CHAPTER THREE

Dwarfs enjoy holes. The dark is coveted in a manner other races may think strange. Dwarfs have been known to celebrate annual rejoicings of one’s birth with the lights snuffed for it reminds them of the humble hole. Reverence for hole and dark stems from several facets: one, jewels and gold are found in such, and dwarfs love treasure. Two, if a hole is lit, one dwarf’s beaten another to the punch. There’s nothing good about this; not for one’s own sake. To be sliced and served Chocolate Mudberry Cake in pitch black is thought to be as close a dwarfen child can come to experiencing drunkenness.

It is, of course, the edge cases that prove challenging to what are otherwise concrete theorems. One edge case indeed found himself down a hole of which light fled in hours long past. This dwarf, for he really now no longer was man, felt the continued lingerings of a dull ache in his limbs. His thick limbs, he thought to himself, though he had not had much time to make a visual impression before the moon above slipped away from view. The dwarf could certainly feel the cartoonish proportions with which he was now attached to, and he swallowed a lump in his thick dwarfen neck. He could also feel the whiskers that hung from his face, a very new development that, in contrast, brought less stress to him than the forced thickening. Facial hair had long been a dream for once the son of a bearded father. The wish sprang from an envious desire that first surprised the boy, then tortured him as he toured his teenage years without a hair save the top of his head--a place where, now, of course, the dwarf felt naught but smooth skin. Even his own father hadn’t gone so bald.

With having endured these wild changes, the dwarf could only guess at the modifications of his face. Obviously felt was a wider nose, thicker brows--but he could not picture these features. He could feel dirt. He felt rocks, and a couple of worms. He felt terrible. He thought about his father, and the dwarf began to weep bitterly. He hated the farm of his youth, but even rising dead early in pale blue to feed hens beat the current circumstances.

The dwarf sat up. He rubbed his large hands against the cylindrical wall of earth around him. He looked at what he assumed to be straight up, certainly uncertain, and could not discern but dark. He cursed the tree that had trapped him in such an inhuman prison. He cursed his own hands for their lack of humanity. He continued cursing until collapsing back into a pathetic heap, bitter tears once more flowing.

It was very dark.

It was dark for a length of time unknowable to the dwarf, uncountable. He sat up once again and even stood despite the continued ache in his legs. The dwarf could not reasonably assess his new stature, but he did decide he could test it as he could not stand to cry any further. Knuckles cracked, awkwardly. His neck bent. He slapped his palms at the wall, searching. Hairy fingers pushed and prodded against dirt until, eventually, the dwarf found his first success: grippable earth. He attempted to hoist himself up, and out reached his free hand further. He prodded another found mound of firm dirt. But the earth loosened, and the dwarf fell.

Yet again he landed dwarf.

But something happened this fall that did not previously. The dwarf smacked the ground and groaned in pain--this, of course, grounded. But something strange met his gaze now, defiant of the dark surrounding. Letters and numbers seemed to hover ahead of him, orientated to match his vision. Gas pump prices flashed through the dwarf’s mind, another reminder of a life long lost. But what he saw never ran across a station’s sign in his former lifetime, glowing:

“ATHLETICS SKILL XP GAINED”

“ATHLETICS SKILL INCREASED TO 2”