The Dwarfish history of the Tallowlands

Draw close, manling, and pass that well-water your brewer flatters with the name of ale.

Hm. 

Passable, after all. Perhaps I misjudge the children of Sigmar.

At the least, my throat is not so dry as it was. While the fire burns still, let me tell you a little. You have been hospitable to my sister in her illness, and my kin do not soon forget kindness. 

Of the Tallowlands, it is said the Star Giants drew their plough across these lands – long ago; before the raising of the Hold, before the coming of Man; before the kingdoms that now flourish. The land buckled and melted in the heat, and the bones of the earth themselves grew soft and flowing. For two wholemoons the skies rained ash and fire as the plough drew slowly through the groaning ground. All who stayed on the surface perished. As the Giants passed, the land grew cold once more, and the mountains set into the soft rolling hills you see now.

Ages passed – ages of war and terror; long since passed into the myth of man. Then it was that the great King-before-Kings came to explore the furrow they had ploughed. As Nog reached the edge of the blackened land, he saw a long scar in the earth. It sank deep – deep beyond his sight – and was seeded with gems and ore to delight a thousand lifetimes.

It was hard, then, and bare: naught but thin grasses and heathers stretched across the moorlands, and the wind was chill. The Old gods, the hungry gods, were abroad in those days. Nog bought his safety through cunning pacts and bargains with Caer-Nadhg; and with wondrous gifts to He-that-is-named-Tidh.

Nog knew then that he would raise a hold. A Hold of a thousand – ten thousand! – families. He and his kin would steward these new Tallowlands. And so it became. A fort was raised; and then a keep. Over five manling lifetimes Nog laboured and sweated to bring his hold to reality; while drawing the richness of the furrow to himself. 

Then came the greenskin nomads, and the silver-tongued infidious elves – and with them they brought their war... 

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Hm. Elves. They inveigled their way into the holds of the dawi-folk with flattery and bluster. At first, we were glad to have company, for the winters were long then, the wild things of the world fiercer, and elves – for all their failings – are always beautiful, always quick to laugh, always with the brightest stories and the finest riddles. 

Safely ensconsed within stout dwarf-built walls, they built their damnable towers; and spied on the heavens. They peered too far. 

In his arrogance, their Princeling Lauim declared he had found the first Great Lesson: that gods and mortals were not meant to stand alongside each other. The elves cast the ancient Pacts of the gods and Nog asunder, and used their witch-ways and towers to shift Caer-Nadhg and He-that-is-named-Tidh and Listan and Dairayan and the rest. No longer were they seen plainly, as in the Time of Ancestors; and nor could they be treated with by the words of honest dawi-folk – for the Old gods had moved beyond where the wind of breath could reach them.

It was an ill place, then; and without their presence the balance of the Wilds was broken. Tangled forests erupted with half-beasts and the mountains became treacherous with ogres and giants and trolls. Greenskins boiled forth from their hideouts and lairs, and the Wars of Sorrows began. Many towns were lost, and the dawi-folk were driven from the lowlands to their great holds. Beyond the hillside farms, we have never hence returned.

The elves were ejected, then, and have never since been welcome; but that did not save our underhalls, for the greenskins and beastmen and crawlers are braver now than once they were; as they have no gods to fear.

The Throng of Nog, as it stands in these benighted times.

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Ask them, now, in the towns of Man, where the lands they dwell in began, and they will not know. Only the dawi remember, for we have rune-cunning; and carve our memories in stone. Aye, us, and perhaps the elves; though well it is said that it is better to trust a knife in the dark than an elf. 

The Sin and the Gorach were the first of the Men to settle, the first to trade, and the first to build cities. Where the dawi-folk had bargained with the gods, knowing them to be part of a great balance, Man brought their own gods with them – Khând, Hain-Amur, Mithrest – and grew strong. Their temples displaced those of the wild gods; and 

Those first kingdoms are now lost, long lost, and lamentably lost. The Southern fiefdoms – the latecoming Rhôvers  – are a dreary place in comparison with the glories of the Twin Empires. But such is the way of Man. Far-reaching, and short-sighted, the Sinian and Nygorach strove ever onwards.

At first, so the ancestors have it, there was a spirit of friendly competition, the two cities growing to become kingdoms, then empires... As the strength of each waxed, so they strove not merely to out-do one another, but to eclipse the other. After centuries, the Sinians, it seemed, had won – and bloodlessly, too – for their rich lands bordered much to the south, providing them with space to grow; while the thin soils of Nygorach grew stripped-back and starved as the people of the peninsula cannibalised what land they had in raising increasingly impressive monuments, their grandeur giving the proud rulers an inadvertently desperate air, that made visiting dignitaries' wine sour.

The Gorach would, eventually, fall to the temptations of powers that even the blade-ears avoid, and by the beard of Gazul, their new-found power would consume them.

The Tallowlands; a map charted by the umgi Warmtamale and Omricon.

It was not long since – within my lifetime, and I am no great age for a dawi  – that Sinian fell. In two-score years, its garrisons and towns and castles were eaten from within. The Sinian Emperor, and then his line, were lost, and the lands themselves seemed sickened. 

Trains of refugees and exiles swept down the mountain roads, seeking sanctuary. Armies of monsters trailed them, and as our holds became besieged, we learned then how it was that the Great Sinian Empire had fallen so quickly – for Nygorach had traded with dark places, and learned how to draw life away. So Sinian soldiers fell, unblemished; and even their firearms and gunpowder failed to light, as the spark of fire lost its life. It was then we learned once more the value of steel and sinew over the alchemy increasingly favoured by our cousins and by the youngling races. 

Turning to the ancestors, we found ancient tomes from the time the elves lived alongside us, and our runesmiths learned to yoke their sorcery; breaking its will and writing it into our runes, and thence to beat them into our steel. Thus strengthened by good dwarfish craft, were our holds able to withstand  the tide.

The conflict became known as the Ghoul Wars, and it continues to this day. It is our great sorrow to bear witness to the weakness of Man. With the strong arm of the Sinian Empire lost, the wild things of the Tallowlands grow bold once more. The mould-hearted children of the Nygorach are triumphant – though their mad king rules naught but charred wasteland. Pain, despair and hunger, the three children of  war, stalk the Tallowlands... 

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