The Lore of Clan Goran - Chapter 8 - The Push East

[Kane]

We spent the better part of two painful days in the ruined clanhold. Meloc and the brothers scoured the hold for anything of value to our mission, but as expected there was little left but broken weapons and fouled water. The Naroc had been very thorough in denying the use of their hold to the Shadow.  The water supply had been poisoned with raw metal ore and even after boiling, it was undrinkable. Air vents had been destroyed, so the air was stale and wouldn’t be able to support a large population. From what we could tell they had sealed their mines almost a year before the hold fell.  It would take months to clear the entrances and even then we didn’t know what we would find. They went to their grave taking everything that made them Naroc with them.

I spent the two days copying names from their Hall of Heroes that had survived the orcs’ vandalism.  From what I could tell, the hold fell almost two years ago, based off the last dates in the Hall. I kept the feral dwarf with me as I explored.  His eyes were always moving as if he was looking for something specific. At one point he dug into the firepit near one of the forges and uncovered much fresher ash and offal. He pointed to himself as if to make it clear that his people had been here, likely trailing behind the orcs, staying in the shadows and living off their carrion.

My relationship with the feral dwarf had changed with our mission.  In the past, I was one of the few who tried to treat him as a real person, one who could be rehabilitated.  I tried to teach him our language, and even though I was sure he understood me, he would never speak. As we travelled closer to the main cavern system, he showed me faint scratches in the wall, often right at floor level.  At first, they looked natural as if made by shifting rock or by herd animals. It was only after he pointed them out that I realized they were simple messages.  I quickly learned over a dozen of the feral dwarf trail signs.  I’ve included drawings of the most common, enemy, food, animals, water, etc in the back of the journal. The feral dwarves even have a clever dating system.  By making the scratches very shallow, they fill with dust in less then an arc, making them impossible to see.  The depth of the marks and the amount of dust tell you how old the message is.  Simple, but very effective. Our patrols have probably passed by similar marks and never known it.

As we left the hold, we knew we were getting closer to Shadow controlled territory as food was becoming scarcer. Areas that should have been rich in food were almost striped bare.  We could see where there had once been large pools of fresh standing water, but all had been drained and were very slowly refilling. We were replenishing our food and water whenever possible knowing that it would get more difficult the further east we went. Four days out of the Naroc clanhold, we found our first bodies; orcs and goblins.  The bodies bore the distinctive wounds of a vardatch. They hadn’t been dead long as decay had barely set in. We would need all our skills to avoid detection and a fight we couldn’t win.