruenor knew it was because he hadn’t even afforded her the courtesy of looking at her while she rambled. He winced at the realization-Uween was not deserving of his disrespect.
But still, neither was she his mother. Not to his present thinking, and allowing her to continue along with the delusion truly insulted him and reminded him of how helpless he was in the face of his errant choice in Iruladoon.
A strong hand grabbed his ear and yanked his head around, to stare into the scowling face of Uween Roundshield.
“Ye look at me when I’m talkin’ to-!” Then her voice became a garbled grunt of surprise and pain as Bruenor, acting purely reflexively, acting as Bruenor Battlehammer and not Reginald Roundshield, slapped his arm back, catching her by the wrist, breaking her grasp and driving her arm down, twisting it to force her to lurch to the side.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, catching her breath when Bruenor let her go.
He looked away, embarrassed but still angry, and was not really surprised when Uween smacked him on the back of his head.
“Ye don’t disrespect yer Ma!” she scolded and she poked him in the side of the head. “And look at me!”
He did, his face a mask of anger.
“I come in here givin’ ye praise and ye slight me?” Uween asked incredulously.
“I’m not wantin’ yer praise or anyone else’s.”
“By the gods!” cried the exasperated woman.
“Damn the gods!” Bruenor exploded at her. Before he even realized his movements, he was on his feet, hoisting his wooden chair above his head appearanceI holding on. With a growl he threw it across the room, against the wall, shattering it to kindling.
“Oh, but get yer head, boy!” Uween scolded. “Ye don’t go cursin’ Moradin in me house!”
“Ah, but it’s all a stupid joke, don’t ye see?”
“What’s all?”
“All of it!” Bruenor insisted. “All a durned game for them to laugh about. All a puny try for puny glories that none’ll remember or care about. ‘Bones and stones,’ so me friend used to say. Bones n’ stones and nothing more. For all our cries o’ glory, for all our cheers to lost kin … bah, but ain’t it just a game then!” He kicked at some of the wood that rebounded near to his feet, and when he missed it, he scooped up the plank instead and snapped it in half, then threw both pieces, sending them spinning across the room.
“Stop it!” Uween demanded.
Bruenor froze, stared her hard in the eye, then calmly walked over and picked up another chair. With a look of supreme defiance at this dwarf who would be his mother, he lifted the chair up high and brought it crashing down on the floor, smashing it to kindling.
Uween wailed and fled the room.
Bruenor followed her only far enough to slam the bedchamber door behind her.
He went back to his original position, though the chair was gone, and picked up his bandage to continue his work. But then he snarled and growled and spat and threw it, too, across the room.
He glanced back at the door and only then fully realized what he had just done-and done to an undeserving and always supportive dwarf widow!
The shame overwhelmed him and sent him to his knees, where he threw his face into his hands and wept openly. Shoulders bobbing in sobs, Bruenor lay down on the stone and splintered wood.
He fell asleep right there, face wet with tears, and troubling dreams began to descend upon him, and flitter up like dark wings all around him. Dreams of Catti-brie lying dead, of Obould’s orcs drinking mead with tankards marked by the foaming mug, the standard of Mithral Hall-and indeed, drinking mead within Mithral Hall, and in a room littered with dwarf corpses!
The room’s door banged open, startling him awake, but it took him a long while, time he didn’t have, to determine if this was reality or another image in his dream.
He finally figured it out when King Emerus Warcrown lifted him roughly to his feet and slapped him across the face.
Behind the king, Parson Glaive stood solemnly, hands intertwined before him in prayer.
“What’re ye about, then?” the king demanded.
“Wh-what?” Bruenor stammered, not knowing where to begin.
“How dare ye dishonor yer Da!” Emerus shouted in his face. “How dare ye treat yer Ma as such?”
Bruenor shook his head, but could not begin to offer a response. Not verbally. Dishonor? The word screamed in his mind! Could these two even begin to understand the word? He had died a good dwarf’s death-he had earned his place at Moradin’s side, and it had been taken from him through guilt and a foolish choice!
Dishonor? That was dishonor, not some meaningless argument in a meaningless house in a meaningless citadel!
asked, and Catti-brie nodded.igh holding onHis previous existence, his glorious tenure as King of Mithral Hall, had been ripped from relevance! Oh, and not by his own impulsive, foolishly emotional choice, but by the mere fact that he had been given that choice in the first place. What point this-any of it! — if a god’s whim could undo everything?
“Well, Little Arr … Reginald?” Emerus Warcrown growled in his face. “What do ye got to say?”
“What playthings we be,” Bruenor replied quietly, calmly.
The king looked at him curiously, then glanced back at Parson Glaive, who opened his eyes at the young dwarf’s curious words.
“Self-congratulating,” Bruenor went on undeterred. He gave a helpless chuckle. “And all our great deeds be tiny spots on the altars o’ the laughing gods.”
“His father,” Parson Glaive explained to the king, who nodded and turned back to Bruenor.
“Ye don’t know me father,” Bruenor snarled at him. “Nor his father afore him.”
He was sitting on the floor then, flying down at the end of a fist, with the room swimming around him in uneven turns.
“Yer time on the training grounds is done, Reginald,” Emerus Warcrown told him. “Ye go out and fight aside them that’s keeping Felbarr free o’ damned orcs, and then ye come back and tell me about yer playthings! If ye live to get back to me, I’m meanin’!”
They left abruptly, King Emerus first, and Bruenor caught a glimpse of him offering Uween a much-needed hug before Parson Glaive, with a profound and purposely loud sigh, closed the bedroom door.
Perhaps no section of Citadel Felbarr was more revered and less visited than this one, where rows and rows of piled stones stretched into the vast darkness of the huge cavern. The cemetery of Clan Warcrown encompassed many rooms, and a new one was always under construction.
Bruenor heard the solitary digger’s pick chipping at the stone when he entered the main chamber of the cemetery, the heartbeat-like cadence ringing somewhere far off in the distance to his left. He moved to his right, across the huge main room, the oldest room, and through one low tunnel into the next section. This room, too, he crossed, and another beyond the next tunnel and another beyond that.
He could no longer hear the lonely tap of the worker, who was digging out a chamber that would not be used for decades. As most of this solemn place was a testament to the past, to the fallen of the clan, so that dwarf excavator was the promise of the future. Citadel Felbarr would go on and she would bury her dead with reverence and tradition.
The thought nagged at Bruenor as he passed into the last chamber out here on the right flank of the centuries-old graveyard.