Work Text:
Wake up
Torska’s eyes opened to unfamiliar rafters—honey-colored limestone catching the morning light as it slipped through shuttered windows. The air tasted of woodsmoke and roasted barley, layered with something harder to place: the mingled scents of many roads, many territories, pressed together in one room.
His head throbbed with a deep, stubborn ache, the kind that came from sleeping far too long—a sensation that had become his ever-present companion during every awakening. Sitting up only made it worse. The pain did not stay in his skull; it settled into him, sinking deeper than bone. His breath caught as a familiar stiffness pulled at his lower back and left hip, sharp enough to draw his hand there without thought.
Stone-skin.
The patch beneath his palm was warm now from the soft bedding, but it ached all the same—dense, unyielding, a part of him that had never quite remembered how to be flesh again. He sat hunched on the edge of the bed, letting the pain anchor him while the tavern breathed quietly around him.
The memory came then, unbidden.
-Flashback-
The first thing Torska noticed was his breathing — not the sound of it, but the movement. A frozen chest loosening, stone-soft ribs giving way one shallow rise at a time. Each breath dragged in with resistance, akin to the slow, powerless draft through forgotten mine tunnels. As though the air itself had weight, as though his lungs had forgotten their purpose and had to be coaxed back into remembering. It hurt, faintly at first, then more insistently, a pressure deep beneath the skin where cold had once ruled.
Warmth followed.
Not sharply, not as a shock, but the way the sun settles into stone left half-buried in summer shade. Heat soaked into him slowly, without urgency, gathering along the surface before seeping deeper. It spread across the backs of his hands, along his cheek, the curve of his shoulder—familiar in the dull, unthinking way warmth is familiar to things that do not move.
For a time, it was enough simply to be warm.
Then something shifted.
The heat did not fade, but it changed—no longer just resting on him, but sinking in, stirring weight beneath the surface. What had been comfortable stillness grew heavy. Dense. As though the warmth had found something solid inside him and begun to press against it, reminding it—without words—that it was not meant to remain where it lay.
Stone remembered gravity before it remembered motion.
And slowly, unwillingly, he did too.
Sensation returned in uneven waves. A tingling crept through his fingers, then dulled into ache. His legs felt distant, heavy, as though they still belonged to the earth beneath him. The mind lagged behind, sluggish and unfocused, thoughts slipping loose before they could take shape. Awareness came and went like a tide, each retreat leaving him uncertain whether he was waking or dreaming.
Time meant nothing. There was only the slow, stubborn act of feeling again.
The air carried a weight of green to it—damp loam, leaf rot, sap and shadow layered deep. Not the close breath of mountain halls, nor the salt of open roads. Forest air. Old forest air. Somewhere beyond the reach of cities and names.
When his awareness drifted far enough to notice direction, he felt the land slope gently beneath him, roots pressing close under thin soil. This was not deep woodland, not yet. The trees here stood watchful rather than crowded, as though the forest had paused at an unseen line.
The borderlands.
Later, he would remember it for what it was: the edge of the Northern Forest of Daggerwood, where wild growth gave way—reluctantly—to the paths of men and stone.
After what felt like hours—though it could have been moments, or days—he stirred. The movement was small, instinctive, but it was enough. Pebbles scraped and shifted beneath him, dirt sliding from the grooves and folds of his clothes. Moss and lichen clung stubbornly to his hair, torn free in reluctant strands as he pushed himself upright with a sound that might once have been stone cracking.
He did not rise cleanly.
Something tugged—sharp and anchoring—yanking his head back before he understood why. Pain flared along his scalp and jaw. He froze, breath hitching, then followed the pull downward.
His beard.
Once long. Once carefully groomed, braided and banded with the marks of clan and craft, each tie earned, each ornament placed with intent. Now it was a wild, root-thick mass, tangled deep into the young maple’s reach. Fine hairs had been swallowed by bark and soil alike, grown through and around as the sapling became a tree. The forest had taken its time with him.
He pulled once, instinctively.
The tree did not yield.
For a long moment he knelt there, fingers curled uselessly in the mess of it, mind still fog-thick and slow. There was no anger in him yet—only the dull understanding that this was the first reckoning of losses yet to come.
The knife came to his stiff, aching hand without ceremony.
The blade bit through years of growth with a soft, final sound. Hair and braid and history fell away together—locks of dwarven pride severed and left to tangle forever at the tree’s base. When the last strand parted, he slumped backward, away from the sunken outline his stone body had carved into the earth.
He was free, but not whole.
Then the pain struck.
A deep, biting ache flared from his hip, spreading up through his spine from the impact. Instinctively, his hand went to the source beneath his skin—and found not softness, but resistance. Callused scales and fine cracks met his touch, rough and uneven beneath his palm.
It felt like broken flagstone: living now, fused to him, rising where flesh should have been.
The realization settled slowly, heavy and undeniable.
How much time had passed?
How long was my sleep?
What happened to me?.... To us?
-Return to present-
The common room of the old tavern sprawled below as Torska descended the creaking stairs, his black duster brushing walls crowded with an impossible collection of banners. Valrose colors hung beside The Phantom’s Flagon pennants, while local guild totems dangled from exposed beams—layers of allegiance stacked without care. Through a wide archway, the towers of the city rose beyond the windows, their scarred stone catching the morning light.
The murmur of the tavern faltered as he reached the bottom step. Not silence—just a hitch, a half-beat out of rhythm. A few heads turned, then stilled. Most held only polite curiosity, quickly masked; one or two lingered longer, their looks carrying the quiet weight reserved for things rarely seen and not easily forgotten.
No one greeted him. No one challenged him either.
He crossed the room without comment, boots sounding louder than they should have, and made for the long hearth where a kettle hissed over a crackling log fire. Conversation crept back in behind him, softer at first, then steadier—as though the room needed a moment to remember how to breathe.
The barkeep—a burly old man with a back gone stiff from too many years and too few breaks—gave a grunt as Torska approached.
“Morning, stone-sleeper. You look better’n last time I scraped you off the floor.”
Torska answered with a low sound that might have been a grunt or a groan. “Aye. Still tryin’ t’remember which bones belong to me.” He eased himself onto a stool, joints popping like settling timbers, as they always did in the first hours of any given day.
The barkeep slid a flagon toward him, thick with barley and honey, the motion practiced and unceremonious.
“I’ve got news ’bout your inquiry,” the man said, his voice dropping without needing to look around. “More whispers from last moon. Old statues turnin’ up again. Not all whole. Some… shattered clean through. Some left standin’ in overgrown gardens like ornaments folk forgot they owned.”
Torska’s fingers tightened around the mug, knuckles paling against the clay.
“Any names?”
The barkeep shook his head. “Buildings’re too old and crumbled to have ’em anymore. But a ranger out on the Glidor roads swore one bore a dwarven-lookin’ clan mark.”
Torska’s hand drifted to the pouch at his hip, thumb tracing the faint engraving worn into the leather. His stomach turned cold.
“Where?”
“North past Westhome. Up the main road, before Greenwater proper.”
Silence gathered between them, settling thick as dust. Then the dwarf stood, the movement slow but deliberate, joints complaining as they bore his weight.
“Hand me that map,” he said. “I need to be sure the roads haven’t changed beneath me.”
The barkeep hesitated, then reached beneath the counter and produced a cracked, time-worn map. “You’ll want to pass through Highkeep. Roads there are mean—but you might hear more there than you will here. Folk say stone remembers voices. Maybe yours will stir theirs.”
Torska grunted and slid a few coins across the counter.
He pulled his cloak tighter and stepped through the tavern’s arched doorway into the cool light of dawn. Beyond the city’s edge, the horizon glimmered like the edge of a blade. The old paths waited—buried under moss and time, but not forgotten.
_______________________________________
The road from the old tavern snaked northward, flanked by low stone fences and wildflower meadows slowly reclaiming the old scars of war. The sky hung pale and overcast, pressing down on the hills like a heavy thought. Each mile rang beneath his boots with the quiet rhythm of resolve.
By the week’s end, the black rooftops of Highkeep loomed ahead, slate shingles glinting like scales in the setting sun. The city had changed. Once known for its silver vaults and blood-bought wealth, it now wore a veneer of order—a peace too polished to trust. Brass-armored guards watched the gates, their breastplates stamped with a crest that did not feel familiar, like many of the subtle shifts he had noticed from town to town.
The smell of greed still clung to the streets like smoke.
Torska kept his hood low and his coin purse tighter. Merchants shouted of “reclaimed treasures!” and “relics of the petrified age!” hawking shards of broken statuary and dull gemstones of polished glass to passing travelers. One stall displayed a piece of what the seller claimed was dwarven craft—metal fused with stone, set out like a curiosity.
Torska stopped, studying it. The sigil etched into the surface was worn, but not unrecognizable.
“Found in the western ruins,” the merchant boasted. “Old clanwork. From before the Turning.”
Torska’s jaw clenched beneath what remained of his beard. “From Westhome?”
The merchant faltered at the sight of an actual dwarf standing at his table. “Could be,” he said quickly. “Could be Greenwater. Who’s asking?”
But Torska was already moving on, boots striking the cobblestone in a steady, measured rhythm—one that drew glances as he passed.
Marching onward brought him to Westhome. The city stood much as it always had—a proud trade hub set across the hills, its roads busy with wagons and foot traffic, its towers maintained and flying familiar colors. Stone walls were sound, gates well-kept, and the markets rang with the ordinary noise of commerce. Whatever troubles had passed through the region, Westhome had endured them.
Torska moved through its streets without drawing more than a passing glance. Dwarves were rare, but not unknown enough to cause pause here even after nearly 8 years of absence. This was a city that dealt in goods and gold first, questions later.
It was only beyond the inner roads, where the city thinned and the land sloped away toward older foundations, that neglect began to show.
There, near a half-forgotten spur road and the remnants of an ancestral hall long since removed from trade routes, he found the old well. The blacksmith’s guildmark was still cut into its stone lip, worn but intact. Nearby, a fallen family mark lay tipped among rubble, no longer set upright or tended, half-sunk into the earth as though the ground itself tried to bury the memory.
He knelt, pressing a rough palm to the largest fragment. A ring lay fused within the stone—a relic caught halfway between flesh and earth. The chill of broken magic lingered in it, pulsing faintly beneath his touch: an echo of the same curse that had once held him, and all dwarven kin alike.
“Who were you?” he murmured. “Brother? Cousin? Friend?”
There was no answer. Only the wind threading through hollow windows, and the slow, steady drip of water from the neglected well nearby.
Carefully, he gathered the shard that bore the fused ring, wrapped it in linen, and laid it deep in his pack. No good would come of leaving it here alone. On his map, he marked the place of the discovery and added measured notes to his record book. Perhaps he would return one day with kin enough to recover the rest of their fallen.
Then he turned toward the northern trail.
The road to Greenwater gleamed faintly under the moon.
By the time he reached it, the world had softened. Arid forests gave way to emerald marshlands and slow-moving rivers, dotted with lantern boats and pale water lilies. Music drifted across the water—soft flutes, easy laughter, the low hum of a city that had learned how to forget.
Torska paused at the edge of the dock, the scent of fish oil and blooming reeds mingling in the air. For a moment, he could almost believe the world had healed.
But the stone shard in his pack weighed heavy against his back, and he knew better.
Greenwater should have been peaceful. In truth, it was. Lanterns drifted along the slow river like tame fireflies, their reflections dancing over carved marble bridges. Taverns laughed late into the night; minstrels played soft tunes from balcony railings, and the scent of spiced wine lingered in the humid air. Here, the world had learned to move on. The age of curses—of stone and silence—had faded into little more than a fireside story.
But Torska did not belong in a place that had forgotten how to mourn.
He took a rented room above a cooper’s shop near the eastern docks. The bed was soft—too soft, as though it might swallow him whole. He sat on its edge long after midnight, staring at the shard from Westhome laid upon the bedside table. Even through the linen wrapping, its faint chill seeped into the wood. At times, he could have sworn it pulsed, as if the fragment still remembered breath.
Or begged to.
Outside, laughter echoed off the canals. Somewhere, a woman sang—a bright, careless sound that made his heart ache.
Rest came in fits. He dreamed of the Daggerwood again—the stillness, the first gasp of breath, the slow, bewildering return to a world no longer as quiet as the one he had left behind.
When dawn’s first light crept in through the shutters, he rose with the heaviness of a man who no longer believed he would ever find restful sleep again. His joints ached from the odd cradling of soft bedding, his skin prickled in the humid air, and his patience for the city’s easy leisure had already thinned to a thread.
The streets of Greenwater curved like waterways through a dream. Vendors shouted of lotus wines and river pearls; ferries drifted between houses with moss-covered roofs. Children played in shallow pools where fish darted between their toes. Torska moved among them like a shadow that did not belong.
He did not come here for merriment. He came looking for answers.
The rumors that had drawn him this way tugged at the edge of his thoughts—the broken statues, the scattered kin. If one had found its way here, it could have been carried farther still.
He began to wander beyond the busy canals, letting instinct rather than map guide him. Up narrow cobbled paths, past shrines grown over with vines, following the sound of rushing water.
It was there, at the city’s northern edge, that he found the garden.
A wrought-iron gate stood between two old cypress trees, its hinges green with rust. Behind it, mist rose from a slender waterfall spilling down weathered stone into a pool ringed with lilies. The air shimmered with spray, cool and alive. And there—standing directly beneath the cascade—was the statue.
A dwarf, seemingly carved in exquisite detail. Or what remained of one.
The water had worn her smooth over the years, softening the sharp edges of her face until her features blurred into something ghostly. Both arms were gone at the shoulders; her hair, intricately braided once, now ran like melted wax down her back. The suggestion of plaits lost beneath layers of erosion.et her stance remained unmistakable.
She stood solid and unbowed beneath the cascade, feet planted, shoulders squared despite what had been taken from her. There was pride in the set of her weight, even now. Resolve. The posture of someone who had not expected to be spared, but had never intended to yield.
She had never awakened from her cursed slumber.
The damage told it plainly enough. Stone worn too thin. Breaks too deep and careless to have been made by time alone. Whatever moment the curse had lifted for the rest of his kin, it had come too late for her. Flesh could not return where too much had already been lost.
Water slid endlessly over her ruined form, tracing paths down her face like tears she would never feel.
Torska’s breath caught in his throat.
He stepped closer, boots sinking slightly into damp moss. The gate creaked and rattled under his weight as he gripped its bars. The roar of falling water swallowed the city’s sounds until it felt as though the world had narrowed to this one hidden place.
He searched for any sign—any proof—that she had once lived, once walked the same mountain halls he did. At first, there was nothing but erosion and moss.
Then a glint—faint, but real.
Half-hidden beneath the run of water along her left side was a carving, worn thin but unmistakable.
A knotted crossing of tools and hands.
The sigil of Smeltbuster.
One of the Dead clans.
He pressed his forehead against the gate. Cold iron bit into his skin, and the mist dampened his beard.
“Stone Maker… take me,” he whispered. “You’re one of ours.”
For a long moment, he stood there, motionless. The water roared. The statue stared through the veil of years, and he felt smaller than he had since the day he’d awakened in the forest.
Then the anger came.
It rose sharp and unforgiving, a familiar heat beneath the skin. Like a forge with new bellows. His grip tightened on the bars. His arms shook—not with weakness, but with the effort it took to keep still.
A voice broke the quiet.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
Torska caught the man’s words without turning fully. A few paces away stood a gardener, judging by the mud on his boots and the shears at his belt. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, tattooed forearms darkened by sun and work.
“Old piece,” the man went on, following Torska’s gaze. “Been here longer than me—longer than most folk who work with their hands in town. The master likes her there. Says the falls make her look alive.”
Torska’s hand stayed on the gate, knuckles whitening.
“Where did she come from?”
The man shrugged, wiping his hands on a rag. “Out west somewhere. She was a gift from some adventurer, I’m told. There’s a trade in old relics, you know. Easier to sell statues than to remember who they were carved for.”
“Statues,” Torska repeated.
The word came out low and slow, edged with something dangerous. “You call her that?”
The man hesitated, eyes flicking to him now, measuring. “Well… aye,” he said at last. “What else would I call her?”
Torska let go of the gate, the iron screeching faintly as it sprang back into place. He exhaled through his nose, a sound closer to a growl than a sigh.
“A stone-sister,” he said quietly. “You call her a stone-sister.”
The gardener took a cautious step back. “Didn’t mean offense.”
“None taken,” Torska muttered—though his tone stripped the words of any truth.
He turned away from the man and back to the falls.
The statue’s face, worn smooth and indistinct, caught the light through the drifting mist. Water slid endlessly over her cheeks, tracing paths that looked too much like tears. Someone had placed her here on purpose. Had chosen this garden. This view. Had decided that this was fitting.
His jaw tightened.
This had not been care. It had been possession.
“Folk call her the Silent Watcher,” the man offered after a pause. “Suppose it’s fitting. Always watching, never speaking.”
Torska’s eyes narrowed. “Stone remembers,” he murmured.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” He adjusted his cloak, the fabric darkened by spray. “She’s not forgotten.”
He left the garden and its keeper with slow, deliberate steps, the sound of falling water following him around the bend at the corner of the path.
He did not hurry.
The sound of the garden falls faded behind him as he followed the path down into the city’s higher quarters where stone was cleaner and the air smelled less of river and more of money. Villas rose behind wrought walls and trimmed hedges, their lanterns hung for beauty rather than need. This was a place built to be admired, not endured.
Torska moved through it like something out of place. But filled with unbridled rage, directed currently, at once source.
It did not take long to learn who owned the garden. Names came easily here, spoken freely by servants who mistook him for hired muscle or curiosity alike. The Silent Watcher, they said. A centerpiece. A gift. A wealthy collector with a taste for relics and living water.
By the time he reached the villa gates, his hands had stopped shaking.
The guards looked him over and hesitated—long enough for him to step past them before they remembered themselves. No one laid a hand on him. There was something in his posture that discouraged it.
Inside, the air was warm and perfumed. Marble floors reflected torchlight. A man reclined near a low table, wine in hand, rings heavy on his fingers. He looked up, annoyed more than alarmed.
“You’re early,” the man said. “I didn’t send for—”
Torska crossed the room in a handful strides and struck him across the face.
The chair tipped. Wine flutes shattered. The man hit the floor hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs, shock overtaking arrogance before pain had time to catch up. Torska stood over him, chest heaving, fists clenched at his sides.
“Do you know what you own? WHO you own!?” he demanded.
The man scrambled backward, slipping on spilled wine and broken glass. “You—you can’t—this is my house—”
“You bought stone,” Torska snarled. “You bought my kin.”
The words cracked something open in him.
The truth of waking to what had been done to his kin. Of seeing his people reduced to ornament and myth. Of hearing them called relics. Statues. Things to be displayed, traded, and forgotten once their novelty wore thin.
Torska caught the man by the collar and drove him back, hard, into the marble floor. The impact rang through the room, sharp and final, knocking the breath from him before fear could find its voice.
“She had a name,” Torska said, each word pressed tight with fury. Each word pressed tight with fury As his fist collided with the man's jaw with each declaration
His fist came down once.
“She had hands that worked!”
Another strike, his fist slick with blood dripping down his victim's face.
“Arms that built! Arms that held!”
The man tried to speak. Tried to plead. Torska did not hear him.
“You turned her into a- FUCKING view!”
When Torska straightened, his shortened form standing over the shriveling man, the room had gone silent. Only ragged breaths remained, and the distant sound of falling water somewhere beyond the villa walls.
He adjusted his cloak with hands that still trembled, forcing them steady as he took out a handkerchief to clean his fist.
“You will remove her,” he said. “You will return what’s left of her to dwarven hands. And you will pray you never see another of my kind in your gardens again.”
The man did not answer. He couldn’t.
Torska turned on his heel and left the villa without looking back, rage still burning—but now it had been quenched momentarily.
When he reached the street below, Torska paused.
He did not look back at the villa.
He looked instead toward the garden’s rise beyond the walls, where mist still clung to the trees. He wondered—briefly, unwillingly—whether anyone else had ever stood there long enough to imagine the woman beneath the stone. To picture warmth where water now fell. To remember the weight of a hammer in hands meant for work, not weather.
The thought tightened in his chest until his breath caught.
Stone endured. He had been taught that from the first days of his life. Stone bore weight, outlasted fire, remembered blows long after flesh failed. But standing there, with the sound of the falls still echoing in his bones, he understood the difference.
Endurance was not survival.
Behind him, somewhere up the hill, a disturbance rippled through the quiet. Voices raised—not shouting, not yet. The sudden wrongness of discovery. A servant calling for help. The sharp, startled tone of a man finding what should not have been found.
Torska did not turn.
The road into the heart of Greenwater stretched before him, bright and open. Morning light caught the canals, and laughter drifted down from balconies and gardens, easy and unburdened. It was a beautiful sound.
It hurt.
As he walked, he found himself murmuring—not a prayer, but something harder, more binding.
“You’ll be remembered proper,” he said under his breath. “I’ll see to that.”
He did not know whether he meant the statue, the clan, or the part of himself that had woken too late to save either.
He moved through Greenwater’s markets in silence, marking streets and landmarks on his map, sketching the river paths in the margins of his book. Before evening, he drew a rough likeness of the Silent Watcher—nothing elegant, only enough to fix her in memory. If she had been made anonymous, she would not remain so.
Still, his thoughts returned to the falls. To the sound of water striking stone. To the glint of a sigil half-lost beneath moss and time. And then—unbidden—to the other sound that lingered with it: the dull impact of force given shape, the remembered heat that still clung faintly to his knuckles, long after the moment had passed.
By sunset, the city glowed gold along the canals. Light and laughter followed him wherever he went. And beneath it all, he carried the weight of old stone—memory and sorrow, patient and unyielding.
Crushing.