Chapter 22: Ch. 022 – (Then) Difficulty Adjusting

“Well lad - for now this is going to be home sweet home.” Boriv he slid open the large door to the half empty warehouse. The door was only large compared to the small dwarven doors of course - it wasn’t much bigger than a standard door on the surface. 

“Ummm… Okay,” Jonathan said, not really sure what to say. He couldn’t exactly say no of course - but the stone floor and towering crates hardly looked welcoming. After a lot of walking and a few conversations with beardless city dwarves, Boriv had decided that there was really only one place to keep a human for any length of time. Khagrumer just wasn’t meant for men. “What about a bed? And—”

“Yes yes. Tomorrow we’ll figure out some creature comforts. Ye’ll just have to make due tonight.” Jonathan noded, not wanting to argue. 

“How long will I have to stay here exactly though Boriv?” he asked for the dozenth time, tired of the uncertainty. 

“At least until the trial - after that we’ll just have to see.” the dwarf answered, which was pretty much what he always said to questions like that. 

“And until then do you think maybe you could show me the city. If I have to be I definitely want to—” Jonathan tried to come at this from another matter. 

“Where possible,” Boriv said, suddenly gruffer than he was before. “Look, Jonathan - this is the realm of the stone men. It’s not meant for yer kind. The more you see. The more you do. That will only complicate things further. So just rest easy, and I’ll be back with food and a mattress tomorrow and I’ll let you know what the plan is.” The idea that he’d traveled all this way and observed so much only to be told that he might never see more than a few blocks away from the station they’d arrived in stung. 

Jonathan merely nodded, and when Boriv shut the door, he sat down. There wasn’t really a point in wasting any more words with the old dwarf. It wouldn’t change a thing. Just thinking about his situation was frustrating. He was only blocks from the labyrinthian station they’d just left, and just down the street from some of the most amazing wonders he’d never even suspected, and he couldn’t go wander around for a quick peek. It was too hot for that. Even the stone was warm. Everything was warm in the wrong ways. Even in high summer a boulder sitting in the shade was nice and cool to lie on, but here everything was too hot. 

Jonathan lay there, waiting for sleep to take him. It felt like all he’d done since he’d left the village was sleep while his master dragged him from one crazy place to the next, but once again that’s exactly what he was doing. At least this time he didn’t have to do it with his brother chained up on the other side of the dark freight car. That was an improvement, but on the whole, things were definitely getting worse. He couldn’t wait to get this over with. He was sick of dwarven justice, and dwarven temperatures, and dwarven sized seats. He could probably list a dozen more dwarven things he hated without trying, but that much negativity wouldn’t do. Instead he tried to focus on the positive: when his brother was finally convicted and the Shaw name was cleared he’d get to go back home to Miss Marne and Tilly, and he’d be able to eat real food again. 

He also thought of Claire, but he tried not to. That was too much of a secret hope from this far away to look at directly. Jonathan wracked his brain to figure out something positive about his situation that didn’t involve going home since sleep was not going to take him with trains thundering off every twenty minutes. It took him a long time to figure one out though: if he had to go to a trial, then he would get at least one good look at the city of Khagrumer. It wasn’t quite the beaten gold citadel that dwarven cities were made to be in fairy stories, but it was certainly something he was dying to explore, and one good look would be better than no looks at all. 

That night the only thing Jonathan learned about the dwarven city was that it never slept. The noises never stopped and the lights never dimmed as dwarves worked all through the night. He imagined that all of the dwarves slept individually sometimes, but since it never got dark, they never all went to bed at once. Likewise, it never got cooler, much to Jonathan’s disappointment. He managed to get a few hours of fitful sleep now and then, but mostly he just lay on the stone staring up at the rafters. This was not something he ever thought he’d have to endure, but he didn’t know what he could do to make the situation any better. During the night he’d reached out with his fireblood and felt the energy all around him. Everything was infected with the element of fire this deep. Not just the train boilers and the forges either. The very stones he laid on were so warm he could feel the fire inside them even though it was hard to do much with. 

The next day Boriv arrive as promised with a straw pallet, and a sandwich bulging with unfamiliar meat along with a few other things. “It turns out this is a complicated case, lad,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment. “We could be here quite a while.”

“How long is quite a while Boriv?” Jonathan asked. “It’s so hot I can’t think and I can barely sleep.” 

“Ye’ll get used to it lad. I’ll find ye some work with my cousin Maxom to pass the time.” He answered confidently. “The trial will be here before ye know it.” 

“But—” Jonathan protested.

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“No buts lad. Ye’ll be fine. Trust me. You’re not the first man in the city after all - but ye just might be the softest.” The dwarf laughed at his own joke, slapping Jonathan on the back even though only one of them was amused. 

After that Jonathan’s days just became a worse version of his life at home. He woke up, he went to a hot cramped office where he did sums for half the day, and then he went home. Only instead of going home to his family and hot meals he went to a dusty warehouse and ate whatever leftovers Boriv brought him. His perfectly comfortable desk with a window, had likewise been replaced with a large box for him to sit on while he gazed out at a lovely view of a brick wall. The heat at least wasn’t too much worse than Boriv’s office, but here he couldn’t escape it by dawdling on some errands outside or heading home for the day. Here the heat followed him constantly, just like the stares of suspicious dwarves unused to men in their cities. Boriv told him that perhaps a hundred thousand dwarves lived in this city once when Jonathan had asked, but in all of those dwarves almost none of them could speak any language but dwarven. Even if he bumped into one with some grasp of Wenlish they’d want nothing to do with him. 

He’d never felt so completely alone in his whole life. 

Wake up. Work. Go to an empty building. Miss home until he fell asleep. Repeat. That was Jonathan’s life now. After almost two weeks his body had finally acclimatized to the blasted heat, but now his real fight was with despair. Days bled together, and oftentimes Boriv wasn’t even a part of them anymore. Whatever he was doing here, it didn’t involve Jonathan very much. He only showed up enough to drop off food every few days and tell him the trial was soon before he disappeared again, so Jonathan found other ways to amuse himself. 

Every day he tried to take an even longer and more circuitous route back to his warehouse. Trying to explore the city wasn’t allowed of course, but getting lost on his way through a city so strange he couldn’t even read the signs? That was completely justifiable. Jonathan saw much of the railyard and some of the merchant quarter by getting a little more lost every day. Then one day on the way home he figured out there was a ladder to get on the roof of his warehouse. From there he had quite a view of the city center, and took to going up there every night after Boriv’s visit so that he could study the towers and count windows. It was a beautiful sight. 

No matter what he did though he always ended up back on the floor of a dirty old warehouse trying to find sleep that was so elusive it took hours to locate even a trace of it. That’s when Jonathan started playing with fire. His whole life he’d been told not to. He’d been warned about how dangerous being fire blooded was and how easily he could burn their house down by accident that unlike Marcus who had regularly used his earthblood talents Jonathan had almost never practiced with it. What was there to burn here though? Sure he had to be careful near his bed or the crates, but everything else was stone, and he was very sure he couldn’t put out enough heat to melt that. Plus, as a side effect, it turned out that using his elemental talent was exhausting, so with that he finally had a practical way to get some rest that didn’t involve prayer and counting sheep. 

Night after night Jonathan practiced pulling heat from one stone into another, creating hot and cold spots on the floor. At first they were almost unnoticeable, and equalized quickly, but eventually he could make stones so hot he couldn’t touch them and flames that were larger than candles, even if they didn’t last very long. It didn’t matter. Fire didn’t really have practical uses, and once Jonathan got back to the surface where the heat was so much lower he wouldn’t be able to play these sorts of games. For now all that mattered though, was that he could sleep faster and deeper after he’d really pushed himself like this. 

Jonathan’s time in purgatory couldn’t last forever though. One day Boriv came after work, just as he usually did to drop off some food, but for once when Jonathan asked about the trial the dwarf didn’t say soon. Instead he answered, “Trial’s been put on hold for now lad, just like everything else. We got gobblers, and when a city gets gobblers the whole world stops until we find em and kill every last one.”

“So does that mean I get to do something besides maths and sums all day?” Jonathan asked hopefully. He didn’t much like the idea of fighting anything, especially not something like a goblin, but if it got him out of the office for a day he’d give it a shot. 

“Aye,” Boriv said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring ye a sword at the start of second watch and then we’ll be prowling the rail yard looking for any sign of the buggers.”

“And the whole city is looking tomorrow,” Jonathan asked. “What if no one finds them?”

“If ye don’t find five gobblers today then next week ye’ll have a hundred, and the week after that ye’ll have ten thousand. Every dwarf will be lookin until we’re sure there ain't none left to kill. Ye can be sure of that lad.” 

Jonathan went to bed that night unable to sleep because of fear and excitement. For once something was actually happening and he wasn’t being told to sit down and wait for other people to do the work for him. It was thrilling - at least as long as no goblins snuck into the warehouse tonight and ripped open his throat, he decided.

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