The Three Peaks: Part 7 - Desperation and Defenses
The Scouts Return
The messenger was young, no more than twenty years old, and he rode his horse until it nearly collapsed from exhaustion. When he arrived at Sparkbrook’s gates, he could barely deliver his report.
“Two thousand soldiers,” he gasped between breaths. “Maybe more. Coming from the north. Military formations. Banners I don’t recognize. They’ll be here in two weeks. Maybe less.”
Mira felt the world tilt beneath her feet.
Two thousand soldiers. Sparkbrook had four hundred and seven dwarves. Of those, perhaps thirty could effectively fight. The fortress had fortifications, but they were designed to hold against goblins and beasts, not against a disciplined military force of that magnitude.
“Get this soldier food and rest,” Mira ordered. “Then gather every officer to the war room. Now.”
The Impossible Calculation
By that night, the war room was full of the fortress’s senior staff. The military commander, a dwarf named Tefur Stonefist who had trained most of Sparkbrook’s soldiers, looked grave.
“We can’t defend against that force,” he said flatly. “We could maybe hold the gates for a few days, but once they bring siege equipment and establish positions, we’re dead. A two thousand to thirty soldier disparity is beyond strategy. It’s just mathematics.”
“Can we evacuate?” someone asked.
“Where?” Mira replied. “This is the mountains. The nearest friendly settlement is three weeks’ travel. We have four hundred dwarves, limited supplies for evacuation, and a two-week window. We’d be scattered and vulnerable on the road.”
“So we die here,” another officer said.
“We fight here,” Tefur said. “And we die here, yes. But we make it costly. We hold the fortress as long as we can. We kill as many of them as we can. We buy time for anyone who manages to escape.”
It was a soldier’s answer. Mira appreciated it. But Mira was an overseer, not just a soldier.
“Erith,” Mira said, turning to the engineer. “Can you give us better defenses? Anything at all?”
Erith had been quiet up until now, her mind working through the problem with the characteristic intensity that had saved the fortress more than once.
“The sealed chamber system,” she said slowly. “We were planning to open it next month, but we could accelerate. If we seal the main fortress access points, create secondary escape routes, build false corridors designed to confuse and delay invaders…”
“That buys us maybe an extra week,” Tefur said. “In a siege situation.”
“But it also gives us fallback positions,” Erith continued, warming to the problem. “If we seal the first and second levels, they can’t just walk through the fortress. They have to clear each level. And if we rig certain passages with our stone-fall traps, with water-based mechanisms…”
“You want to turn the fortress into a maze of delays,” Mira said.
“I want to turn it into a fortress that can’t be taken quickly,” Erith corrected. “We won’t win. But we can make winning so expensive that they’ll consider negotiation instead of conquest.”
“What about the original fortress structure?” Tefur asked. “The damage in the eastern wing?”
“Irrelevant now,” Erith said. “If we’re going to lose the fortress anyway, we use that damage. We accelerate the collapse of the eastern wing. We turn a liability into a weapon.”
The Letters
Mira spent the next two days writing letters.
One to Stellarim, to the parent settlement, reporting the approaching army and requesting immediate military assistance.
One to the dwarven kingdom’s capital, requesting aid and intervention.
One to every trade company and mercenary group she knew of, offering payment for immediate military support.
All of which would arrive too late to matter.
But she also wrote a different kind of letter—a letter to the fortress, to be read if the worst happened.
“To the dwarves of Sparkbrook,” she wrote. “If you are reading this, then I have either fallen or ordered an evacuation that I did not survive. I want you to know that this fortress was built not through fortune or planning, but through the stubborn refusal to accept failure. Every wall here was built by hands that chose to persist. Every tool was crafted by dwarves who chose to build rather than surrender. You are inheritors of that choice. Whatever comes next, you are worthy of it.”
She didn’t seal the letter. She left it on her desk where Erith would find it if she came looking.
The Frantic Work
For eight days, Sparkbrook worked as it had never worked before. Every able-bodied dwarf participated in the fortress modification. Walls were reinforced. The secondary passages Erith had designed were carved out at double speed. Traps were set, rigged, and tested. The grand hall was cleared of everything but weapons and food.
Erith barely slept. Mira saw her during the day, working with her crews, and at night, awake in the war room, calculating trajectories and structural stresses and the likely behavior of stone and water under pressure.
“Will it work?” Mira asked her on the eighth day, as they stood looking at the reinforced main gate.
“No,” Erith said simply. “But it will delay them. And delay is the only thing we have left.”
The Arrival
On the fourteenth day, scouts reported the army.
They were massive, disciplined, wearing the colors of… Irondelve. The fortress of iron and steel, the legendary military power of the north. They moved like a river of metal and flesh, and they had surrounded Sparkbrook before anyone could complete a full count of their numbers.
A messenger rode to the gates under flag of truce and delivered a letter.
Mira read it in her office, Erith beside her.
“…surrender the legendary artifact and join our protective alliance,” the letter concluded. “You have ten days to respond. After that, we will assume your answer is no, and we will take the artifact and the settlement by force.”
Mira and Erith looked at each other.
“Do we have an artifact?” Erith asked.
“No,” Mira said. “We have stone, minerals, and stubborn dwarves. But no artifacts.”
“They might not believe that.”
“No,” Mira agreed. “They won’t.”
She turned to the letter, reading it again, considering the options.
There was no good choice. There was only the least bad choice.
“We respond,” Mira said finally. “We tell them the truth: there is no artifact here. There’s only a settlement of dwarves trying to survive. And we ask them why they came here in the first place.”
“They’ll attack anyway,” Erith said.
“Probably,” Mira agreed. “But not immediately. First, they’ll be confused. They’ll wonder if we’re lying. They’ll reconsider their strategy. And every day they reconsider is a day we’ve bought ourselves.”
She began writing a response, her hands steady despite the fear coiling in her chest.
Outside, the forces of Irondelve waited, their siege equipment being assembled, their soldiers establishing camps, their commander debating whether to honor the ten-day window or move immediately.
In the fortress, dwarves worked with furious intensity, building defenses against an enemy they might not survive.
And somewhere in the mountains to the east, Urist McForgemaster was unaware that his legendary artifact—his crown of power—was about to start a war.
Next in the series: The Three Peaks: Part 8 - The Siege