Faction overview: Abyssal Dwarfs – greed at the edge of the Abyss

Above the Abyss there is no day and no night. There is only smoke, and the red glow of the fires below, and no way of telling what hour it is. Long stone arches reach out over the chasm from the walls of Zarak and Deiw – the Gift-Piers. They end in empty air, high above the churning depths. Every day, thousands of slaves are pushed off them. For the greater glory of Oskan, the Father of Lies, and his twenty-six Abyssal Lords – the dark gods imprisoned at the bottom of the Abyss, known as the Wicked Ones.

The ones doing the pushing are dwarfs. Or they used to be.

Part one: the Father of Lies' seed

The curse of gold

The dwarfs of Pannithor have always struggled with their love of gold – a love that borders on obsession. Every dwarf knows they have to master it, or lose the very things their people are famous for: reason, honour and grit. Other races can hardly imagine the dignity with which the dwarfs carry this burden. And it is a real curse, laid on them during the God War.

When the good peoples of the world stood together against the dark gods, the dwarfs were there, as unshakeable as they are today. But the Father of Lies spotted a weak point in the dwarven heart. Their love of everything precious could be bent out of shape, the way the dark gods bend every beautiful thing. So he planted a seed in the dwarfs – one that could turn that love into a secret, burning need to hoard riches above all else.

A dwarf who gives in loses control. They covet the wealth of others, take it any way they can, and may end up committing the one act dwarfs dread above all: murder. And then the Father of Lies looks up from whatever hell pit he was thrown into, and smiles. That final step means the Abyss has claimed another dwarf.

Miners at the brink

Long ago, dwarfs from the northern holds set up mining settlements around the Abyss, drawn by the promise of riches. For centuries nobody knew what had happened to them. Now everyone does: the whispers of the Father of Lies twisted those once noble hearts beyond recognition.

The longer a dwarf lives near the Abyss, the more it changes them. It's small comfort for the rest of the world that Abyssal Dwarfs are slow to breed. Many scholars believe they can't be born naturally at all, and that their numbers only grow because renegades from the southern holds keep drifting north to Tragar and falling to corruption. Others claim demonic magic has soaked into them so deeply that they're effectively immortal – doomed to an eternity of treachery and spite. One thing is certain: in any of their armies the dwarfs are outnumbered by the slaves driven ahead of them and the constructs fighting at their side. Sometimes heavily.

Kin you wouldn't recognise

Abyssal Dwarfs are every bit as strong, squat and hardy as their southern cousins. But they're often pale and grotesque, with twisted bodies and vicious tempers. Instead of their kin's flinty, clever eyes they have dark little gimlets that look at the world with open loathing. They're also stouter – a life spent on the backs of slaves has got them used to comfort and excess.

They've lost none of their strength, though, and their thick fingers are as nimble as ever. They're as good at metalwork as any dwarf; they just use the skill mostly to show off their wealth. In every one of them yawns a chasm of hunger for power and riches that nothing will ever fill. That's why they drape themselves in jewels and wear armour so elaborate their untainted kin would never be seen dead in it.

Part two: Tragar

Zarak and Deiw

The Abyssal Dwarfs call their kingdom Tragar. Everyone fears it.

Their hellish industry rings the Abyss. Mines and settlements cling to the cliffs above the vast, smoke-belching chasm, and at either end of it stand the twin temple-cities of Zarak and Deiw – old dwarf words for power and pain. They're sentinel-mountains on a maddening scale, built of stone, iron and brass and covered in leering, blasphemous carvings. They never stop growing, because their masters keep building higher and digging deeper, until the warping power of the Abyss seeps through the rock and turns the lowest chambers into hellish dens.

The surrounding mountains, almost dwarfed by the cities, are home to orcs, giants and trolls. Dragonspawn wheel above the highest spires on the hot air rising from the Abyss, and mutated basilisks slither through the rivers of lava that pour from the great forges down into the pit.

Each city is divided into districts built around temple-bastions. Every temple-bastion has its own workshops, barracks, temples, markets, guilds and keeps, and each is ruled by a warlord called an Overmaster or a sorcerer called an Iron-caster, who has to fight every day for influence and guard his back against jealous rivals. It's a country built on slavery and betrayal. A knife in the dark is as ordinary here as open war.

The slaves

The air rings with the noise of the forges and the screams of slaves, echoing through a maze of chasms, mines and tunnels. Their short lives pass in one endless night of misery, cruelty and pain.

Many were snatched from distant lands by slaving gangs. Others are prisoners from far-off battlefields – unlucky souls who survived the fighting only to end up here. Even more are born into slavery. Some are bred for it.

The Abyssal Dwarfs make sure every race does what it's best at. Dwarfs are excellent miners and smiths. Elves make amusing toys. Humans can be put to the most gruelling labour, and goblins make perfect house servants. Orcs have one real talent – war. Hordes of enslaved orcs go into battle first, as living shields and battering rams, before the masters commit themselves. If hundreds die in the process, nobody in Tragar cares. There are always more.

The Overking

Tragar runs on greed, so nothing in it stays still for long. Some rise, bend their fellows to their will and turn their little holdings into little empires – and then fall. The powerful make and break alliances in an endless contest for 'rightful' rule over their people.

On paper, every lord of a temple-bastion owes fealty to the Overking, ruler of all Tragar. In practice even he has a shaky grip on his people. The current Overking, Zerkziz, spends every day on politicking, diplomacy and displays of strength and cruelty to keep the lords of his land on side. He's grown so fat in his palace that slaves have to carry him everywhere on a palanquin. His fighting days are long behind him, but his mind has lost none of its cunning or steel. Zerkziz sends his armies to war regularly. He knows nobody can ever be allowed to doubt his strength – and he quietly hopes any pretenders to his throne will get themselves killed. The greatest lords of Tragar are happy to lead their armies in person anyway, because glory on the battlefield is the surest way up.

Master and sorcerer

Two powers sit at the top.

The Overmaster is the leader – rich, sadistic and paranoid, because his hold on power is always hanging by a thread. Clad in enchanted obsidian armour, he leads raids against the rest of the world and loudly proclaims his devotion to the Wicked Ones. He has to stay busy at all times, because a single moment of weakness can be the end of him. Betrayals and coups are the norm. Many Overmasters can only count on their kin's loyalty because whole cults have grown up around them, and in the temple-bastions they are revered alongside the dark gods. Among the most famous are the Blackblood Legion, who coat their armour and weapons in the blood of slaughtered slaves before every battle, and the Engine-Legion of Vhrakzis, whose champions hack off their own right arm as a sacrifice and replace it with a mechanism of brass and iron. It's to these cults that the great warlords turn when they plan a campaign – or a coup against their rivals at home.

The Iron-casters are a powerful sect. They commune with the Wicked Ones, wield unnatural powers and run foul experiments fusing mortals with the demonic creatures of the Abyss. They rarely rule openly, but they're the real power behind many an Overmaster, slowly feeding him promises of power and conquest while working towards their own hidden ends.

That pairing of sorcerer and warrior is the secret of the Abyssal Dwarfs' success and their greatest weakness. The balance between them sits on a knife's edge – they're as likely to tear at each other's throats as to unite.

The Queen of the Black Flame

The Iron-casters wield the twisted fire magic of Ariagful – one of the Wicked Ones, the evil Queen of the Black Flame – and summon her abyssal servants to the battlefield. The dwarfs of the south have another name for her: She of the Red Flow, a name that calls to mind both lava and blood. She is the dark double of Fulgria, goddess of fire and the forge and patron of the dwarfen Warsmiths – where Fulgria stands for the purity of the forge, Ariagful rules over the undisciplined forge and savage violence. She's always happy to tempt dwarfs with sorcerous answers to practical problems, and the Abyssal Dwarfs are always happy to accept.

Part three: the wars of Tragar

The Quartz Sceptre

Every so often a leader rises who is powerful enough to unite the whole Abyssal Dwarf race and lead it to war against the rest of the world. That's what happened in the War of the Quartz Sceptre. Overking Zerkziz himself led them, backed by the legions of the Supreme Iron-caster Arhak Soulbinder. Arhak had found the lost dwarf hold of Hirath Dur, said to hide the fabled Quartz Sceptre – a relic that can break even the strongest will and lets its bearer rule the world.

The war set Zerkziz and Arhak against the Free Dwarfs – the clans of the Halpi Mountains, who answer to no power from the dwarfen south. They were led by Sveri Egilax, lord of berserkers and king of the hold of Cwl Gen. The bitter campaign came close to wiping the Free Dwarfs off the face of Pannithor, and it ended at the Battle Among the Crags. Arhak Soulbinder was within reach of the sceptre and would have taken it, had Egilax not led a daring charge straight at the Overking. Facing death at last, Zerkziz sounded the retreat. King Egilax secured the sceptre, and the Abyssal Dwarfs lost track of it. For now, at least.

Arhak is dead now. Luckily for the free peoples of Pannithor, Tragar never stays united for long – every alliance there lasts exactly until someone else's ambition wakes up.

The birth of the Gnorr

Bharzak the Grim, Overmaster of the Gift-Piers of Zarak, wanted more. More work, more blood, more pain. More slaves. Other lords of Tragar lust after gold or power – Bharzak only wants to swell the already endless crowds in his pits.

Once, in an orgy of torture, he butchered more than a hundred dwarf slaves until there was nothing recognisable left of them, and in a rage he flung the remains to the rats. And at that moment, inspiration struck. Rats are everywhere. They're vicious, tough, and they survive in the worst filth imaginable. If any race was made for slavery, it was them.

Bharzak locked himself away in his laboratory and spent almost thirteen years experimenting on slaves and on rats steeped in the power of the Abyss. By the time the doors finally opened, everyone had forgotten about him and a new Overmaster had taken his place – and out poured a pack of horrifying hybrids of rat and dwarf, human, elf and goblin. Bharzak called them the Gnorr: a slave race that would work longer and harder and breed without end. With the biggest brutes among them at his back, he quickly took back his power – more of it than before.

They turned out to be his greatest failure. The Gnorr watched, learned and plotted, and in the darkness of the pits they grew a language of their own, Chitter. Unseen, they tunnelled beneath the cellars and sewers of the twin cities, and when the revolt came, thousands of Abyssal Dwarfs died and the rats escaped Tragar for good. A new plague had been loosed on the world – the Gnorr, known to everyone today as the Ratkin.

That was more than a century ago. Bharzak barely kept his position, and he rules his underground domain with one eye on every shadow, watching for a rival's blade or the red eyes of his own creations. He nearly died at the hands of one of his rat brutes and rebuilt his ruined body with parts taken from Ratkin and Grotesques, the many-limbed mutants of the Iron-casters' laboratories – even the most hardened lords of Tragar look away when he passes. And the breeding goes on. Not every rat escaped, and the ones that stayed behind are scornfully called Yellow-tails by those who got away.

Orcs at the gates

The Abyssal Dwarfs and the orcs can't stand each other. Both races have their heartlands by the Abyss, and although both want to conquer everyone else, they fight each other more often than not. If it weren't for the orcs, Tragar could turn all its unholy energy south. The dwarfs have ringed the Abyss with iron and obsidian fortresses, but every so often an orc warlord comes along and smashes it all down.

For a long time no orc dared attack Tragar head-on – behind its walls waited the one thing orcs fear more than death: slavery. Then came the orc warlord Gakamak the Smasher. He murdered several dwarf lords at a parley and then launched an all-out assault on their lands. His tribe became the greatest orc force in history. It laid siege to the temple-bastions of Tragar and handed the Overmasters one humiliating defeat after another, until it had pushed the dwarfs back to the very brink of the Abyss. Only then did Gakamak's army fall apart. The dwarfs were in no state to give chase, and Gakamak got away.

The human tribes of the north sometimes march to war alongside Tragar, and sometimes fight for it as slaves. Ogres turn up in its ranks too – they really don't mind whose side they're on. The Abyssal Dwarfs even venture into the forest of Galahir, where the ancient trees make good fuel for their furnaces. And on the border with Tragar the Order of the Brothermark now keeps watch – a new order to which the human realm of Basilea ceded the land there.

The march south

When the Abyss swelled with power ten years ago, the armies of Zarak and Deiw marched south. With the might of the Wicked Ones behind them, the Abyssal Dwarfs meant to finish their kin once and for all. The dwarfs of the south were divided, quarrelling and weak; Tragar was strong and united under Zerkziz. The time had come.

Countless armies marched on the Halpi Mountains, the homeland of the Free Dwarfs. Tens of thousands of slaves and Blacksouls – the heavy infantry of Tragar – advanced ahead of hundreds of mortars, whose fire and fumes blotted out the sky. New, colossal obsidian beasts lumbered into battle carrying great shrines that channelled their patrons' infernal power. Halfbreeds – half dwarf, half abyssal beast – and Grotesques in endless variety were driven forward by their makers, the Iron-casters. The Free Dwarfs fought desperately, but the Abyssal Dwarfs rolled on like a lava flow, slowly swallowing everything in their path.

Every battle of that war is a legend in its own right. At Cwl Gen, the dwarf Warsmith Jarrun Iremonger emptied his workshop and the hold's entire armoury – over a hundred war machines held the walls for seven days and nights, and when the last defenders had pulled out, Iremonger set off the remaining powder and brought the hold down on the attackers. At the Battle of the Bloody Steppe, Sveri Egilax led a whole army of survivors driven into a blood frenzy by grief, fighting more for honour than for victory. Each of them took scores of the enemy down with them, and still the greed of Tragar could not be stopped.

The last defenders gathered at Rhyn Dufaris, the hold closest to the Great Cataract, a vast waterfall. The Abyssal Dwarfs surrounded them, and their dominion over the mountains seemed certain. The refugees crossed the Great Cataract on the ferries of the Chainway, hauled along a vast chain. When the last of them was across, Baine Thistledew, head of the clan that kept the Chainway, hacked through the chain with his axe and the whole crossing sank. The Free Dwarfs stood on the far shore and waited for the invasion.

It never came.

The flood

Nobody had foreseen the plan of the Green Lady, leader of the Forces of Nature and the goddess left untouched when the Celestians were torn apart. Together with the Thuul mages of the undersea Trident Realm she woke an ancient magic: the Frozen Sea north of the Abyss boiled, the ancient ice gave way, and a wave rolled across the steppe and flooded the Abyss and all the land around it. Zarak and Deiw, built on high peaks, survived – but they were cut off from the land and from the fires of the Abyss, and its power began draining out of the dwarfs. So the Abyssal Dwarfs chose to hold on to what they'd taken and pull back. For now.

The songsmiths of Golloch, king of the dwarf empire in the south, sing of it as a great victory, and in his halls people say the Abyssal Dwarfs simply feared his wrath. Those who fled across the Great Cataract remember it differently.

Halpi's Rift

Beneath the Halpi Mountains the Abyssal Dwarfs accidentally unleashed the magic slumbering there – the Nexus of Power. The surge was felt across all of Pannithor; it tore the fabric of reality, warped even the Elven Ways and widened the Abyss. The breach, known as Halpi's Rift, was eventually sealed by an alliance of the noble races – but not before Garkan the Black, the Wicked One who created the orcs, had used its power to forge a new and stronger breed in the Abyss: the Riftforged orcs. When their legions burst into the world, some marched through Tragar towards the Halpi Mountains. The Abyssal Dwarfs had been warned, and stood aside.

Part four: the dark host

Blacksouls and Decimators

There aren't many Abyssal Dwarfs, but every one of them is a trained warrior and every one is expected to fight. The most famous warlords can summon troops from across Tragar; others have to raise militia, bargain for support and drag huge slave hordes out of the pits. They're as enduring as their noble kin – and, sadly, just as slow. So they march in big infantry blocks behind thick armour and shields.

The backbone of the army is the Blacksouls. They fight with heavy axes and hammers, march in tight regiments and often carry shields of ensorcelled dark iron. They'd rather receive a charge than make one – let the enemy spend its strength on their ranks, and then the axes come out. In the line they work together, quarrelsome as they usually are, because as sadists they understand that this is the best way to make the enemy suffer. Once the battle's over, the feuding and backstabbing start straight away, as each tries to improve his position just a little.

The enemy's approach is met by long lines of Decimators. Unlike their cousins, Abyssal Dwarfs prefer slaughter up close to firepower at range. The Decimators' thunderpipe is a short, brutish blunderbuss that spews a cloud of grapeshot capable of stripping flesh from bone and stopping the most determined charge dead. Above all it's meant to maim – so the victim can be dragged, howling, back to the slave pits. If that isn't enough, the Decimators step aside and the enemy runs into the teeth of the kin waiting behind them.

Berserkers

The exception to all that discipline is the Abyssal berserkers. They're usually seen trying to keep up with the orcs, howling like madmen, until they finally hit the enemy line and turn into whirling, frenzied killers. They're a twisted version of the berserkers of the south. They aren't driven by their people's tragic history, or even by guilt over betraying their kin. They've given themselves to the death cults of Tragar and sold their souls to the creatures of the Abyss for the promise of endless slaughter. Only by killing can they hold off eternal damnation, at least for a while.

Cunning Overmasters factor the berserkers' bloodlust into their plans and often use them as bait or a diversion.

Slaves in the line

Orcs are tough, capable and eager to fight – ideal slave soldiers. Most go to battle on foot, as a shield wall for their cruel masters. Some ride captured gores. The beasts are as abused as their riders, but they cover ground at a punishing pace and hit the enemy like a brick wall. The orcs don't need much whipping, either. Once they smell blood they hurl themselves into the fight with wild glee. Battle is their only taste of freedom, and that is enough to make them fight like fury, even though they hate and fear their overseers.

Behind these hordes stand the Slave Herders, each with his own favourite brand of cruelty: some march at the head of the slaves, driving them on with barbed lashes, others ride chariots alongside the gore riders and steer them at the foe. Whole hordes are led by Slave Drivers – master torturers who outrank the herders. They often carry dreadful totems and pennants to war and revel in the despair they spread among the enemy.

The lowest-ranking herders aren't yet allowed to handle orcs. They learn the trade on Mutated Mastiffs – misshapen dogs created by the Iron-casters. A pack can take down an unprepared dwarf, and an over-eager herder only makes their temper worse. If he manages to bring them to heel – and survives – he may be trusted with more valuable stock.

And then there are the rats. The dwarfs still breed Ratkin as fodder and sacrifices. One report written for a lord of Tragar notes with satisfaction that, compared to the might of Zarak, the escaped rats are 'mere fleas on the fur of a rodent'. Enslaved Ratkin go into battle alongside the orcs, and where their masters have allowed them a few new ideas, they ride Tunnel Runners too – the rat-kind's answer to chariots, recaptured from the runaways or rebuilt in the workshops of Zarak.

Mutants

The Iron-casters experiment without a shred of morality or sanity. They fuse the flesh of thinking races with the essence of abyssal creatures, and whether the creatures they make understand anything at all is anyone's guess. Best not to wonder how aware they are of their torment. Most don't live long, and few ever make it to a battlefield.

The best known of these mad creations are the Halfbreeds: the upper body of a dwarf fused to a bull-like abyssal quadruped. The thunder of their hooves is feared far across the northern steppes as a herald of death or slavery. They're bright enough to wield weapons and follow simple orders, but the constant pain of their tortured bodies drives them into a fury, and most charge the enemy the moment they see it. The worst of them, Halfbreed Champions, have to be unleashed quickly before they endanger their own side. And the immense Greater Halfbreeds serve as mounts for Iron-casters and the wealthiest Overmasters.

Grotesques are huge, many-limbed hybrids that tear their opponents to pieces. Overmasters prize them, but there's no communicating with them, so they usually have to be destroyed after each battle before they kill their masters.

Gargoyles aren't mutants, yet they share an odd kinship with the Iron-casters' creations – maybe because they too are the lowest of the low in their own society, maybe because of a shared hunger. These dim-witted lesser abyssals follow the dwarfs to war and hang over the battlefield like a shroud, ready to drop on the wounded and the stragglers.

The Flamebound

Some Iron-casters don't breed hybrids at all, but build constructs out of obsidian, bone, metal and magma, with magic bound into them – strong, reliable and all but indestructible. Only the Iron-casters and their acolytes know how they're made. Some talk of the essence of the Abyss itself, others of the souls of lesser beings chained to obsidian frames. The secrecy also lets the Iron-casters charge outrageous tithes for their creations.

The most common are golems – hunched, muscular figures that tower over any man. Fighting one is like fighting an avalanche. They're slow and dim, pounding their foes with their fists or drenching them in magma, and then standing idle until they get new orders. Wealthy Overmasters can afford Greater Obsidian Golems – giants that tear down castle walls and crush whole regiments.

When the Abyss opened ten years ago, foul energies spilled out into the world. It was Dravek Dalken, a former acolyte of Arhak Soulbinder, who worked out how to harness them for the legions of Tragar. Brass shrines were built, blazing with hellfire and malice – the Hellfanes. They channelled the power flowing out of the Abyss into nearby Abyssal Dwarfs, making them stronger and faster. They only worked at close range, so great obsidian beasts were built to carry them into battle. The flow of that energy has weakened since, but the constructs can still draw on it.

The Hexcasters are another recent addition – small, insect-like constructs bound to runes of hatred that bring bad luck down on the enemy. They're subtle enough to be turned on an ally, too. More than one Overmaster has felt his strength drain away just as he faced a dangerous foe, and understood the betrayal too late. That's why Abyssal Dwarfs keep a careful eye on any Iron-caster with one of those things scuttling at his side.

The Immortal Guard

The elite of the army is the Immortal Guard. They're said to be little more than living suits of armour shaped into a terrible, bloodthirsty likeness of a dwarf, without fear or mercy. They have one job: to protect their commander in battle.

Joining the Immortal Guard takes a quality that's rare among Abyssal Dwarfs – loyalty. A warrior swears himself body and soul not to a person, but to a title, and a binding ritual much like the Iron-casters' magic makes him immortal. When the holder of the title dies, the guard protects the successor. Over time the guardsmen lose themselves piece by piece, until nothing is left but obedience and the will to fight, sealed forever inside gilded armour. Some embrace that fate all too eagerly and become something more than their kin. These spirits of war are called guardians – the only higher rank in the Immortal Guard – and they lead it in battle.

Living machines

The war machines of the southern dwarfs are designs tested over thousands of years. Those of Tragar are new and volatile inventions of the Iron-casters: mortars, rocket launchers and flamethrowers – anything that causes agony. Their constant thudding is the drumbeat to which the army marches to ever greater slaughter.

They're built with the leering faces of abyssal creatures, and that's no accident. The Iron-casters bind the essence of Ariagful's children – the abyssal beings born of her – into them, so every engine is, in its own way, alive. It rages inside its metal prison, and its fury feeds the fire of its weapons. With a single word an Iron-caster can wake the regenerative power of the creature inside and repair any damage. Ariagful herself bears the dwarfs no grudge for imprisoning her children – the denizens of the Abyss mean little to her.

Part five: monsters and masters

Ba'su'su the Vile

Most Halfbreeds live short, painful lives, their tortured bodies an affront to the mortal world. One of them has not only survived but thrived through decades soaked in blood. He is Ba'su'su the Vile, the Lord of Gargoyles.

He's a hybrid not of two creatures but of many. He has the head of a hairless dog with eyes that burn with the heat of the deepest Abyss, the body of a man twisted and overgrown with muscle, a vulture's taloned feet, and two pairs of wings as black as the ash clouds over the northern lands.

He's forever circling the Abyss on its searing thermals, master of everything that flies there. Wherever he goes, a cloud of gargoyles follows him, so thick it blots out the sun. Gargoyles feed on the dead and dying, friend or foe, but with Ba'su'su among them they cower and hiss. It's his right to feed first, and none of his winged kin may touch flesh until he's had his fill. And when the Abyssal Dwarfs march against the lands of men and the other speaking races, Ba'su'su flies with them – where his makers go, he goes.

He once had a bride. Sor'ik'su, queen of his lofty seraglio, fell into the hands of the Varangur during the Reckoning – the great war those clans of the far north waged against the Abyss. Breaking her will took an age, and then a bloody ritual fused her body and essence with the remains of Herja, the long-dead leader of the Var'Kyr, the first and long-forgotten followers of Korgaan, the Varangur's god. In that body Herja went on to fight for Korgaan – until she fell in a duel with Magnilde, the warrior the god had chosen as his new favourite.

Brakki Barka

Halfbreeds are thought too wild and unpredictable to command others. Brakki Barka is the exception. In him the insane fury of his kind is joined to an iron will and real ambition. He's so preternaturally strong and his rage so boundless that he has risen higher than any of his kind ever has: he commands the army of an entire temple-bastion, Bhardoom.

He commands mostly in name, because in battle his frenzy is so total that he barely gives any orders. He keeps his warriors in line the old-fashioned way: anyone who shows the slightest cowardice or hesitates over an order is crushed under his hooves. If anyone objects, their whole company is thrown from the heights of Bhardoom into the ocean of lava at the bottom of the Abyss. The Legion of Bhardoom is known as utterly relentless and utterly obedient.

Life is a hundred times worse for the slaves of Bhardoom. If one falters at his work, he and ten others are killed on the spot as a warning to the rest. Small wonder the slave-masters of Bhardoom are always hunting for more unfortunates.

Golekh Skinflayer

Among the Abyssal Dwarfs, Golekh Skinflayer is known for his short, violent temper and for the legions of slaves he commands from the great keep of Khalazahrm. To the Gnorr he is a curse – a dark spirit of cruelty and pain that comes for the weak and the wayward. In their own tongue they call him Aka-Strach-Ya, which roughly means 'the burning lash'. Enslaved Ratkin fear him more than their own god.

In battle he rides a reinforced chariot pulled by a vat-grown gore, lashing out with his whip at friend and foe alike. His slaves throw themselves at the enemy in a desperate frenzy, while even the most disciplined enemy troops freeze in terror before the screeching horde washes over them.

Part six: eyes on the north

The third city

The years pass, and the Abyssal Dwarfs grow stronger. The Halpi Mountains are theirs – every hold there has been destroyed, or taken and corrupted. The floodwaters have evaporated, the slaves have repaired the damage, and the chasm has split the ground even further, so that Deiw no longer marks its edge. At the far end of the Abyss, thousands of slaves are raising vast structures of black iron and obsidian amid the wailing. A third city is rising.

Over the chasm that now reaches deep into Tragar stands a new fortress, Tragazahk. From there, and from Zarak and Deiw, new legions are setting out.

Alliances with other evil races of Pannithor have also brought new weapons, the like of which hasn't been seen since the God War. Things so terrible they're best left unspoken, lest they invite madness.

Whispers

The armies of the Wicked Ones are cut off inside the Abyss, so the gods have chosen new proxies in the world. The Archfiends – generals of the demon hosts from the Sixth Circle of the Abyss – pass on their orders to the Abyssal Dwarfs, since they suffered least from the flood. Sealed behind the vast gates of their strongholds, the Abyssal Dwarfs are now their dark masters' chief weapon.

The Wicked Ones fill their minds with visions of conquest and whisper secrets to the Overking. A power in the north. A lost elven prince. Glory everlasting. Zerkziz is a zealous worshipper of the Wicked Ones – and he listens.

The forges of Zarak and Deiw are working without rest. Baleful eyes have turned towards the Northern Alliance – a pact of the peoples of the frozen north – and its city of Chill, where some ancient power is flickering into life. The Abyssal Dwarfs, who fight in caves and ice caverns like no one else, will lead the assault. Ahead of them will march slave orcs and Ratkin – a plague that will spread through the tunnels and strike the Alliance from below.

Never enough

All of this has happened before. The War of the Quartz Sceptre ended in retreat, the march south in a flood, and the Gnorr, who were meant to be the perfect slaves, escaped and became a plague.

But the Abyssal Dwarfs don't count their defeats. For them, failure is fleeting and the hunger for conquest is everything. There's always a new scheme, a new land to plunder, new slaves to catch. Only bloody conquest gives them a sliver of satisfaction – and only for a moment. Because the chasm in an Abyssal Dwarf's soul runs deeper than the one he built his cities over.

Nothing will ever fill it.