🌋Chapter 11: Dwarves' City ForgeHeart
🌍 May 20, 89 BCE — Mid Spring 🌸
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Drawf City Map:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hI-kXZxMIeTVUhoJP9vIZfBVEKRmHrDD/view?usp=drive_link
Too bad Webnovel doesn't let me embed pictures in here like other sites do. 😉
In the Batcave, Junjie, Claudia, and Nano planned the dwarves' new mountain stronghold, ForgeHeart.
Nano projected the terrain around Chimney Rock to the west, near the Cascades east of the Human City site. Above the central table rose a three-dimensional projection of the eastern mountain range: ridges, lava tubes, glaciers, and folded strata rendered in silent perfection. Tiny symbols marked heat vents and ore veins. Nano adjusted the image, thin blue ribbons tracing the flow of water and heat.
Junjie watched in silence, then spoke. "The dwarves will need more than a single hall. They will build a kingdom, not a refuge. One city at the center, five citadels around it. Let the mountain hold them all."
Nano outlined a central dwarven city about two kilometers wide, surrounded by five citadels, each a little over one kilometer across.
Claudia leaned closer, tracing one glowing fault line with her finger. "The structure is good," she said. "They will need circulation shafts, light wells here, and steam vents here and here. We must let the mountain breathe."
Junjie moved among them, studying angles and elevations. "ForgeHeart here," he said, pointing to the flattened ridge. "From this height, they can watch all directions. The citadels will form a ring: Big Snow to the north, Summit Chief to the east, Chimney Rock to the south, Chikamin to the southeast, and Goldmere to the west. Each has a purpose: defense, forges, arms, agriculture, and trade."
Claudia nodded slowly. "Balanced. If one falls, the others endure. And all connected beneath the surface."
The hologram expanded, revealing underground shafts and rails, steam elevators linking each peak. The plan glowed like veins of light through a heart of stone.
"Perfect," Junjie murmured. "Prophecy written in light."
Nano pulsed once. The hologram dissolved. On the table lay a single parchment sheet. The ink looked hand-drawn, the fibers rough and old, but the lines were flawless. Nano had pressed it from light into matter and sealed it with Junjie's crest.
The Council of Stone
Torchlight flickered along the hall as Junjie and Claudia unrolled the parchment before the Dwarven Council. Thick-bearded chieftains leaned forward, the smell of forge smoke still clinging to them.
Junjie's voice carried quietly through the chamber. "This is the vision. A kingdom not beneath the mountain, but within it. Six strongholds bound by the same heart."
The chief engineer studied the sheet, then lifted his eyes. "You drew this from your sight?"
"I saw it in the mountain itself," Junjie said. "The ridges and the vents spoke. The rest is only a detail."
The dwarves murmured among themselves. Compasses and rulers came out. One adjusted the slope of a vent line. Another thickened the retaining walls. A third scratched new symbols beside the citadel markers.
When at last their corrections were done, the high chief pressed a seal of molten wax into the corner, followed by iron sigils from each clan. "Then so it shall be," he said. "ForgeHeart and the Five Citadels. The mountain will bear our halls."
Junjie bowed slightly. "The mountain will remember your names."
🚜 Breaking Ground
While the Ore Monster was still at work on the Elves' island, both Wyrmwoods began clearing the sites for the dwarves' new city and its five citadels. The Wyrmwoods felled and stripped the trees, stacking the timber for later use. Behind them, the Brush Muncher followed, grinding stumps and chewing through discarded branches until the ground lay clean and ready for stone.
When the last logs were hauled aside for beams and scaffolds, the Ore Monster advanced. It used its forward plows and side plates to push the remaining vegetation and soil off the ridge, sweeping the ground clean before setting its drills. Only then did it begin to compress the rock itself, driving gravity plates downward until the earth fused to glass-hard bedrock.
It reached the first peak and began to eat. The mountain shuddered. Chunks of rock vanished into its belly, and from its rear came massive stone blocks, rectangular, smooth, and fitted with tongue and groove edges. Each block landed with a sound like thunder.
The dwarves watched, speechless, as the monster built their first wall. Course upon course, block upon block, until a perimeter rose around the future city. It was rough but perfect, a skeleton waiting for hands of stonecraft to give it form.
The Ore Monster moved from site to site. At every citadel ridge, it paused, flattening the ground and compressing the stone until it was glass-hard. It left pyramids of smaller blocks at each site, stockpiles for future halls and towers.
As the machine worked, the dwarves marked where their forges would stand, where vents would rise, where terraces would catch the sun. Their voices rose in planning chants, half song and half calculation.
By the third day, the mountain range looked alive, steam rising from shafts, smoke curling from the first kilns, and the echoes of hammer on stone spreading through the peaks.
The dwarves had their foundations. The Prophet's vision had become their blueprint. And the Ore Monster, with its endless rumble and roar, had become the first true beast of their new kingdom.
⛏️ The Dwarves Get to Work
When the Ore Monster finished its rounds, the mountain stood bare and waiting. At each of the six sites, it left a final gift, a pyramid of building blocks, perfectly squared and stacked like a stone treasure. Then, with a low metallic groan, the massive machine turned west, its drills folding inward as it rumbled away to its next task.
For a moment, silence claimed the range. Only the wind moved, whispering through the clean-cut ridges where forests had once stood.
The dwarves gathered at the edge of ForgeHeart's plateau, gazing across the six leveled crowns of their new realm. Each site lay pristine: smooth, glass-hard, and ready. Then their leader nodded once, and the work began.
They started by marking their foundations. Buckets of powdered limestone mixed with charcoal were poured along string lines until pale gray paths traced the first streets and courtyards. The grid expanded quickly, squares and arcs intersecting in the pattern Junjie's parchments described. When seen from above, the marks resembled ancient runes written across the stone.
The small Ore Eater took its place near the central shaft markers, grinding downward to carve the first elevator tunnels. Though it could not compress stone as it dug, its drills were steady and precise. The dwarves hauled the loosened rock to the surface and piled it along the ridge. The heaps grew day by day, lining the construction sites like gray dunes.
When the dwarves began to worry that the waste would crowd the work area, a familiar tremor passed through the earth. The great Ore Monster had returned. Its jaws lowered, drills whirring as it glided past each site, scooping up the discarded rubble with effortless strength. The stones vanished into its belly, and from its rear emerged fresh-cut building blocks, perfectly formed and ready for use. By the end of the circuit, every loose mound was gone, and the dwarves stood beside new stacks of smooth, gleaming stone.
Above ground, the Wormwood reappeared, its great arms loaded with timber. It had carried the harvested logs to the Human City, where the lumber mills and saw presses cut them into beams and planks. Now it returned bearing the finished wood, its cargo harnesses stacked high. The dwarves guided it to the edge of each site, where it carefully lowered bundles of heavy beams ready for framing.
Because travel between the high ridges remained slow and dangerous until the elevator shafts and tunnels were finished, the dwarves decided to concentrate all their labor at ForgeHeart first. The mountain winds and sheer slopes made long-distance movement impossible for heavy crews, so they would complete their capital before touching the outer citadels. The Prophet's logic held: finish the heart, then build the limbs.
With timber and stone both in hand, the dwarves began their build. The beams formed roof frames and braced walls, while the first courses of stone blocks rose beneath them. Hammers and chisels struck in rhythmic cadence, filling the air with the metallic ring of purpose.
At ForgeHeart's center, engineers turned their focus to the elevator towers. The dwarves had been granted a supply of nanoforge alloy beams, drawn from the Illuminati stockpiles. Using these, they built the first lift frames, strong, gleaming structures lined with wood and reinforced by glass panels so travelers could watch the mountain descend beneath their feet. The dwarves marveled at the clarity of the glass, running rough fingers along its smooth surface as they assembled the carriages.
Within days, the pattern of a true city began to emerge. Worksites flickered with forge light and lamplight. Stone walls climbed upward, timber scaffolds reached toward the sun, and the first elevator shafts opened like black throats into the deep earth.
The dwarves worked as though born to the rhythm, singing low harmonies that carried across the peaks. In every direction, the mountains echoed with their creation.
By the end of the fortnight, ForgeHeart stood half built, the skeleton of a living city. The forges were waiting, the towers were rising, and the dwarves had found their rhythm.
When the central city stood secure and the first forges began to burn, the dwarves moved outward. The Gull of the Mountain ferried crews, tools, and supplies to each citadel ridge in turn. The Wormwood and the Ore Monster had already stocked the sites with timber and stone, so every workforce arrived to find its building materials waiting in orderly stacks.
They built each citadel exactly as they had built ForgeHeart, marking the ground with limestone ash, drilling the elevator shafts first, and raising the halls and forges above them. When one fortress stood finished, the Gull lifted them to the next peak, leaving behind completed walls, kilns, and lift towers glowing in the torchlight.
When the last citadel was done, the dwarves turned to the earth itself. The small Ore Eater began drilling the horizontal shafts that would connect every elevator tunnel beneath the range, the first arteries of the Great Underway. The mountains were no longer six separate peaks, they were one kingdom joined by stone and fire.
Within a season, the dwarves installed a railway through those tunnels, driven by steam engines that burned their clean coal pellets. Freight cars hauled ore, timber, and provisions between the cities, while passenger coaches carried miners, engineers, and traders in comfort through the warm, lamp-lit depths. The steady clatter of iron wheels became the heartbeat of the mountain realm, echoing day and night beneath the stone.