Flinthammer Hall

The gnome pressed her nose to the bear’s black one. The bear seemed a little perplexed by this, but highly entertained.

“And what’s your name?” She batted her big blue eyes at the bear, laying prone on the distillery’s floor, feet kicking in the air.

“Crapper.” Ringo growled, quaffing a rhapsody malt before spitting foam across the bar as Beli’s hand retracted from a location only wives normally freely grab in public. “OR! We don’t have a name picked out yet! Muradin’s beard, woman, you’re gong to leave me a eunuch! And I need another malt!”

The gnome leaned forward, and began whispering into the bear’s ear. Turning his delicate parts away from Beli, Ringo sipped his new drink, watching the bear and gnome on the floor.

“What’s her story, then?”

…

Read More Read More

Once the gunshots stopped echoing, the bear cub bounded out of the tunnel, into the snow, the violence of a moment before already forgotten.

Ringo checked the bloody bodies of the troggs, turning up only a few shiny rocks and a half-eaten piece of some sort of rotten meat. He squinted as the bear leaped through snowdrifts, the glare bright this morning. Ringo slipped his goggles up from around his neck, fitting them over his eyes. Hefting his pack, he followed the bear.

“Come on, you. You can play when we get to Kharanos.”

Slinging his blunderbuss over his shoulder, he stumped down the hill, heading down the pass, chewing a cold sausage.

…

Read More Read More

“What are you going to name the bear?” Grelin Whitebeard had cleared a spot on the Anvilmar bar, and dipped his quill into the bronze inkwell by his hand, continuing to write.

Ringo looked at the cub, who was currently trying to chew on a chair leg.

…

Read More Read More

Ringo loaded the shot into his blunderbuss, keeping an eye on the bear cub. It had seemed dangerously interested in the targets a little while ago, but now was rolling on its back in the snow, playing with a large pinecone, flinging it up in the air with all four paws, then catching it, growling and biting it, rolling and tumbling through the snow in mock combat with the defiant toy.

“A dream?” Beli stood behind him, her hands wrapped around a mug of scalding morningbrew. “Like a vision?”

“I told you, I don’t know,” Ringo lifted the gun, bracing the stock firmly against the meat of his shoulder, sighting carefully. The metal disks atop the split logs had once been Dragonmaw helmets, but after countless target practices, they had been torn to ragged metal shreds by shot. Periodically, Ringo had one of the Anvilmar smiths heat up the helmets and bang them back into more or less circular shapes, but at this point, no one would know without being told they had once been helms worn by the orcs who had conquered Khaz Modan during the darkest days of the Second War. “I just had a dream.”

…

Read More Read More

The pounding sounded like drums, like war drums, beaten by an orc astride a great beast, beating furiously, the sound and the vibration rattling teeth and raising hair on the scalp. But it wasn’t war drums, although the sound was punctuated by screams and flashes of sickly green light and the roar of huge predators.

Ringo awoke with a soft cry, sitting up in bed, sweat cooling on his skin where the furs had slid off his chest. He blinked, shaking his head of the sight and sounds. Quietly, he slipped out of bed, walking over to the slit window that looked down into the Coldridge Valley from his home in one of the cliff towers built into the mountainside.

There was a soft noise from the bed.

…

Read More Read More