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- Character Biography
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Even in the gloom of a northern dusk, the digsite milled with activity around Frostfling Barrow, pockets of lantern light competing with the ice-blue runes in the blocked portal. These runes only glowed at dark, rising with the sun's descent. Dwarven sappers from Clan Silverpick, pried from their underground homes in Belgrath, pored over notes left by experts from the Archeological Society of Alliria. Truly, it was a marvel of cultural encounters.
Rovan might have been able to appreciate it all a little more, had it not been for the blasted cold. No matter how many layers he dressed himself in, it seemed to incessantly creep in through his wool and suck the very marrow from his bones. An inescapable chill suffused the mountain range near the Blightlands, especially at night. Whether he took shelter in tents or by a campfire, fingers of frost somehow managed to sneak over his skin all the same. He stomped life back into his toes, clapped his double-gloved hands together and adjusted his fox fur-cap to fit better over his painful ears.
"Master Ravenhill!" a gratingly exuperant voice called. He sighed and rolled his eyes skyward, preferring to nurse his own misery rather than converse again with their token scholar. By the time she reached him, he had managed to plaster an indulgent smile on his face, turning to see Lead Archaeologist Tafna Gringhook straddling up to him over the rocky terrain, breathless with excitement.
"Master Ravenhill," she repeated, as if he hadn't heard her hollering the first time. Her eyes sparkled and her wrinkled mouth quivered with barely contained excitement. This boded ill for his prospects of a quiet night. "I have urgent news. A breakthrough, I tell you, a marvellous breakthrough!"
He made an inviting gesture of his hand.
"Why then, speak Mistress Gringhook, speak. I am all ears," he pointed to his fur-covered ear. "Despite appearances."
Tafna stared blankly at him. He sighed internally at the droll nature of scholars. Finally, he had to twist his chin and arch his brows in a saying gesture, stretching a painful smile across his cold cheeks, still pointing helpfully. A mirrored smile slowly followed, before her eyes widened with understanding, grinning uncertainly, pointing at him with her mitten.
"Ah. Aha! Very good, very good. I see the brisk mountain air hasn't robbed your sense of humour." Rovan's smile froze, much like the rest of him, painfully taut. Tafna barely noticed, flicking open her book. "When the Silverpicks cleared the remaining rubble, my colleagues caught a find, truly one of a kind." Rovan absent-mindedly noted the unintentional rhyme there - the closest thing she had uttered to poetry in three, torturous weeks, but nevermind. She flicked open her tome, revealing something flinty between its pages, coming to a sharp point, with something looking like a primitive bone handle.
Before he could even question why she would use her tome as a container, she sallied on, voice squirreling away:
"It was hidden among the debris - not too far from the blocked portal. Judging by its clearly Age of Flint make, we estimate it to have belonged to someone from many millenia ago. Possibly the very same who built this tomb! Now, it is a little small for the make of an Ice Giant devoted to Skadaeni, but that could point to its ritualistic nature. It is known that giants often have used smaller folk to conduct their rites. And since this clearly is a barrow of a significant figure, it is likely that this was fashioned purposefully from an inferior material, made from what would be readily available in this region. Perhaps it was employed for sacrifices given to the chieftan--"
"Or perhaps it was employed as a fancy toothpick." Rovan shrugged, his discursive side getting the better of him. His patron had specifically instructed him to be as courteous to Tafna as possible, but it was hard to supress his incredulity before her flights of fancy. "Or it could be little more than a dinner knife discarded by some hapless creature here. How can you possibly tell that this had any significance to, ah, ice giants?"
Rovan had, reluctantly, studied their research, so he could refute it within its own paradigm. He'd had nothing but time in this frosty region, between setting up camps and travelling. And it was an express desire of his lord that he do so, to be privy to their knowledge.
At first, Tafna gawped at his audacity. But then, she gathered her bearings, a smile of challenge crinkling her features. Oh, no, Rovan thought. Now I've done it.
"Well first of all," she started, sweeping her arm out at the portal. "Look at the size of this entrance. You can't tell me that would be for any lesser creature than a giant, now can you?"
"Or the size of someone's grandeur--"
"Secondly," Tafna went on, interrupting him. "The runes on the portal are adjacent to, but not of any known language. Neither Dwarvish, Draconic or any other Undercommon speak we know of. The written word of the Ice Giants has been lost to us. This portal may be the last letters of this ancient tongue we have--"
A third voice interrupted them brusquely:
"Portal's re'y fer demilition." They both turned to look down at the leader of the dwarven sappers. Rimer Silverpick, with a thickly braided beard of a colour worthy of his clan-name, a thick leather cap tucked so far down over his face as to nearly cover his eyes. "N' y'werd, aye'll whisk z'laddies frennum n' pull-um stens laik tith frumma dragoon, Gringhok."
Tafna's jaw worked, blinking at the unflinching dwarf.
"I -- I'm not quite certain I . . . pardon?"
Rovan stepped in, brushing the air between them with his gloved hands.
"Allow me, Mistress, I'll speak to Rimer. As you were - you continue studying your, mm, knife."
"Dwarvish sounds so different when spoken - I'm usually used to reading it--"
He refrained from commenting that the dwarf had, in fact, attempted to speak in Common. After ushering away the befuddled archaeologist, Rovan turned to Rimer, switching to Dwarvish.
"My apologies. Ice in the ears, as they say. Forgive our human constitution."
Rimer glanced up at him from below his cap, pale-blue eyes peeking out with scepticism.
"That why a fox crawled on your head and died?"
Rovan smirked at the roughshod tradition of dwarven banter.
"Indeed. Otherwise my cold ears might start mistaking your words for the harped tones of an elf."
The dwarf stared up at him for a long moment, looking as like to put an ice-pick in his fur-cap as to admire it. Rovan met him with his same smirk.
Finally a cackle escaped Rimer's beard, slapping Rovan's knee good-naturedly.
"Attaboy. Come along, let me show you what we've done."
Rovan tried not to bend too much over his knee - what counted as a friendly slap among dwarves felt like a punch to him. At first he hobbled after Rimer, before he straigthened and refound his dignity, approaching the elaborate system of pulleys, ropes and pitons around the massive slab of stone barring their path. It towered above him with an inhuman grandeur.
Perhaps Tafna was right after all . . .
@Frazil Varulf
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