There is no hatred colder than that between kindred, and none burns longer than the feud that erupted at the mountain-hold in The Battle of Kazad Drengi. For the dwarfs who dwelt there, the enemy at the gates was no stranger but a mockery of themselves — the bull-headed, fire-worshipping cousins who had sold their souls to the Dark Gods in ages past.
The Chaos Dwarfs came out of the east with slave-driven war machines and daemon-bound engines that belched sorcerous fire, intent on taking the hold's mineral wealth and dragging its people back to the ash-choked ziggurats of the Dark Lands in chains. The defenders, staunch warriors of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds, met them with the same grim engineering turned to nobler ends — cannon and organ gun, gromril and grudge — and the tunnels rang with a duel of black powder between two peoples who forged war in the same fashion.
But the Chaos Dwarfs fought with weapons no honest hold would touch. Their bound daemons gnawed through gates that should have held for centuries, and their sorcerer-priests called down fire that melted stone and flesh alike. The defenders sold every hall dearly, filling their own tunnels with the slain, yet inch by inch they were driven back into the deeps, their grudges written in blood upon the walls they yielded.
Kazad Drengi fell at last, its survivors dragged south into slavery or buried beneath the collapsing deeps by their own hands rather than be taken. It was a wound in the dwarf soul that no reconquest could ever fully heal, and its name was inked into the Great Book of Grudges in the darkest of all inks.
The chronicle continues
