#rudnik

[zombilenium]

Rudnik Ghost Town, Rybachy peninsula, Russia...

[jovanapaunic]

[gideonsexperiment]

Perseus [Campaign]

[beingatoaster]

I started this like. a year ago? When I wrote Brochilde meeting Corric, and decided I should do her other dwarf buddy as well. But it languished as just a couple paragraphs until this week, when I was suddenly seized by the urge to avoid what I should be working on finish it off. So, the tale of how Rudnik met Corric, this time.

---

Rudnik wondered, for far from the first time, why so many magical texts were written in Draconic.

He was luckier than usual this time around; this temple's library contained a number of translations. Into Common, not Dwarvish, but Common was better than nothing, and at least he knew how to read it. Unfortunately, whoever had done the translations had left most of the technical terms untranslated, simply transliterating them into Common script without a translation. Or maybe these were untranslatable words. Rudnik didn't know.

For the fifth time today, though, he found himself opening the Draconic-to-Common dictionary that the library also held, to see if he could figure out what this new word meant. It was always the complicated words that were transliterated, the compound words or the ones that the dictionary marked as not traditionally translatable, so having the dictionary on hand didn't solve everything, but it helped a lot.

As he was leafing through it, someone else came up to the table. They paused and looked down, which Rudnik ignored--many of the visitors here seemed intrigued by a dwarf in full chainmail, with an axe across his back, paging through handwritten tomes. But this figure didn't move on, instead continuing to loom overhead. They cleared their throat.

Looking up, Rudnik saw a dragonborn, a rusty orangish-brownish-reddish shade, incongruously wearing a frilly red dress over a ruffled white chemise. She smiled down at him.

"Hello, friend! Do you mind if I join you?"

He did mind, actually. Rudnik didn't want someone sitting nearby, chattering about their reading or asking about his. Even if she didn't talk, she'd probably look at what he was reading, and what would she think about the books he'd collected? What conclusions might she draw? He couldn't risk it.

"I'd rather you not," he said, trying to sound polite but aware that it likely came out gruff at best.

"All right," the dragonborn said agreeably. "But do you mind if I borrow that dictionary for a few minutes, then? I promise I'll bring it right back. I'd thought if we sat together, we could share it, but I don't want to disturb whatever you're working on."

That made Rudnik look up in surprise. "This dictionary?" he asked, hefting the Draconic-to-Common dictionary he was consulting right now. Not that he had any others.

"Yes, that one."

"Why would you need it? You're a dragonborn, you speak Draconic. And your Common seems fluent enough to me." He knew it was a rude question even as he was asking it, but his astonishment, and his irritation, overrode his good manners. He was using the dictionary himself, and he didn't see why she needed to take it away on him.

"I don't speak Draconic, actually. Or, I'm learning it, but I'm not very good yet. I was raised by halflings, so I learned their tongue as a child. I've found some simple Draconic texts in this library, so I'm trying to read them to improve my fluency, but I keep running across words I don't know. And this is the only Draconic dictionary they have."

The dragonborn still seemed unbothered, either by the impolite question or the surliness. She was beaming at him with what seemed to be great care, teeth showing, but at such an angle that the sharp points were covered. Something she must have learned from her halfling parents, to make the expression seem less threatening. It gave her story the ring of truth.

"I see," Rudnik said, his question answered. He felt uncomfortable, now, having been so short with someone who was also seeking answers. "I suppose it would make sense if you sat down at the other end of the table, so we can keep it in the center. But I can't concentrate on my work if we talk."

"No worries, friend," the dragonborn said, pulling out the furthest chair from him and thumping down into it. She set a thin book with a brightly-decorated cover--a children's book of fairytales--on the table in front of her. "I'll keep my lips sealed. My name is Corric Fenwhistle, by the by."

Which seemed like a direct contradiction of her promise, but Rudnik hadn't quite sunk to the kind of poor manners yet where he could ignore it. "Rudnik Grayscale."

"A pleasure to meet you, Rudnik," Corric said, sounding like she meant it. "And now I'll leave you to your work."

***

Somewhat to Rudnik's surprise, Corric more or less kept to her vow, aside from her ridiculously cheerful greetings and goodbyes. They worked in silence together for more than a week, Corric with a different fanciful children's text each day, Rudnik with his thick pile of unhelpful magical tomes. He'd moved on to a couple without translations by the week's end.

But even that didn't help. He couldn't find a single mention in any of them of the fearsome watcher that his patron whispered about, the thing of eyes and mouths and shadowy tendrils that had driven the rest of his mining unit to death from exhaustion in their terror. Few books even acknowledged that the otherworldly depths that it came from even existed. Those that did said little about the inhabitants. They were dismissed, as a whole, as mysterious and dangerous, and the only text about them was in the form of warnings to leave them well alone.

Rudnik already knew that. He couldn't do much about it now, with his patron's orb in his eyesocket and its voice whispering at the edges of his mind. But he was fully aware that he and his comrades should never have dug that deep at all, and once they had, that he shouldn't have let either of the beings present into his soul. It was too late now to prevent that.

What he wanted now wasn't warnings. It was information. On his patron, if he could find it, to help him manage its often inexplicable and unpredictable actions and demands; and on its enemy, if enemy was what the thing was, that it had promised him the power to see and fight. Everything it deigned to share with him about that creature that had killed his comrades was cryptic, nearly incomprehensible, and didn't seem in any way to add to whatever power he had against it. But he was determined to make more of himself than just a channel for his patron to work invisibly against it.

By the ninth day after Corric had introduced herself, he was on the very last of the possibly-helpful books. He'd leaned heavily on the shared dictionary, translating each sentence literally and then trying to work out the complicated Draconic grammar, which he found paradoxically easier to shift into his own Dwarvish than into the loose, wishy-washy excuse for structure that Common boasted. Corric had touched it all of once today.

At least her quest seemed to be going better. She hadn't needed the dictionary more than that once, and she was done with her book by noon. Rudnik wasn't exactly watching her. He'd just noticed, out of the corner of his eye, when she closed the cover after a second read-through and folded her hands on top of it. She seemed content to sit there, contemplating the dust motes in a beam of sunlight that fell upon the table from a skylight above, and Rudnik wasn't going to disturb her by commenting on it when she'd been so careful not to disturb him.

The sentence he was on wouldn't parse. Not in Common, and not in Dwarvish; it made him tempted to wonder if it even parsed in the original Draconic. And it had seemed like it might for once be a helpful sentence, too. It was the start of a new section, and he'd translated "abyss beyond," but the verb form leading to it was conjugated in such a way that he wasn't able to discern the root, which was all that would be in the dictionary.

Looking down at his paper, Rudnik put his head in his hands and groaned aloud. This was useless. He was scrabbling for knowledge at this point; if there'd been none to be found in any of the other volumes, why would there be any in this one? He could feel despair eating at the edges of his thoughts, threatening to overwhelm him.

Corric moved, slightly, her crinkled skirts rustling loudly in the library's silence. "Can I help?"

"You? The one who told me that she was raised to speak Halfling?" Rudnik laughed bitterly. "You read children's books still. This is a magical text. I highly doubt it. And even if you could, it wouldn't be useful. Nothing's been. I'm trying to find information on a monster that doesn't even exist in our reality! Why would anyone waste ink on that? I might as well search for knowledge of my own descendants, I would be as likely to find it. All this work, and I've learned nothing. Because there's nothing there to learn. At least your silly fairytales are teaching you a language as you go."

He regretted the insult immediately, and the more so when Corric drew in a breath. Bracing himself, he awaited the indignant response. But instead she simply let the breath out slowly, her skirt rustling again, more extensively this time. Rudnik opened his eye and peeked through his fingers. She had risen, and was walking quietly away.

That was fair. More than fair. He'd been asking for a scolding, but she was too good-natured for that. Rudnik sighed and began to gather up the other books that he'd piled up, the ones he was sure were useless, to put them away. Maybe that would clear his head enough to let him parse this sentence when he got back.

It didn't. Rudnik sat back down in front of the sentence, re-translated what he could of it just to start fresh, and then hung up on the verb again. It was too simple a sentence to glean the answer from context: the subject, which he'd translated as "the abyss beyond" and hoped was correct, the object, which was the offer, and the oddly-conjugated verb. The sentences around gave no help, either. It stood alone on the page. The paragraph before described, if he was understanding correctly, the author's attempt at conjuring a spirit, and the paragraph after, the wards the author had raised afterward. In between, that bare description of what had gone wrong.

Rudnik put his head in his hands again, rubbing at his eyesockets--the one in which his own eye still sat, which ached with exhaustion, and the other with his patron's glass-like eye hidden behind the patch, which ached with the chill and weight of the orb within. He tried to take solace in the silence of the library.

Which was disturbed, suddenly, by the rustling of crinkled fabric. Rudnik looked up between his fingers again.

Corric was returning, crossing from the doorway with long strides that made her skirts sweep like a noblewoman's behind her. She carried a plate in hand, and Rudnik could smell the toasted bread, the warm meat and melted cheese, of a sandwich such as the tavern down the street often served. He lowered his hands and looked up at her, and she smiled at him and held out the plate.

"Miss Fenwhistle-"

"You seemed like you could use this, friend," she said, with her usual cheer, before he could muster either a graceful apology or a graceless question. "My temper goes sour too, when I haven't eaten in a while, and it occurred to me that you'd been here since I arrived this morning and hadn't taken a break yet to eat or drink."

It wasn't just the sandwich she was offering, Rudnik thought, it was an out. A saving of face.

"Yes, I do need to eat. Now that you've reminded me, my stomach agrees," he said, reaching for the plate. "I am very grateful. Do I owe you anything?"

"Not at all, friend," Corric said. She thumped a jug down on the table too, and a mug beside it. How she'd smuggled any of this past the librarian, a stern-faced acolyte deeply protective of the books, he couldn't imagine. "Though I wouldn't mind a look at whatever's gotten you so cross-eyed, while you eat. If it's not a secret, of course."

She looked so earnest that Rudnik was certain that he truly could refuse, and she would take no more offense at that than she would have at anything else he'd done or said. And it was that earnestness that convinced him.

"It is secret," he said, pushing the book and his paper away from his seat to clear space for the plate and mug, and not coincidentally towards her, "but not from friends."

The smile she gave him in return was so bright, it eclipsed all those earlier. "Let me take a look at it, then."

Rudnik hadn't been lying when he said that his stomach agreed with Corric, and as he bit into the sandwich, he found himself to be ravenous. He'd been skipping lunches all this week, and he'd doubled his dinners in exchange, but he hadn't realized how reluctantly his body accepted the trade until it was offered a more usually-timed meal. He tore through the food, and the sweet cider that Corric had brought with it, while she was still paging through the dictionary.

"It's the way the verb is conjugated," he told her. "I can't tell the root. I've been able to do rough translations straight from the dictionary, you see them written there, but only when I can tell what the root of the verb is. For my research, it hasn't mattered what tense it's in, or what else the conjugation means."

"You might be surprised at how much it does matter," Corric said absently, pausing on a page and scribbling her own note on the bottom corner of his paper. "Draconic verbs carry the identity of the speaker, when conjugated. It's actually unusual that this writer bothers with all this 'myself,' 'my mind,' 'my spirit,' when they could just add an inflection onto the verb. It's a very old style, which actually--that's where I recognize this conjugation from! It was in one of the old books of fairy tales, it's a formal mode, used when you address clanheads and gods, I think...."

"I... didn't know that," Rudnik admitted. "I thought they were just different ways of writing 'I,' the way Dwarven has different forms of the second person for rank and respect and such. This is the only book that hasn't had a translation available for it."

Corric didn't answer for a moment, sweeping back through the dictionary, and then she looked up at him and grinned. "I knew it. The verb is 'kaljahar', and it's obscure on its own. I didn't know it, I had to look it up once I de-conjugated it and figured it out. The conjugation changes the first syllable, I had to look through everything with 'ja' in the middle, but this is the only one it could mean. According to the dictionary, 'kaljahar' doesn't have a direct translation, but it means something like, to possess with force, but specifically done by something not a demon or a ghost. Extraplanar, potentially inimical, and something that damages the one possessed. And there's a time inflection on it. The sentence says something like, and this is very rough, I'm not that good at Draconic yet, but, 'something from that abyss beyond cruelly possessed me, for just a moment.'"

For a moment of his own, Rudnik couldn't respond. That was, in essence, what had happened to him, hadn't it? Both the fearsome thing that had killed the others, overwhelming them with fear, and his own patron, who had torn out one of his eyes to mark their pact. Had the author had the same experience? He needed to look more closely at that next paragraph.

"That's very useful," he managed at last. Brushing the crumbs off his hands, he pushed the plate away and reached for the book. "May I see that again? I think I'll need whatever else it says about the incident."

"Certainly," Corric said, handing everything back over. "But would you like some help? I don't know how much more I can be, but I've finished all the children's fables, and they don't have anything in Draconic for adults that's not dry treatises. If I'm going to read one of those, it might as well be for the sake of helping a friend."

Rudnik felt reluctance well up in him. She had helped, true, but going further with her might expose him to uncomfortable questions. The last thing he wanted to do was explain his quest, and his warlock curse.

But on the other hand, he'd already learned just now that he might not be able to comprehend the book without her. And she seemed genuine, and honest, and willing to help. That was better than he might ask for from anyone else.

"It would be easier together," Rudnik conceded. "It's very kind of you. All of this, the food, and the help, and your graciousness."

"Don't think anything of it," Corric said. "We all act poorly when we're under stress, and hungry, and you seemed to be both. I'm glad to help with either."

She smiled at him, as she dragged her chair around the table to sit at his side. Rudnik, his face unaccustomed to the expression after so long, smiled tentatively back. He didn't know where this unexpected blessing had come from. And, he decided, he wasn't going to question it.

[nemanjak]

[beingatoaster]

Yildgrunn: 🐇, 🔥, 🐝; Ryxtlin: 📚, 💳, 🃏; Vasuvinti: 💅, ⛄, 🍑; Phyrea: 🔫, 🌹, 💉; Housin: 🎲, 🍰, ⏳; Rudnik: 🎉, 🌙, 🙁

Under the cut!

Yildgrunn

🐇 What animal would they say best represents them?

She'd say it was the noble badger: mighty, warlike, and determined to persevere!

(Dwarves tend to, for obvious reasons, subconsciously limit their heraldic symbols and fursonas to burrowing creatures. The badger is basically the dwarven heraldic equivalent of the lion.)

🔥 What’s their favorite candle scent?

She really likes woody scents, but also has a soft spot for jasmine.

🐝 What stereotypical high school clique would they fit into?

The jocks, but definitely the girl jocks--the girls who played soccer and basketball and hung out with the cheerleaders, but got away with being not quite as femme as they were because they Did Sports. (I don't know how stereotypical this is, but that was a definite actual clique in my high school.) Though she wasn't one of the really popular kids, she was one of the ones who hung on the edges but was permitted because they were on the team together.

---

Ryxtlin

📚 If they were the protagonist in any book series, what series would they choose? Alternatively: what would be their favorite book?

This is hard! My immediate instinct is actually to say the Harry Potter series, because she'd like being allowed into a wizard school and basically being The Chosen One, but I think she'd chafe at the institution of Hogwarts and the whole thing where Harry's status and power come from his parents. I wish I remembered the Percy Jackson series better, because if I am remembering it correctly, they beat out arrogant opponents by working semi-outside the system, and she'd definitely go for that.

Or, to go non-fantasy, I think she'd really enjoy being Miles Vorkosigan. Underestimated and derided for his physical abilities, but smart and capable enough to run rings around his opponents, and always coming out better at the end than he started with.

💳 What one thing that they don’t need do they waste the most money on?

Fancy wizard-looking clothes! Depending on how we define "need," anyway, because Ryxtlin's reasoning is that she has enough of a disadvantage in being taken seriously that she needs to wear the fancy wizard outfits to balance that out. If we're talking something that even Ryxtlin admits she doesn't need, it's probably either tasty snacks or decorative trinkets.

🃏 If you had to choose one tarot card to represent them, what would it be?

The Chariot! Going by my tarot book, both the upright and reversed meanings fit well for her.

---

Vasuvinti

💅 What are some things they have strong opinions about?

Pretty much all of her opinions are strong opinions! Vaz doesn't believe in being lukewarm about something. But she feels very strongly about fair competition (if you don't make sure the playing field is level, there's no pride in having won!), acting compassionately towards others (indifference and cruelty corrode the soul and cause you to dissociate from your inner self), and stretching routines (they're not just vital, if you do them right, they're fun!).

⛄ What’s their favorite season and why?

Summer! She feel obliged to like it best, since "summer's child" was one of her nicknames as a child, but she also really likes the heat.

🍑 Which emoji would they use the most?

🌞 (why post a mere smiling face when you could smile with the sun's enthusiasm?)

---

Phyrea

🔫 What would they die for? Kill for?

Phyrea would die for Tiaathque or any of her family, easily. She'd also die, in general, to protect an innocent. Overall, though, she's of the "I would die for this, but I'd rather make you die for it" school of handling villany, so she'd kill for all of the above and more! She's actually very cavalier about killing anyone she sees as having bought too deeply into the Bad Systems she's trying to overturn and uproot, in part because she's very bad at articulately talking them around.

🌹  What songs remind you of them?

Burn It Down, by Vixy & Tony, is a ship song for her and Tiaathque for me, but it's very much Phyrea's attitude and voice speaking throughout.

💉 Which Deadly Sin do they most correspond to? Which Heavenly Virtue?

Pride (with a definite side-helping of Wrath) and Courage.

---

Housin

🎲 Do they have any vices?

Housin is one of those people who, asked to name their flaws, would provide you with a list that looks suspiciously like "has actual human emotions when they think they shouldn't," but as for actual vices.... She's not supposed to take intoxicants, since they interfere with her faculties, but she's had to get tipsy "to successfully accomplish the task" a lot more than is really reasonable. And there's the whole... coldly assassinating people thing. Also, she gives in a lot to anger, since she's successfully pretzel-twisted herself into believing that any deep desire to do harm to someone is borne from logical grounds and a sense of righteous justice, given that she, supposedly, doesn't feel anger.

🍰 What’s their favorite food?

Raisins. Or grapes. Or anything derived from grapes (when the mission requires her to drink, it's funny how it usually requires her to drink wine). But raisins are the most common and "permitted" treat.

⏳ How do they feel about death?

It's a natural part of life! Given that she's a former gladiator and a part-time assassin for her monastery, Housin doesn't feel a lot of weight around it. She's supposed to--the theory of her monastic training is that she judges the impact of each death around her carefully, and kills with the understanding of its import--but she's already fucked up enough about emotions that she never was able to really pick up on that and internalize it properly.

---

Rudnik

🎉 Do they celebrate any holidays? How do they celebrate?

Back home, Rudnik celebrated all the traditional dwarven holidays--the Feast of Smiths, Silvernight, the Deep War anniversaries, and so on--but they're mostly social holidays, and he doesn't have the social structure for them as an adventurer. Also, a lot of the religious ones, he doesn't feel right participating in anymore with his warlock connections. A few of the rest, mostly the solemn memorials, he tries to honor quietly on his own in some small way or another.

And once he's in a party, he definitely finds or makes everyone Silvernight gifts, even if the rest of them don't recognize the holiday.

🌙 Which D&D class would they play as?

He'd play as a fighter. Solid, sturdy, able to protect the group and take the big hits without going down, with a purely physical approach to obstacles. Not a self-insert, but definitely some wish-fulfillment going on.

🙁 What do they consider to be their worst quality? What actually is their worst quality?

He would consider his worst quality to be his cowardice--he's afraid of his patron, he's afraid of his own priests and society, he's afraid of the awful thing he's committed to fight. His actual worst quality is probably his behavior towards those he thinks of as his lessers, which includes his unthinking bigotry, his snap judgements based on appearance, and his overall rudeness to people he finds, based on those judgements and presumptions, wanting.

[beingatoaster]

Aaaaand one last prompt ficlet, again for Corric’s party, using part of one three-word prompt (which had “garlic” in it) and part of one question prompt (”what’s their favorite thing to cook?”) in a combo to prompt a conversation. Rudnik and Ryxtlin are the most untrusting people in the party, and the most likely to be at odds based on their ideals and ethics and attitudes, and honestly they wouldn’t get along at all if Corric hadn’t been the one to introduce them, but they do achieve a sort of fragile camaraderie and I wanted to look at the beginnings of that.

---

"Ryxtlin cooks," the kobold announced, pulling an iron pot out of her pack and plopping it beside the fire.

No one argued. They were exhausted from the ambush they'd been caught in, all of them; the kobold was the best off, being the only one who hadn't taken a blow in the battle. Which was typical. He and Corric had both leapt into the fray, her sword and his axe coming faster to them both than their magic, and Brochilde never hesitated to throw herself onto the front line. Ryxtlin seemed shy of spending her magic too, but her mundane weapon of choice was that crossbow, so she had, as usual, stayed well clear of the action.

She was a kobold, after all. They weren't known for their courage in close quarters.

Neither were they known for their cooking, but at this point Rudnik would eat raw rotten meat and be glad for it. The pot, in that context, was promising. She readied it the mundane way, trudging back and forth from the stream instead of summoning up the water, raising a tripod of branches instead of making it float, and that was also a comfort to him.

(Corric had lit the fire with a last flick of her fingers before flinging herself down to groan on the ground, but he had long since accepted that there was nothing unnatural about a flame-hued dragonborn throwing fire around. It might be magic, but it wasn't a rupture in the world the way his own arcane abilities were, or the arrogant dominance over the natural order that a wizard practiced. Since she was a dragonborn, a draconic bloodline couldn't even be called a taint in the blood. Those were the arguments he'd practiced.)

"Corric, cooked meat?"

"Cooked meat," Corric said. "I have potatoes in my pack you can put in, too. And some salt and pepper."

Ryxtlin made a sound of disgust, but dug through Corric's pack for the aforementioned items. "Roots and sneezes, if you want. Ugh."

She started gnawing on her own bloody quarter of the rabbit Brochilde had caught while sawing determinedly at the potatoes with her dagger, and at that point Rudnik had to look away. He should do something, anyway. Brochilde and Corric were both just lying on the ground, but they had taken worse wounds than he had. He couldn't sit easy, not with the cold burn of his master's eye in his socket, and he wanted to do something.

"I'll help chop the potatoes," he said, approaching Ryxtlin slowly and with his hands in clear sight. She didn't seem to like him much, though he'd grant that it was mostly his own fault--he hadn't been kind, on first meeting, until Corric had knocked some sense into his skull. He still had his reservations about her, so he couldn't complain that he she had them about him.

She gave him a wary sidelong look, hunching defensively over the handful of potatoes, and then shook her head. Before Rudnik could back away, she said, "No, do salt and pepper. Ryxtlin gets them wrong."

"Right," Rudnik said, and carefully opened the packages, looking at the scanty potatoes and the size of the half-dismembered rabbit and measuring out a small enough amount not to overwhelm the senses. Then, because he felt awkward sitting there in silence while Ryxtlin kept eyeing him like she still half-expected violence, he said, gruffly, "Potatoes would be better with garlic."

"Rudnik has garlic?"

"No." He felt his face warm and cleared his throat. "I just- I like them that way. Have... have you ever had garlic? On potatoes, or something else?"

"No," Ryxtlin said. Then she shrugged. "Probably. Eat things without asking, can't know what's in."

"You'd know, I think. It's very strong, a bit like onions, but more spicy, a bit like pepper- you'd probably call it 'sneezes' too."

Ryxtlin's nose wrinkled. "Sounds bad."

"No, no, it's good," Rudnik protested, holding up a hand against her disdain. "Mashed potatoes with garlic, and just a little cheese- it's so good. And it goes well with meat, too, I know you like meat. You don't like it cooked, but marinated? Do you like meat marinated?"

"Yessssssss," Ryxtlin said, slow and careful, almost suspicious. "Ryxtlin's teacher marinated meat. Ryxtlin liked it. Not cooked, but soaked was good."

"Next time we get into town, I'll make it for you," Rudnik said, feeling seized by inspiration. One way to a creature's heart was through it's stomach--maybe he could start winning Ryxtlin over, a little, if he fed her. "Marinated meat and garlic potatoes. You like cheese, don't you?"

"Okay," Ryxtlin said. Her look had gone from suspicious to interested, and she wasn't quite so hunched over the food anymore as she dumped meat and potatoes into the pot. "Ryxtlin will eat the potatoes if they have cheese."

Rudnik smiled at her, relieved to see her tension ease. This was the first conversation they'd had that hadn't been all business, where she hadn't told him to go away once that business was over. "I promise there'll be plenty of cheese."

[beingatoaster]

I was just fucking around, trying to fulfill my dwarf quota and do something creative, and actually came up with a concept I really like? Rudnik Greyscale was just a regular miner--a steady and reliable man man, a bit quiet but always ready to join in with the drinking songs, quaffed his ale like any other dwarf--whose mining squad dug too deep. They collapsed the tunnels they’d been digging as a desperate last-ditch action against whatever evil it was that had risen up from below, to keep it from reaching the dwarfhalls above. When the full combat company that was sent in to rescue them and stop whatever the threat was finally breached the collapsed section, they found no sign of whatever had attacked the miners, but the whole squad was dead without a mark upon them, the only signs of battle the damage that their weapons had done to the stone all around. Rudnik was the only one left alive, muttering to himself about eyes staring out of the depths.... He was too disoriented by his experiences to tell them what had happened, and he was a changed man after that day, shirking his duties to page through ancient texts in the temple libraries and mutter to himself in hissing tones as if he was having an argument within his own head.

(Warlock, Great Old Ones patron--a mountain dwarf is actually a good race for making a decently melee-capable warlock that’s not a hexblade, since they get the racial combat training for battleaxes and hammers and the subrace’s medium armor proficiency. No Charisma bonus, but the boosts to Constitution and Strength mean you can dump any other good rolls/points from point-buy into Charisma and still have, as mentioned, decent melee capabilities. I may build this guy out further once I come back from the gym....)