“M* **n.”

Gilder IX floated in a blacker than black abyss.

“*y s**.”

A voice he could not recognize and yet was so calming and familiar echoed in the nothingness that surrounded him.

“My *o*.”

Who was talking to him in this place of infinite nothingness?

“My son.”

Who was there?

“My son…”

Father?

“My son. Your work is not yet done.”

But I am dead. How can I do anything?

“You have the blood of Gods in your veins. It is a part of you, even as the monster tried to devour you, you have the strength to resist it.”

But how? There was nothing here.

“Remember your lessons. Reach out for the gift given to us by our ancestors. Escape your fate and overcome oblivion.”

How?! How am I supposed to-!

“Remember who you are. Remember what you are.”

Father!

There was only silence. The voice of his sire had left him, and he was alone in the darkness. Still, he held onto his father’s words. He tried to reach out and feel around in the void. It seemed that an eternity passed before he managed to find a miniscule light shining in the abyss. It was a single pinprick, but it was there, nonetheless. He reached out towards the light and felt himself being pulled towards it, into it.

His formless body flowed through the pinprick of light and then he saw only darkness.

He felt pain. Pain enough to open his eyes and bolt upright. Looking around at the other members of his kind, he soon realized what the pain was from. He took his first breath since his resurrection and looked down at his naked form. He felt weak. Weaker than he had been before when facing those monsters. No, in reality he had not faced them. They crushed him utterly and without the slightest care. He had been less than a gnat to them, and they treated him as such.

“Oi, oi, oi! What are you doing, appearing naked as the day you were born in our hall? You had better explain this, you fool!”

The faces at the table he appeared on were familiar and annoying. These were the other Kings, the ones he had died trying to protect. They seemed not to know of what was coming, and if they did, they did not take it seriously.

“I died and was reborn. The blood of the Gods in my veins saved me. The Rattan overran my Kingdom, led by their five twisted masters.”

The other Kings laughed.

“Seriously? You expect us to believe a bunch of rats with pointy sticks overran your kingdom?! If you want to make a joke at least make it funny! Just admit it, you tried a new teleporter.”

They were fools, the lot of them. But no matter, he had told them of his and his Kingdom’s fate, and now that he had done so he was going to-.

A Dwarf barged in at a breakneck pace, almost tripping over himself as he ran to deliver a scroll to one of the Kings.

“What is it now? What do you want?”

Grabbing the scroll from the hands of the messenger, he popped off its seal and read it in silence. Gilder IX stared at the face of the King in question, whose countenance slowly shifted from one of annoyance to one of denial, then anger and finally a mix of sorrow and shock.

He let the scroll fall from his shaking hands as he looked at the naked king who formerly ruled the last wall between them and oblivion.

“We are doomed. He spoke the truth.”

The other Kings stirred.

“What do you mean, Stonehammer? He could not possibly be-!”

“MY KINGDOM IS GONE!” King Brokni Stonehammer wailed, “My family, my line, my treasures, everything is gone! Lost to the monsters that rampaged through my home like the savages they are! Oh, my poor Svetlana! Oh, Thorim, you were so young! You barely had a beard, and now…”

King Stonehammer collapsed as he lost himself in sorrow and anguish.

“If you had only sent your warriors to fight and hold back the rat-men you would not have lost so much. We barely had the time to try and hold them back with our numbers and technology. If you all had sent your men to fight, we could have bought enough time for an exodus. You may have lost your Kingdoms, but you would still yet live.”

Gilder tried to comfort the despairing King in the most dwarven way possible. This did nothing to ease his pain, but it made the other Kings realize the gravity of the situation. His only courtesy was that he did not tell them about the true mind-shatteringly disgusting visages of the five rulers of the Ancient Enemy.

He knew that they had problems of their own, such as trying to reestablish contact with the Dwarven Kingdoms on the other side of the Great Abyssal Ravine that separated the two Coalitions of Kingdoms from each other. He had heard rumors that something may have happened to the Children of the Stone that were across the crevasse, but right now there were bigger issues than contacting their brethren in another Kingly Coalition.

“I too have lost almost everything to the tide of vermin that took my Kingdom; your last shield against the rats. But so long as the Dwarven race exists we can grow stronger and more numerous. We can gather allies and war materials. With our survival, the chance to take by the world beneath the mountains is, while small, not zero. I saw how powerful the five monsters that lead the rats were. They were at the very least 500 levels above me, possibly even more than Morgrim Nobeard, the traitor who fled in my Kingdom’s time of need.”

“Morgrim fled? But he was a Hero God! How could he simply flee before an enemy?!”

“He was never a true Hero, just someone who felt a small tinge of guilt that he did not follow the others to their deaths. He said that he simply did not want to die, and rather than face beings that were above his level, he ran after realizing his foe was far stronger than him. He was a coward from beginning to end, not worthy of being called either a Hero or a God.”

The revelation that Gilder dropped on them was almost to much for them to take in. Gilder stood up and ripped a banner from the ceiling and draped himself with it before walking to the door.

“Where are you going?! What do you intend to do?!”

Gilder IX, the last King of his damned nation looked back and, in a voice filled with determination and righteous fury, he told them of his intent.

“Going to get armor and weapons. After that I am going to the front lines to buy some time for you to decide on a plan. We either face extinction, or we escape to the surface, but I am not going to run while my kind are in danger. So, you can deny the truth like you did with my now destroyed Kingdom or you can face the facts.”

With a huff, the former King, Gilder Ironheart IX walked out of the room, leaving the stunned and scared (and in one person’s case, despair-filled) Kings to try and formulate a plan of some kind. Even as those fools deliberated, the Rattan menace would continue its crusade of carnage and torture, and Gilder refused to simply sit back and wait for oblivion to claim him again. If he was going to die, it would not be in exile or by old age. He would go down fighting, and now that he knew how to escape the clutches of the soul-eating monster, he- could do so agai-.

A pain filled his heart and he fell to the ground. He heard something, a mocking laughter in a twisted and guttural mockery of the voices of The Races. He could feel his strength being sapped from him and pulled off towards the place where the five-horned monster likely dwelt. But he would not let it claim him so easily. He struggled to his feet and focused his mind to a razor’s edge. He fought with all the might he could muster to sever his connection to the wicked and unnatural abomination, but no matter how hard he fought he could not keep his life force from seeming out.

“No… I cannot fall like this… I refuse. I must…”

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. Then more hands and as he looked back, he saw what he could swear were the ancestor spirits of all the previous kings of Ironheart save for the first. They smiled at him and he saw their forms being pulled towards the distant monster instead of his own.

“NO! You don’t have to do this for me! You deserve your rest! You can’t sacrifice yourselves for me!”

The spirits looked at him and said as one, “It’s all right. You stay, we go. Let our line live on and save our race. You are, and will always be, a true Hero.”

Then he felt it. A surge of power unlike anything he had ever felt before in his life filled him and began to alter him on a fundamental level. As the Ancestral spirits faded and were swallowed by the distant monstrosity, Gilder’s eyes opened to reveal a blinding light that faded to revel his irises had turned golden. He was taller, stronger and more powerful than any dwarf had ever been in an age, and he felt as though he could take on the world.

He was now clad in ornate yet durable armor and floating before him was a massive double-headed battle axe which had a head the size of a dwarven teenager. He effortlessly gripped and swung the massive weapon as though it were a cardboard tube, and with each swing he could feel shockwaves speeding out before him. He smiled a painful smile filed with sadness and rage and sped off down the halls at a speed no man, dwarf or elf could hope to match. With each step he took the ground quaked and cracked and he just kept going faster and faster.

Whenever he reached a corner he kept going at his new speed, turning on a dime despite going at over 190 mph. Even the Underway Express Tramline could go this fast, and no dwarf could withstand the G-Forces he was experiencing. But he merely felt as though he was standing still, and his speed only increased.

200 mph.

210 mph.

230 mph.

Finally, he capped out 260 mph and easily left the Kingdom his was in and rocketed along the underways at a ludicrous speed. Time was of the essence, and he could not risk another Kingdom falling by the filth-ridden paws of the Rattan menace. He finally reached the outskirts of one of the Kingdoms he had sworn to protect since childhood and crashed into the oblivious horde of vicious rat-men that surrounded it. He tore through all in his path like a bloody and rage-fueled dervish, and with each swing of his mighty weapon hundreds of Rats lost their lives. By the end of the fourth hour since his arrival, the entire Ratan siege force had been wiped out down to the last slave.

Gilder IX looked out towards the darkness and began to run once again. There were yet more Kingdoms in mortal danger, and now he was strong enough to fight the five monsters that led this twisted race. It would be simple with his new power.

Or so he thought. He sped off into the dark, completely unaware of how impotent his power truly was compared to the monsters he would be facing.

Monsters that would not give him a third chance to fight them.

Monsters that were still hundreds of levels higher than him.

Monsters whose hands he was playing into.

Monsters that would relish the taste of the flesh and blood a true Dwarven Hero God as he lay helpless as they would eat him alive, with his mind fully conscious of what was happening.

But that was yet to happen, and with every step he took, Gilder Ironheart IX moved ever closer to his terrible, painful, horrifying and unavoidable fate.