The Assailed Resident

[Damion Shargath]

Closed

It was during the pitch black darkness that enshrouded Salvar this night. The clouds had been so dense not to let the moon cast upon the icescape a single glint. The cold and barren wasteland was not of its usual plain white purity, but of a burying darkness which transformed it into a lightless grave for those who wandered it. Many a traveler would find their bitter and untimely end tonight. Countless would be forced to their knees by the biting frost, numerous struck down by the fist-sized hail, and a myriad were to be lost to the panic enforced by their disorientation.

The Salvic clouds threw their ice down into the howling and shrieking wind, leaving it to be thrashed upon the earth below. Many a dwarven mountain-peak-torch had been deconstructed by the brutal weather already, and if not even some of the finest craftsmanship and architecture could withstand the battle with Salvar one could imagine what a layman’s construction would look like posterior to natures rampage. It was everything but silent night, tonight.

If one believed in a higher force lying within the will of nature, and if one thought of Salvar as a land to abide only with the strong – the following could possibly be an interpretation of the storm: It was an act of reshaping, an act of cleansing the land of the weak who did not deserve to walk upon its harsh, yet glorious face.
And upon it stood three fractions of creatures…Those who were the undoubtedly strong enough, those who had adapted and prepared themselves, and those who should have left the country during a prior day.

…

It was amongst all the chaos about that it took its place.

Standing upon the north faced ledge of a mountain overruling most others around in size, there rested an impressive edifice. It was a mansion of massive material, most likely chiseled from the very mountain itself. The building’s western wing connected into the mountain in an astonishingly fine crafted work of art. Giant hands of massive dark grey rock clutched the western wing before their fingertips became one with the domicile.
The truly extraordinary thing about the mansion was that it possessed only three inlets for light. A humongous double-glazed window stretching across almost the entire ground floor offered an awe-inspiring view of the Salvic landscape beyond. Despite the fact that it was one single gigantic glass pane, positioned and anchored only at its edges without a single supporting steel grid, it posed not a single crack or deformation – withstanding the constantly pelting hail. It doubtlessly made the spatiality within, behind the window, the most impressive.

The entire main building, counting the section concealed within the rough mountain exterior, posed to be two thousand and three hundred feet wide.
To enforce this construction’s majestic position, another building stood atop its roof, shorter and thinner - of roughly one thousand feet in length, half of it concealed within the mountain, and five hundred feet in depth. It almost disappeared in the night, as not a light shone from the headband-like glass façade near the top of the building. If one stood close enough, the finely crafted sculpture work on its northern wall could be deciphered. At least a dozen torsos crept out from beneath the gigantic hands which clutched the building. Their faces writhed in agony, stretched with battle-cries, or squeezed in acrimony as their muscular arms forced forth weapons of all sorts. It seemed they fought a war against an unseen enemy, a losing battle whose continuation was upheld only by their immortal petrification.

And it was below this building, at the foot of the mountain and the very plains that sprouted from it, that a million endless wars and battles were being fought. The bodies of those fallen, their faces twisted in gruesome manners, dueling forever with death, their souls locked into an icy dungeon they couldn’t escape.

Thunder crashed and snapped onwards throughout the night as the clouds blanketed the country in darkness. Relentlessly the hail flew about, tossed back and forth by the glacial wind. Not a single mountain-peak was to be distinguished through the dark foggy nebular which hung thicker in the sky than any ocean’s fog. If one had ever wondered what the ninth circle of hell was to look like, an excursion to the scourged heart of northern Salvar would answer their curiosity.

Somehow this natural pandemonium seemed not to discommode the male figure, in somber stillness, standing at the bottom of a large luthern on the first floor. Occasionally, if granted a gap between both hail and snow, a miniscule dot of orange would intensify its color before disappearing in an inert gust of grayish smoke. The tranquil action continued for an estimation of about five minutes before the light did not return and the figure vanished from the window.

Silently, with calm breaths, a tired head rested itself upon a large pillow. The knocking of hail against the window sounded like the crude war drums of a brutish army. Slowly a pair of gray eyes fell closed, chanted to sleep by nature’s morbid lullaby. At the southern wall of this light bereft room stood a bed almost twice as long and five times as wide as the lone embodiment which occupied it. What followed five steps toward the window was a round pool embedded in the floor. A body of lukewarm water mingled inside the smoothened marble pit, which posed to have a diameter of roughly six and a half feet and a depth of four feet. It radiated comfort, presenting not a single sharp edge in its simplistic entirety. The mild heat of the gently gliding water floated into the room and created a pleasant temperature.

Dwarven engineering. A boiler pipe sat in-between the two floors of the house. Not to mention the entire sanitary system in the rather sizeable abode was of exceptionally high-standard.

…