We pay homage to Australia’s original storytellers who remind us that storytelling is about deep listening. We recognise Australia’s First Nations Peoples for their ongoing connection to storytelling, country, culture, and community. We also respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we’re all situated and recognise that it was never ceded.  

Gilli

By Harley Dark

 

Crackling embers hiss as Barif watches his son use the bellows to blow air into the forge, engorging its flames.

‘Heat it quickly, then draw it out, Gilli.’

‘Yes, Forgemaster,’ he says, using tongs to plunge a nugget of iron into the fire.

When the raw metal glows with heat, he turns and sets it on the anvil. Taking his hammer, he raises it and strikes. Barif expects a reverberating clang, but Gilli’s hammer strikes with a meagre ting.

The older dwarf approaches Gilli and claps an arm onto his shoulder.

‘You won’t forge a nail with those scratches, boy.’

Gilli hesitates, and his hammer arm hovers above the anvil.

‘I don’t want to break it by accident…’

Barif holds his son’s other shoulder and turns him around, before kneeling to his height.

‘If it breaks, we’ll melt it down and try again with the next batch. If you spend all your time on one piece, with those cautionary strikes, we’ll never be able to use it.’

Gilli nods, and his grip on his hammer tightens.

‘We can’t build shelter against the blizzards with unfinished nails. There’s a time for patience, but we need these by the hundreds.’

Barif pats Gilli’s back once, and then stands up, moving away. The child is barely thirteen, but forging doesn’t come as naturally to him as it should by now—his father worries about more than the young dwarf’s swing.

Gilli takes a deep breath in, then holds the nugget in the fire once more. As soon as it begins to redden, he sweeps his tongs around and onto the anvil. He crashes his hammer down upon the metal, then again and again, drawing it out into what begins to approach the profile of a nail.

Barif crosses his arms and strokes his long, braided beard as he studies Gilli’s form. His son tenses his whole body when the hammer comes down, as if he expects to be hit back, far from the fluid motions of a practiced smith.  When the hammer bounces, Gilli struggles to absorb its force by coiling his elbow, and the shock reverberates through his locked spine. There’s power behind his swings now—but no grace yet, no rhythm.

The two continue, only breaking for mealtime.

 

Rain falls in thick sheets across a muddied battlefield in the dead of night. Barif and Gilli stalk between skeletal trees and their recently fallen comrades. Gilli, now a young man, looks just like his father without the specks of grey in his beard.

Barif raises a hand and closes it in a fist, signalling his son to halt behind him. He points into the distance, where an elven invasion encampment is settled in a maze of trenches. Snaking sheets of tarpaulin serve as roofing against the rain, and lamplight glows from within.

Barif puts up two fingers. Gilli squints. Two shapes move in the dark, circling the perimeter of the camp. Sentries.

‘Father—’ he whispers, ‘we can’t just leave them like this.’

He looks at Barif, concern in his eyes, and gestures to the corpses around them. The fallen dwarves stare skyward, pain and shock frozen in their final expressions, mouths agape. Barif looks back at him, his lips twisting into a grimace.

‘Don’t fall behind.’

Barif moves on with careful steps. Gilli takes a breath and braces himself. He moves to the first body and kneels beside it. He gently closes its eyes and shuts its mouth.

‘May your sacrifice be honoured by the Gods. May Grave-Father Raghe keep you.’

Gilli retrieves a crystal prism from the fallen soldier’s belt. A soft glow of his departed soul emanates from within. A rune is etched into the surface, a monogram.

‘Thank you, Hjolgrim,’ Gilli says, delicately placing the crystal into a pouch on his own belt.

Gilli checks how far his father has moved—feeling that he has enough time, he visits each of the other bodies and pays them the same respect before catching up.

When Barif feels his son’s presence behind him once more, he turns his head and nods back towards him. The two reunited, Barif brings his son up to speed.

‘The two sentries rotate on a regular basis. As soon as they switch, we take the one closest to the entrance—we’ll have them out of the way and be ready for when the other one comes around,’ he says.

Gilli nods. The two wait for their window of opportunity. The moment one of the sentries settles by the entrance and the other is out of sight, the two dwarves move. Their footsteps are silent, disguised by the heavy patter of rain, and they move swiftly—both draw their war hammers.

With no time for hesitation, lest the elf turn to face his direction, Barif winds back his hammer arm and slams the elf in the knee, shattering the bone instantly. The elf topples, thudding into the mud, and Barif jumps atop its back to keep it down. He raises his hammer again, this time intent on cratering its skull.

‘You won’t take our home, you knife-eared prick,’ he snarls.

He turns the elf’s grimace into a concave mess of flesh with his war hammer. The dwarf breathes out and rolls off the elf’s back. He signals for Gilli to hold and guard the entrance. Before he has a moment to rest, he hears the squelching footsteps of the other sentry coming and resolves to charge the elf before it can realise what’s coming.

The second sentry’s eyes widen, and they nock an arrow, but Barif is already upon it and smacks the bow astray with his hammer. The arrow flies wild, and on his backswing, Barif slams his hammer across the elf’s face. A sickening crack echoes over the muddy plains as the elf falls. Silence.

He turns back, to see his son. His heart drops. His hammer thuds into the mud, slipped from his limp hand.

Gilli lies prone, struck by the stray arrow in his chest. Barif sprints to his side and falls to his knees, as his son wheezes out a weak cough.

‘N-no, Gilli, no!—’ he cries, raising Gilli’s head in his hands.

The young dwarf feebly reaches a hand to his father’s beard, then to the side of his face, where his tears wet his hand. Gilli’s lips part, as if to speak—but then a confusion clouds his eyes, and he pauses. His tense expression softens, and his mouth stays open.

The soul prism on Gilli’s belt begins to glow faintly. Barif squeezes his eyes shut and looks up to the sky, rain pouring down on him. The two are drenched, and when Barif takes the prism from Gilli’s belt, it almost slips from his hands.

Barif moves to hold his son’s still-warm forehead to his own, cradling the back of his head.

‘My boy…’

 

 

The war has raged on, a decade since Gilli’s passing.

Barif’s beard has been stressed into greying.

The sun peaks over the horizon, as he stands in a clearing atop a glacial mountain. Frigid air stings his lungs. Surrounding him is a forge of ancient black stone, used by his forefathers. Closest to the Gods, it was deemed a holy site. With a new campaign looming, the army needs all the blessings they can manifest.

Barif has managed to get the fire roaring once more, and his muscles ache from repeated use of the bellows. At least, in the heat, his joints start to relax. He takes off a draping wolfskin cloak and rests it in a dry patch of gravel.

He reaches under his shirt and pulls out a necklace. Hanging from the chain is Gilli’s soul prism. By tradition, his spirit should have been forged into an enchanted item years ago. But the warmth it brought Barif’s heart was too precious.

Now, he isn’t sure the dwarven kingdom will stand long enough to cherish anything for much longer. He has to let go.

Barif withdraws a heavy chunk of platinum from his pack, and places it atop the anvil, readying himself. He takes his hammer from his belt and rotates it in his hand nervously. He shakes his head and cracks his knuckles. Then, he removes his necklace and slips the soul prism from it. He holds it above the fire.

He is to make a hammer. A war hammer. To carry into battle in the defence of the capital city. Enchanted with the strong-willed spirit of his son.

The crystal feels fragile in his hand. The heat of the forge, this close, is getting to him. Surrounded by snow, yet he’s sweating.

A war hammer is a weapon.

‘You didn’t even want to strike a nail,’ Barif says.

He hadn’t realised how dry his lips were, how long he’s been silent. The snow swallows the sound quickly. He places a hand on the raw metal he’s brought to forge and lets himself imagine it as Gilli once was.

Gilli was kind. He would sooner take a strike than deal one. Joining the war effort had eaten him up inside, even though he never took a life.

Barif takes out the plans he’d drawn up for a hammer design and tosses them into the forge. They are instantly incinerated, and flecks of them drift into the wind.

He shifts the platinum to the ground, clearing the anvil so he can lay down fresh parchment. He takes a stick of charcoal and begins to sketch a new design. A breastplate.

He works with intense fervour and, before long, strikes the final black line across the page. Gilli would be proud of this. He’s ready to light the forge with soul-fire. He holds his precious son’s soul prism above the fire, and this time, it feels solid in his grasp.

‘I love you,’ he says.

He drops the crystal into the forge, and it explodes with an azure flame, turning the whole fire a serene, arcane blue. He plunges the chunk of metal into the coals, retrieving it only when it’s burning white. He sets it on the anvil and steps back, then brings his hammer up before letting gravity aid his swing.

The hammerhead punches the surface flat in one spot, then another, as Barif finds his rhythm and brings the hammer down repeatedly. Each clang sends a ringing through the air, almost seeming to unsettle the snow around the forge, which is increasingly little as the heat melts it away.

It takes him more hits than he cares to count, but he smooths the metal enough to begin shaping it. Using his tongs to angle the piece along one side of the anvil, he hammers with precision to bend and work the platinum.

Barif forsakes food, drink, and rest, as the sun rises above his head after hours of labour. In his hands, he holds a sturdy platinum breastplate. He has yet to attach buckles to it, or polish it, but that’s all for show. Barif turns it over and smiles—his crow’s-feet wrinkle and his laugh lines crease.

Stamped proudly on the inside are his name and Gilli’s, side by side.