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Soon after, Rex signed the command writ, pressing his seal into molten wax. Sarath accepted it with a warrior's solemnity and turned to leave the palace.
Outside, the vast cavern of the City of Sharp Blades stretched before him—a sprawling metropolis carved into the bones of the earth. Towers of black stone rose like jagged blades, forges thundered in endless rhythm, and molten rivers of lava lit the streets with a hellish glow. Slaves scurried through the lower warrens in endless chains, while half-blood gray dwarves walked proudly above them, armored in steel and contempt.
Sarath paused upon the high steps of the palace, his eyes sweeping over the kingdom he had sworn to protect. His heart, hard as iron, swelled with grim determination.
Cruel they may be, merciless to all other races, but to their own kin the Gray Dwarves were unbreakable. Their pride was forged in darkness, their loyalty bound in blood and stone.
"This peace… our peace… shall not be broken."
And with that vow burning in his chest, Sarath marched toward his destiny.
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The city of the gray dwarves did not breathe tonight.
Every forge had fallen silent, not because the hammers of the craftsmen had grown weary, but because the entire city had bent itself to a single purpose—war. The vast cavern that held their capital, with its colossal pillars carved from the bones of the Underdark, vibrated with a tension older than the stone itself. The scent of burning pitch and oil mingled with the earthy musk of subterranean moss. In every alley, every training yard, every battlement, the Gray dwarves stood ready.
Gray dwarves were not creatures of fiery speeches or reckless bravado; their pride was iron-bound, forged in generations of hardship under the lash of illithid masters and the suffocating dark. They did not shout their defiance—they sharpened it into blades, engraved it into runes, and carried it into war with grim silence. Their culture was one of discipline, cruelty, and endurance. Each soldier knew their role, every gear of this ancient war machine turning in sync.
Upon the towering walls of basalt and obsidian, the insect controllers had taken their positions. Cloaked in chitin and bone, these grim figures held their warped staves high, and at their command, rivers of monstrous insects seethed outward. Pale centipedes as long as horses slithered across the cavern floor, their armored bodies glistening with venom. Fanged beetles the size of wagons clattered their mandibles, and bloated cave-spiders unfurled in writhing masses, scuttling toward the distant darkness. The Gray dwarves viewed these creatures not with horror, but with the cold familiarity of smiths regarding their tools—this was the Underdark, where only the merciless thrived.
Behind them, their siege weapons loomed like sleeping giants. Rune-heavy crossbows, each the size of a small house, had been carved with painstaking precision by master artisans. Their bolts—massive shafts of black iron—were etched with layered runes of fire, lightning, and explosion magic. To fire one was not merely to launch a weapon, but to unleash an execution. Heavy stone hurlers stood beside them, their counterweights enchanted with Gray dwarves sorcery to strike harder, faster, farther than any surface-dweller engine of war could hope to match.
All of it—all of this dread preparation—was aimed not at surface kingdoms, not at rival Underdark houses, but at the army of death itself.
---
Far beyond, the black fog was moving.
At first it was a smudge upon the horizon of the cavern, a blur where the torchlight of Phoenix City could not pierce. Then it began to swell, thickening, rolling like a tide that swallowed the edges of sight. The fog was not fog at all, but a host—a tide of corpses driven forward by a will colder than stone.
Arthas had come.
The undead did not march so much as crawl, stagger, and spill across the cavern floor in an endless wave. From the low tier slaves of abandoned villages, their flesh still freshly torn, to the warped remains of orogs, goblins, and beasts of the Underdark, his army had grown swollen on carrion. More than one million dead answered his call now, and they did so with neither voice nor will, only the hollow obedience of the grave.
Above them, winged corpses flapped through the air—bats with torn wings, eyeless birds whose beaks dripped rot. They circled like carrion-crows of the abyss, watching, waiting, marking prey for the tide below. Between their shadows, the fog churned in hues of purple and black, thick with the stench of death. Where it touched the ground, moss withered, stone cracked, and insects too small for battle simply curled in on themselves and died.
Arthas himself stood at the center of this black ocean. His armor, blackened steel inlaid with cold runes, glowed faintly in the darkness. Each breath of his presence spilled the fog wider, his existence of undeath eroding the cavern into his domain. To him, the Gray dwarves's insect swarms and rune weapons were not obstacles—they were offerings, bodies waiting to be claimed.
---
On Phoenix City's wall, Sarath, commander of the Gray dwarves, stood like a statue carved from shadow. His armor was a fortress of steel, layered with runic plates and adorned with spikes meant as much for intimidation as protection. His face was granite—expressionless, grim, but his eyes burned with the same steel fire that had carried his people through centuries rule and power.
He raised his hand, and a silence fell upon the walls. No chants, no war cries. Only discipline. Only will.
The insects shrieked. The siege engines groaned as they locked into place. Tens of thousands of crossbows were leveled as one. Two hundred thousand gray dwarves stood in silence, the weight of their kingdom pressing down behind them.
The fog surged closer, and within it, the first pale faces of the dead appeared. Jawless orcs dragging broken weapons, humans with entrails swinging at their sides, beasts twisted into mockeries of life.
Sarath's voice was a rumble of stone breaking free from a mountain.
"Here it comes."
And with those words, the Underdark shook.
"Get ready!"
The cavern trembled with that barked order, carried across the black stone walls of Phoenix City by the guttural voice of a Gray Dwarves captain. Beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Underdark, the gray dwarves stood in rank upon rank, armor gleaming faintly in the glow of rune-torches. They were grim, disciplined, their faces carved of iron resolve, their crimson eyes narrowed toward the creeping abyss.
Then the traps were sprung.
From ramps carved into the walls, chains were released, and massive logs plated in steel and studded with jagged hooks thundered down into the undead horde. Each impact shattered bones into powder, sent corpses flying into the dark. Rolling boulders—half natural rock, half crafted war tools—tumbled into the mass, flattening hundreds before slowing, grinding to a halt only because of the sheer press of corpses piling beneath them.
Against men, against elves, these engines of slaughter would have torn armies to ribbons. Against the undead, the devastation was terrible but not decisive. The corpses broke, but still they crawled, dragging themselves forward on shattered limbs. Piles of bone and meat only became bridges for the others.
The second layer of traps erupted. Sigils carved into the stone flared, and immense magic circles roared to life. Bolts of lightning split the cavern's darkness, lancing into the horde and lighting up a forest of skeletal ribs and hollow skulls. Fireballs blossomed in sudden bursts, consuming hundreds in gouts of flame. Undead shrieked as their flesh bubbled and burst, as bone crumbled under the heat—yet not one turned back, not one slowed except by destruction. They had no fear, no pain, no self.
And still they came, stepping over charred husks, crawling over collapsed comrades, their endless tide drowning every trap in sheer numbers.
The cavern air itself grew sickly. A black-purple fog rolled with them, thick with the stench of rot, poison, and death. It spread like oil smoke, coating the lungs, burning the eyes, whispering madness to those who breathed it. Within that fog, the Gray Dwarves knew, lurked the Death Knight—Arthas's warlord, a corpse bound in armor and cruelty, master of this abomination.
"Fire!"
Alas, commander of the war machines, bellowed the order. His heart was stone, but heavy—he knew if this tide reached the walls, Phoenix City's foundations would be drowned in corpses.
The first volley came.
Massive rune-crossbows, their arms thicker than tree trunks, sang as they released their payloads. The bolts, four to five meters long, screamed into the blackness, each shaft etched with layers of Gray Dwarves enchantment. On impact they detonated like bombs, bursting entire swaths of undead into flames, gore and ash. The blast waves flung corpses into the air like rag dolls, raining limbs and heads onto the cavern floor.
Beside them, the Stone Hurlers unleashed their wrath. Enchanted counterweights groaned as tons of stone were hurled skyward, arcing down into the horde. Each impact was an apocalypse—explosions that shattered bone, crushed bodies, and hurled shards of rock through the undead ranks like scything blades. One stone landed amidst a cluster of Drow-corpses, and the cavern floor erupted, sending fountains of broken skulls and severed arms skyward.
The gray dwarves did not cheer. They did not roar. Their culture allowed no frivolous joy in war. Instead, they reloaded with precision, their grim faces betraying nothing but the focus of warriors whose ancestors had endured millennia in here. Each weapon required teams of Gray Dwarves to operate—eight to mount a single bolt, three more to crank, others to set the runes and aim. Yet no motion was wasted. Their pride lay in efficiency, in power, in the inevitability of their machines.
Still, the fog crept closer. Still, the dead marched, endless, tireless, uncaring of losses.
On the battlements, Sarath's crimson gaze fixed on the heart of that storm. He could feel it—like ice pressing against his soul—the aura of the Death Knight waiting within. His hand clenched the rail of black stone until it cracked.
He would meet him.
Sarath strode to one of the massive crossbow machines, shoving aside its crew with the authority only a warlord could wield. With his own strength he drew back the chains, the gears groaning as he bent iron with brute force. He operated the whole Crossbow himself, his voice a growl that made the magic flare hotter, sharper, deadlier. Then he aimed, his gaze unblinking, and fired.
The bolt shrieked across the battlefield, tearing through hundreds, carving a glowing path into the fog.
And something leapt to meet it.
A massive figure, armored in silver steel engraved with runes, rose from the fog like a mountain. Its axe, jagged and cruel, split the air and met the bolt mid-flight. With a sound like a world breaking, the enchanted projectile shattered, fragments raining harmlessly into the undead horde.
Silence swept the Gray Dwarves walls for a heartbeat. Then the figure stepped forward, glowing eyes—deep, hateful blue—locking with Sarath's own.
Sarath's breath froze. His heart turned to lead.
"Kurman…"
The name left him not as a battle cry, but as a wound. The armor, the weapon, the towering frame—it was all his. Kurman, his comrade of three centuries, his brother-in-arms, who had fought beside him in wars, who had bled with him under the laws of higherups, who had laughed with him in the forges after victory. Fucked slaves with him, Kurman, whose ashes should have been sent to the forges of the g
Gods.
Desecrated. Defiled. Bound in chains of necromancy, his soul torn from the afterlife, shackled to a corpse's shell.
Sarath's fury boiled, but beneath it lay grief, black and suffocating. This was not merely the theft of a friend. This was a theft of eternity. Kurman's spirit would never walk the halls of the Gray Dwarves ancestors, never drink from the iron chalices of their Gods. He was lost—forever.
The undead tide pressed on, heedless of traps, of devastation, of their own endless slaughter. The gray dwarves fought with grim ferocity, their rune-weapons belching fire and stone, their discipline unbroken. But in their commander's eyes burned more than wrath.
It was despair.
For every Gray Dwarves slain, every soldier whose corpse rose in the fog, the kingdom did not lose one warrior. It lost one eternity.
And against such a tide, even iron breaks.
"Kill!" Sarath roared, his throat tearing with rage, blood-light burning in his brown eyes like molten embers. The killing intent that surged from him was not the frenzy of a warrior alone—it was grief twisted into madness. He was not only avenging a friend slain in war, but a soul extinguished utterly. His companion would never ascend to the Great Kingdom of God, never rest in holy peace, never be reborn through the wheel of life. Forever lost, consigned to the nothingness beyond death. Sarath's scream was a declaration against that void.
On the field before him, the insect controllers unleashed their monstrous swarm. Towers of chitin and mandibles surged forward, the ground trembling as iron beetles—each the size of a chariot—charged in phalanxes of tens of thousands. Their black shells gleamed with unnatural hardness, tougher than hammered steel, their mass alone enough to crush entire lines of lesser foes. Some screeched with shrill war-cries, others hissed streams of acid that smoked against the stone beneath their claws. The sight was apocalyptic—an avalanche of armored horror.
Yet against the undead, such force was met with futility.
The black-purple fog that lay across the battlefield was not mere mist—it was the manifestation of the Domain, a cultivation born from blood, death, despair and Souls with so much grief, loss, death, Unlife and powers beyond normal. Every exhalation of that fog pressed against living flesh, making bugs falter, lungs burn, and hearts stutter. For the dead, it was benediction. Within its currents, corpses stiffened, flesh twisted, bones cracked and realigned, souls bound by chains of despair.
With every insect that fell, crushed under a gray dwarf's axe or skewered by a spider's spear-legs, the fog claimed them. Their mandibles twitched again, eyes clouded into milky green, and they rose with new hunger—soldiers of unlife, each more dreadful than in life, their wounds still open, ichor dripping, their shells fractured yet animate.
The battlefield became a grotesque parody of renewal—birth from death, armies replenished at a rate no living host could match.
Arthas, cold and statuesque in the distance, narrowed his eyes. His gaze swept to the walls of Phoenix City, where the obsidian battlements loomed like jagged cliffs carved by the millennia old Kingdom. Here, the ancient kingdom of the Gray Dwarves had built their pride. For millennia, the gray dwarves had endured in the Underdark—stubborn, joyless, yet unbreakable. Their hands, calloused from centuries of forging steel in flame and rune, had shaped fortresses that fused raw stone with glyph-etched magic.
The Gray Dwarves had no songs, no laughter in their halls, only the ringing of hammers and the murmur of grudges remembered longer than lifespans. Their culture was built upon labor and vengeance, faith in toil, and mastery of earth and rune.
Now its walls bristled with siege engines—vast rune-inscribed crossbows, each the size of a small house, their limbs carved from black ironwood reinforced with adamantine bands. They drew back bolts as long as a warhorse, each one inscribed with detonating runes that glowed with a molten sheen of fire. When released, the quarrels screamed like falling stars, striking with force enough to shatter platoons.
Alongside them, stone hurlers—catapults whose arms had been strengthened with geomantic sigils—flung boulders larger than cottages, each bound in runic chains to ensure they burst apart into fragments after impact.
Already, these weapons had gouged swathes through the undead ranks. One colossal bolt skewered half a dozen giant spiders, pinning them in a writhing heap before detonating into a blossom of flame, scattering their limbs like charcoal husks. A hurled stone landed amid the iron beetles, bursting into fragments that scythed through armor and flesh alike—rending them in half, tearing shells from bodies, smearing ichor and organs across the obsidian ground.
The Gray Dwarves did not cheer; they did not laugh. They reloaded in silence, eyes grim, their pale gray faces set with iron discipline. Their lives had been forged in this darkness, and this was simply another day of toil—except the forge's anvil was the battlefield itself.
But for all their might, the swarm of insects pressed on.
An iron beetle king slammed into a cluster of undead ghouls, crushing them beneath its clawed legs, mandibles slicing through bone and rotted sinew. Its armored carapace fended off arrows and spells alike, and with a screech, it gored a mummy, snapping its spine. Yet even as the beetle reared in triumph, a hurled boulder smashed not far away blew up and a part of its flank, shattering its shell in a spray of blood and shards. The beast collapsed, twitching. Before its corpse cooled, the purple-black fog seeped into its wounds, animating it again. It rose, split in half, dragging its shattered body forward as undead ichor dripped in thick trails.
In another place a Undead beetle, its legs blown away by an exploding bolt, continued to crawl forward with its remaining limbs, mandibles clamping on a gray dwarf's arm and ripping it away as the dwarf's comrades hacked at it with rune-axes. Blood spattered across the walls as the dwarf screamed, but no one flinched. The Gray Dwarves did not waste pity—not on themselves, not on their kin.