The smoke of the smelters burned into his lungs. The heat cooked his body by inches. From above, orders. From below, laughter, mad with despair. Toil and bitterness, everywhere. He worked despite it all. Selfish reasons, in truth. Others would be hurt when he failed. He cared about them. And so he did what he could, suffered what he must, because he had to. His hands a graying map of cuts, pus and burns, he carried wood, ore, coal, and scrap to the splashing furnace, struck away the slag on the hellish surface with a crumpling hammer and barely dodged the cavern-high flames that exploded from the pit, yelping in pain. His body was not just a puppet of flesh and bones, able to do everything the broad rules of reality allowed it to. He tasted the lead in his breath, burned from the metall fused to his flesh, cried for the thousand of tiny things on his skin and inside his blood and stomach that died to the machinery. He was Ogmun. He was a cynical bastard, one who valued these unimportant things over will and power. People with ideals; he knew they could do great things. Their body was like a puppet and their soul a master puppeteer that made flesh dance and distort to its design. In the evening, when they went to sleep on molting straw after a meal of watery mushrooms, he heard that was the way to become a hero: If you refined yourself through hard work and shed your cynicism, you could become like them, if you were a leader and you found followers. One can start a chain that way. Heroes are metal, all impurities smelted in the fire of trials. Kingdoms were chains, made from the links and relations of the great men that mattered. The Empires was the chain of chains, the bind that secured the world against the demons and the dark gods and the evil animal spirits. It had to select, to discard the unwanted and useless therefore. A chain was only as strong as its weakest link.And he was a weak dwarf. A small, beardy human with poison resistance who can only procreate with other small, beardy, poison resistant humans. The Empire, when it subjegated the dwarves by arms and law had realized itcould be more idealistic by declaring those dwarves different from the other humans. Different meant less human, meant worse. The few humans he met had let him know. That was alright for the dwarves high up, because the Imperials allowed a little differentiation among their own. Worse but still idealistic dwarves would give their products, unimportant, crude matter to the humans and the more dwarven dwarves confiscated the glittering silver they got from that, out of love for their different, worse, smaller brother. Only ideals could save them, those born without a role. Clanless dwarves like him had no purpose or role save that the clanned ones gave him. And the greed for crude matter was very corruptive, they said. He'd spend the hard-earned wealth on indulgent luxuries like soft cushions and booze, not altruistic tools of great deeds and empire building that would harvest more for more and more possibiblities. Ogmus was alright with this, for the most part. At least they were not goblins. Those pointy-eared small gremlins with a strange skin colour were really different from dwarves and humans. Some people, somewhere protested his condition, he heard. But his betters informed him about their evil. For these madmen with no grasp of nuance and complexity protested these proceedings in billions of stories, poems and any other form of art, hopeful that their own ideals will inspire heroes, philosophers, empires. But the justice that governs the Empire and gives everyone their due opposes such evil and is much more idealistic than those naive idealists. Thus, when the weaker side lies dead, they will always have won.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  And for these reflections, dwarf and goblin alike choked to the death on the bile of the titanic dwarven steelworks. From below, his worn and ground down ears heard their peculiar sputtering in their peculiar tongue about their peculiar concerns and peculiar mad visions from elsewhere, other goblins supposedly, that no one else seemed to really get. He and them, they toiled without pause, for they toiled for the glory of empire, until the world blacked out around Ogmun's eyes and he fell forward, into the steel smelter.His master at the very top, where mushroom filters cleared the air and the idealism of magic light and power shone from above, thought this the grandest display of cynicism.

  "Strip his first degree relatives of their clan for raising a nihilist!" He bellowed.

  Below him, his nephew cleared his throat, and gingerly reminded the man. "Sir, they are already clanless. Only the clanless are allowed to be smelter assistants down there."

  "Then a fast shall teach them to love their work and pay it the proper attention! To love work more than its reward!" The man’s beard jewelry tangled as he raised his voice and let the whole clattering manufactury know his commitment to virtue.

  "Very well sir. I shall dispose of the tainted steel."

  "You’ll do no such thing. Just designate this batch for our contract with the Adventurer's convict convoys. They'll lock up weak, selfish cynics of weak and selfish species, disgusting lawless savages with no sense of higher purpose. The stain produced by Ogmun won’t matter at all here. The sod will still be useful in the liberation of this world from worldy evil."