The Battle of Death Pass

There is a defile in the southern mountains whose very name is a warning to travellers, and it earned that name in the slaughter remembered as The Battle of Death Pass. The pass is a narrow, twisting scar between sheer walls, a place where an army on the march becomes a column of victims should the heights above turn hostile.

A throng of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds had entered the pass on a march between holds, confident in their gromril and their grudges, expecting the greenskins to fight as dwarfs fight — in the open, face to face. But the Orc and Goblin Tribes that infested the heights had learned cunning of the meanest kind. They let the throng string itself out along the defile before they struck, loosing an avalanche of boulders and a rain of crude arrows down upon the trapped dwarfs from cliffs too steep to scale.

What followed was less a battle than a massacre in a stone bottleneck. The dwarfs could not close with a foe who fought only from above; they could not flee a pass with cliffs at their flanks and greenskins at both ends. They locked their shields and endured, hurling defiance upward even as the rocks and arrows thinned their ranks, selling their lives with the stubborn courage of their kind but unable to reach the enemy who killed them.

The Battle of Death Pass ended with the throng annihilated almost to the last dwarf, its banners buried under rockfall and its grudge left unavenged. The dwarfs named the place for what it had cost them, and thereafter no throng passed through without an oath and a curse for the bones that still whiten its floor.