The dwarf had been staring at his beer for so long that the Goblin began to suspect something was wrong with it. He lifted the keg behind the bar, checked the mark burned into the wood and put his enormous nose to the tap. Everything seemed to be in order.
"Are you planning to drink that?" the little green man in the brown apron finally asked.
The dwarf slowly raised a pair of thick grey eyebrows, revealing eyes that looked almost as old as the stone around them. "I am remembering."
"That usually costs more than beer."
The dwarf ignored him. He was old, even for a dwarf. His beard had once been black, though it was now whiter than the snow on the mountaintop, and he had long since forgotten exactly when the colour had changed. A heavy travelling cloak covered most of his armour, but the metal beneath it was unmistakably dwarven. Old dwarven. The kind very few smiths still knew how to make.
He raised the tankard and took a long drink. "There used to be a waystation here."
The Goblin looked around the tavern. "There still is."
"It used to be bigger." The dwarf pointed towards the wall behind the bar. "The road went straight through there."
The Goblin glanced over his shoulder. There were shelves there now, crowded with bottles, a candle and a preserving jar containing something that had been dead for so long that it had become decoration.
"And now it is a shelf."
The dwarf almost smiled. Fortified by mushroom beer, he began a story remembered by very few creatures still alive. He had never seen the kingdom beneath the mountain himself, but his father had described it in detail, using old maps and sketches that had once belonged to his own father.
Long before monsters claimed the mountain, the great road beneath it belonged to the dwarves. It connected two kingdoms separated by hundreds of miles of peaks, snow and narrow mountain passes. Travelling around the range took weeks. Travelling beneath it took three days.
Naturally, everyone chose the shorter road. Merchants came with wagons, nobles with guards, messengers with sealed letters and, from time to time, entire armies with banners flying above them.
And every last one of them paid.
At first, the toll was reasonable. Then the dwarves discovered one of the most reliable forces in the known world: human impatience. People complained about expensive roads, but they complained considerably more about long ones.
So the toll increased. Then it increased again. Whenever travellers began to believe it could not possibly become more expensive, the dwarves took this as a challenge.
Soon there was a fee for wagons, a fee for animals, a fee for cargo, a fee for armed escorts and a charge for the gradual depreciation of the road. During several particularly profitable years, there was even an administrative fee for collecting all the other fees.
The dwarf took another drink. "My grandfather invented that one."
The Goblin nodded approvingly. "A wise man."
"A rich man."
"Usually the same thing."
The road made the dwarven kingdom enormously wealthy, but it was only half of the reason. Deep beneath the city lay mines older than some human kingdoms. Every day new galleries were cut into the rock, twisting tunnels stretched farther into the dark and iron rails carried heavy carts back and forth, loaded with stone, iron ore, precious metals and, on very fortunate days, even platinum or mithril.
Work beneath the mountain never truly ended. To a human, infinity usually lay somewhere above the clouds. To a dwarf, it lay beneath his boots.
So they kept digging.
Until one day, they found something else.
The dwarf fell silent for a moment. Everyone in the Dungeon had a different explanation for what happened next. Some said the miners opened an ancient gate into Hell itself. Others claimed they broke into caverns where creatures far older and far more dangerous than anything on the surface had been waiting. One travelling merchant swore that an entire forgotten race had been sleeping beneath the mountain. A drunken wizard once spent two hours explaining to the Goblin that the mountain itself had been asleep and the dwarves had simply woken it up.
Whatever the truth was, the dwarves had disturbed something that should have been left alone. Quite possibly something that would have preferred to be left alone as well.
The deepest mines went silent first. Then the guard posts. Then entire halls. Ore carts stopped returning. The steady ringing of pickaxes disappeared from the lower tunnels. Scouting parties were sent down to investigate, and one by one they failed to come back.
As is often the case when something terrible is happening, the bureaucracy took a little longer to notice.
After the seventh expedition vanished, the Council of Elders, composed of the wealthiest dwarves in the city, finally agreed that perhaps something ought to be done. This was, by dwarven administrative standards, remarkably swift.
Orders were given to collapse valuable shafts and quarries, sealing the deepest tunnels before curious miners could wander into them and, more importantly, before whatever was below could wander out.
They were too late.
Where there had once been grave-like silence, there was now an army. Almost no one could say what it looked like. Those who saw it clearly tended not to return, and those who did return were rarely in a condition to describe much of anything.
The dwarves raised barricades and fought for every gallery, every passage, every hall, cavern and underground bridge. It made little difference. Where one creature fell, three more seemed to take its place. They showed no sign of exhaustion and no shortage of replacements.
For the first time in centuries, the gates of the dwarven kingdom opened without anyone asking for money.
Messengers rode to both sides of the mountain and asked the neighbouring kingdoms for soldiers, supplies and help. The replies took some time to arrive.
Both kingdoms expressed their deepest regret. Unfortunately, neither possessed enough gold to cover the tolls, wagon fees, armed escort charges, road depreciation costs and other expenses associated with bringing an army into dwarven territory.
Neither kingdom sent anyone.
The dwarf slowly turned his tankard between his hands. "We did not understand it."
The Goblin raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
The dwarf looked at him for a moment.
"No. We understood."
The Goblin refilled his beer without a word.
The dwarves fought alone. Hall by hall and passage by passage, the kingdom shrank until at last the final gates fell and the great realm beneath the mountain ceased to exist. Those who survived scattered across the world. Some built new homes far away. Others spent the following centuries talking about how one day they would return and take the mountain back.
Very few actually did.
The old dwarf looked around the tavern. Beneath newer repairs, pieces of the original dwarven stonework were still visible. An ancient pillar stood beside the hearth, and half of an old inscription had disappeared behind a shelf full of tankards.
The kingdom was gone, but the road remained.
People still crossed the mountain. Merchants unwilling to spend weeks travelling around it hired armed escorts and took their chances through the Dungeon. Adventurers came searching for the treasures of the old dwarven kingdom. Smugglers used forgotten side passages. Fools came because someone had told them it was a shortcut.
Some reached the other side. Some did not.
And somewhere along that old road, on the very spot where a dwarven toll gate had once stood, the Goblin now poured beer for travellers and for the creatures that occasionally tried to eat them.
The dwarf finally emptied his tankard and set it on the bar. "How much?"
The Goblin told him.
The dwarf frowned. "For one beer?"
"For two."
"Still robbery."
The Goblin leaned against the bar. "You can always go around the mountain."
The dwarf stared at him in silence for a moment.
Then he reached for his coin pouch.
