Druni reached for his mug of ale, careful not to damage or drip on the delicate old maps spread before him on the table. Watered-down mannish stuff, this drink was, but it was the best he could hope for in this little coastal town so far from home. At least the tavern was still quiet at this time of day, so he could eat, drink, and pore over these documents in relative privacy before heading down to the docks to do further testing on the machine.

The dwarf seldom took notice of the comings and goings in the room when he was engrossed in his work; thus, he failed to note the sound of a new group of patrons as they entered the tavern and approached the bar. But when a familiar, gruff voice called to the barkeep for ale, Druni looked up.

Rer Axgrind was a boor, a braggart, a bully; and just about the last dwarf Druni wanted to run into. The three brownbeards who accompanied Rer were unfamiliar to Druni, but their choice of companions spoke volumes about them. No doubt they were passing through this town of men on some trade errand or other.

Druni reached for one of the maps; maybe if he held it up in front of his face and sat silently behind it, Rer would miss his presence.

“Druni? Druni Foesmiter?”

Too late.

“Greetings, Rer,” Druni said, forcing indifference into his tone rather than the disdain he felt.

“It is you! Good old Wetbeard!”

Druni fought the urge to outwardly cringe at the sound of that tiresome nickname.

“Druni here left the Blue Mountains in search of a career in the Gondorian navy!” Rer joked loudly to the other dwarves, ending his statement with that annoying guffaw sound he often made. “He’s a dwarf who wishes he was a fish, that’s what they say! It’s unnatural, it is! Have ye learned to swim yet, Wetbeard?”

Druni tried to ignore the foursome of laughing dwarves. He calmly stood and rolled up his maps, then stuffed them into a leather satchel which he proceded to sling over his back.

“Excuse me. I have work to do.”

He started for the door, but the other dwarf imposed himself between Druni and the exit.

“What’s the matter, Wetbeard? Been out of the water too long? Drying up?”

Druni sighed resignedly. Then, in a swift, fluid motion, he snatched at Rer’s beard with one hand while reaching with the other for a knife that hung from the belt of one of Axgrind’s nameless companions. Rer, surprised, was pulled off-balance and toppled forward onto the tavern table - just as Druni had intended. The no-longer-swaggering dwarf was further startled by the sound of the knife thunking itself deeply into the table’s surface among the whiskers that protruded from his chin. Before he could recover the presence of mind to defend himself or retaliate, he found his beard tied tightly in multiple knots around the knife blade.

“I remind you,” Druni said, glaring at all four newcomers, “that unlike some dwarves I did not inherit my surname from family. I earned the title Foesmiter. For your own sakes, do not give me reason to teach you  how I earned it.”

With that, he marched out the door.

 

The trip to the docks - and the small, rented shed there where he kept his equipment - could have been a shorter one, had Druni been willing to walk along the water’s edge. But contrary to Rer’s accusations, he shared the same distrust of the sea that all dwarves exhibited, and though his work demanded he spend time near the water, he was far from ready for a casual stroll down the beach! This inhibition, along with his natural, understandable distrust of boats, would have to be overcome at some point if he was to succeed.  There was still plenty of time before those particular fears would have to be overcome, though.

There was plenty of time because he had so much to learn, so much to research - even assuming he could get the machine working! Already he was studying men’s trick of navigating by the stars, and their way of using criss-crossed lines on a map to determine the exact location of a place. Even to think in such terms was difficult, in no small part because such studies inspired mental images of actually standing aboard a ship out on the open ocean.  The very thought made his normally ironclad stomach just a bit queasy, but he knew this was exactly what he must someday do to bring his dream to fruition. A grand dream it was, though, and his belief that he could achieve it drove him to master these talents which no dwarf before him had even tried to understand.

If they knew his plans, those fools back at the tavern would be rushing here themselves, racing to be the first. It sometimes pained him not to end the abuse and shed the cursed nickname “Wetbeard” by explaining himself... but no, for now he must keep his goals secret.

A few years back when this region was more troubled by Orcs, this little town had become something of a small-time trading hub; overland routes had been too dangerous, and many who would have plied the trade roads for a time took to the sea instead, at least for parts of their journeys.  Roads from here led to Bree and a few other towns where men and the occasional halfling would buy and sell pipeweed, drink, and other goods.  For a time enough business had passed through this port that a few brave locals had built small dockside warehouses to accomodate the traders' needs.

But peace had been hard on this town, it seemed.  The old trade routes could now be traveled safely again, so the traffic had dwindled and the citizens had gone back mostly to the fishing, farming, and brewing which provided their sustenance.  The warehouses had been long abandoned and were falling into disrepair, so the own of one such building - not much more than a shed, really, but it met Druni's needs - had been more than pleased to rent it out to a dwarf willing to pay a few coppers.  Its location and layout were perfect - on the outskirts of town, with the building itself and the long pier that extended from it masking his work from easy view of the townsfolk.  Oh, it wasn't exactly hidden, and anyone who really wanted to could have watched him, but for the most part it was isolated enough that he'd been spared the presence of curious onlookers.

When he reached his destination, he withdrew a key from his belt and opened the heavy lock he himself had made. The shed’s door swung open with a creak to reveal a stack of supplies, a long work table, tools and a small forge still warm from its last use.  Most importantly hanging on a rack on the wall there was the machine: the one item without which all his planning and learning would be in vain.

Druni had forged an armor-like, full-body suit, its metal plates as light and thin as he dared without compromising their strength. Its helmet covered the wearer’s entire head, with a visor of sturdy glass bolted tightly to the front for visibility. The joints of the suit were made watertight – he hoped – using a stretchy, flexible substance some of the locals had learned to make from tree sap of some variety. He had initially tried to use waxes of various consistencies, but those had proved always either too brittle or too soft to be workable. The suit was man-sized, as it was from among men that he was most likely to find an assistant crazy enough to actually wear the thing – another problem to be resolved in time. From the helmet ran a long, hollow tube of leather, a strip whose sides were stitched together and which was then dipped in a vat of the sap mixture in its warm, liquid form.  The dwarf had wondered if it would be possible to make a better air tube by somehow shaping it entirely from that substance; it was yet another item he would have to put more thought into at some later time.

The final piece of the machine was a wooden framework incorporating a winch, so he could lower the suit into the water one-handed, and a simple bellows which connected to the tube and pushed air down into the suit so its wearer could breathe a steady supply of fresh air.

Druni hauled the entire apparatus out onto a long pier, fighting his own fear of the water all the while. He checked all the joint seals; he clamped, cinched, and tightened every connection, and, when he was finally satisfied, tied a rope to a ring on the suit’s torso and slowly, almost gingerly turned the crank on the winch to lower the suit into the water. He used his left hand to pump at the bellows as he did so; he’d learned early on that air pressure had to be applied at all times to keep water from forcing its way into the empty suit.

When the rope line slackened, he knew the suit had touched bottom – a depth greater than the height of five dwarves standing shoulder upon shoulder. He would have to test at much greater depths, of course, but that, too, would come later.

He pumped the bellows until his arms grew sore - which took much longer than it had during his early tests – and finally began cranking the winch to lift the suit back toward the surface to see how it had faired. By its weight as it came up he could tell that it had taken on some water, but it was encouraging at least to feel that it had taken on much less this time that it had on the last try – he was making progress! Thinking back, he realized he had come a long way in a short time – only a few months ago, the suit had almost always surfaced missing the helmet or one or more limbs, sending him back to the forge to remake the lost pieces.

His water-armor emerged intact, but he could see right away that a gap had opened around the knee joint, where perhaps there was a flaw in the seal. If he acted quickly, there might be timeto patch that today and still have time left to run another test before dark!

Before turning back toward the shed to mix another batch of the sap-sealant, he stretched his sore arms and tired back and gazed out across the small harbor toward the ocean beyond.

They were out there somewhere.

Gabilgathol. Tumunzahar.

Belegost and Nogrod, they would be called by such among the Eldar as still remembered, and by men whose legends still held stories of those ancient realms. Lost when the world was broken in the War of Wrath, the ruins of those great dwarven kingdoms of Beleriand waited out there somewhere beneath the waves, empty of life but surely filled with treasures crafted with such surpassing skill that not even the sea itself could devour them!

Druni would find them; the wealth and glory of the dwarves of old would be restored, and his own name would resound in legend next to those of the Seven Fathers themselves!

“I will conquer you!”

Druni shouted his vow to the ocean. Then he turned and made his way back to land – nervously, for there was still water all around him – and his thoughts returned to the preparation of tree sap.