The dwarves received a message on one of the rare nights they had to stop—just for the evening.

A raven arrived, black as memory, carrying word from a settlement so small it wasn’t even on the map. Just a smoke-breathing cluster of homes huddled against the cold. One of their elders had gone missing, it said. A beloved figure, the kind of old man you carried stories about.

The villagers didn’t want to leave him to nature, because nature, out in these parts, could be mean and wrathful when it got the mood. The dwarves respected that. So they went. They found a chasm not far beyond the treeline, crusted in frost and buried in old snow.

Tarris got a hunch. He took a rope and grappled his way down the ledge, dropping carefully into the drifted white. He found the old man face down in the snow, stiff with cold and, by all appearances, dead. Tarris knelt beside the body, genuinely dismayed at the thought of delivering bad news to good people. After a moment of quiet, he slung the man over his shoulder and began the slow climb back up—hand over hand, the old-fashioned way.

He didn’t trust the rope not to snap. But as he reached the top, the old man woke with a grumble, complaining bitterly that: “I wasn’t sleepwalking—just gone out for a drink.” Tarris believed him. The villagers paid them in a barrel of rather good ale and a rack of especially delicious lamb.

When the dwarves returned to their camp, they found that the front end of the engine had been polished by the locals, who had taken it upon themselves to shine the thing like a statue. Out of gratitude. Or superstition. Or both.