High Chieftain Durgan Embersmyth's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Durgan unrolled the accounting scroll across the stone table and stared at the numbers until they stopped blurring. Forty-three names. Not seventy, as the quartermaster had claimed. Not sixty, as he'd hoped when he counted the tents himself three nights ago. Forty-three dwarves left from a hold that had housed four hundred. He walked to the monument at dawn and carved the true count into the base himself. Three hundred fifty-seven dead. The chisel bit deep into the stone, each stroke a fact that couldn't be disputed or softened. When he finished, he set the hammer down and looked at the empty space below the number. Room enough for names, if he'd had the weeks to spare. But the survivors needed food and shelter more than they needed poetry in granite. He picked up the hammer and walked back to camp. The monument would stand. The dead were counted. Now he could measure what it would cost to rebuild. By midday he'd gathered the survivors at the wooden lodge and laid out the numbers without mercy. Forty-three bodies meant fourteen able smiths, six stone-carvers, eleven who could swing a hammer without dropping it. The rest were children, elders, or wounded who'd never lift a beam again. He watched their faces as the truth settled in. Some looked away. Others met his eyes with the same granite he felt in his chest. When the youngest smith asked if they had enough to rebuild, Durgan told him the truth. They had enough to start. Whether they had enough to finish would depend on what they were willing to pay. But the silence that followed told him something worse. The quartermaster stepped forward, face pale, and admitted he'd been counting anyone who might still be alive in the sealed halls. Trapped, not dead. Durgan looked at the scroll again and did the math. If the quartermaster had inflated the count by twenty-seven, hoping for rescues that would never come, then the clan had been planning on ghosts. He rolled up the scroll and tucked it under his arm. No more hoping. No more maybes. Forty-three was the number they'd build with, and every decision from this moment forward would start from that truth.