CHAPTER 209: THREE PERSONS

By the time Adrian and a laughing, invigorated Damien descended from the shattered mountain peak and returned to the Lord’s hall, Adrian was struck by a remarkable sight.

The gaping hole in the Lord’s hall — the very wall he had thrown Damien through minutes earlier — was already filled with activity.

Scaffolding was being erected. Teams of dwarves, moving seamlessly, were clearing debris while others were already measuring and cutting new blocks of granite. The sounds of hammers and chisels filled the air.

What impressed Adrian most was the dwarves’ demeanor. None of them seemed panicked or even surprised by the state of their Lord’s hall.

They worked with joy, their faces set in concentration, as if a brawl that shattered the very walls of their leader’s keep was a regular, expected occurrence.

They glanced up as their Lord descended, offered a curt nod of respect, and immediately returned to their work, their pace somehow quickening.

"Your people are incredibly hardworking," Adrian remarked with admiration as his feet touched the ground, and his armor receded back into its subspace storage. "They seem entirely unfazed."

Damien swelled with pride, his chest puffing out as he placed his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene.

"HAH! Boy, it takes more than a bit of structure damage to shake a dwarf!" he boomed with affection mixed with arrogance.

"This is nothing! Work is in our blood, King Adrian. It is within our very bones. When our ancestors first carved a home from the heart of the mountains, they didn’t do it with flowery words or fancy magic. They did it with sweat, stone, and steel. It is the way it has always been, since the first of our kind decided that a man’s strength should come from his hands, not from whispering to the wind."

His words struck a chord deep within Adrian. Since the first of our kind. It was a hint to a history that was almost impossible to him to find. The origin of life on Thanad. Back on Earth, the story was one of science and chaos—of cosmic explosions, primordial soup, and billions of years of evolution that led from single-celled organisms to humanity. It was a vast, impersonal, and godless tale, but it was a known history.

Here in Thanad, it was a complete mystery. Adrian had scoured libraries, but the texts only spoke of ancient kingdoms and magic.

There was no mention of how humans, elves, and dwarves came to be. It was as if they had simply... appeared. He had always suspected that the leaders of the great races held this knowledge close. And now, he was standing next to one.

He seized the opportunity. "Lord Damien," Adrian said, his tone shifting from casual observation to inquiry.

"You speak of your ancestors, of the first of your kind. How did the races truly come into existence? Do you have any idea?"

Damien stopped and turned to face Adrian fully. He looked at the young king, his fierce eyes studying him for a long moment.

Then, a slow grin spread across his face. He reached up and stroked his braided beard, and a thunderous laugh erupted from his chest.

"OHO HO HO! So, the new king of the humans seeks the old truths!" he bellowed. "I should have guessed a man of your power wouldn’t be content with just the stories they tell children. So you haven’t heard. Of the origin story..."

Adrian simply shook his head.

Damien’s grin widened. "It is not a tale for the road. When we have a proper seat and a moment of peace, I’ll give you the gist of it."

He then turned his attention back to the workers. "Good work, lads! Put your backs into it! I want that wall stronger than it was before!"

A chorus of motivated grunts and cheers answered him. The dwarves, seeing their Lord pleased and unharmed, worked with renewed vigor.

With a final, approving nod, Damien gestured for Adrian to follow him back towards the now-open entrance of the hall.

They stepped back into the throne room, which was being tidied up by a few other dwarves. The only piece of furniture that remained untouched was the stone throne that sat in the middle of the room.

"Have a seat, King Adrian," Damien offered, gesturing to the throne. "You’ve earned the place of honor today."

Adrian smiled faintly but shook his head. "That is your seat, Lord Damien. I am a guest. Please, do not worry about me."

As Damien shrugged and made his way to the throne, Adrian reached out his hand. With a soft shimmer in the air, a simple chair materialized from nothing and settled softly on the stone floor.

Damien, who had just lowered himself onto his throne, froze mid-motion. His eyes widened and his jaws hanged agape as he stared at the chair in surprise, then at Adrian, then back at the chair.

"What in the blazes...?" he stammered, his booming voice reduced to a stunned whisper. "Did you just... create that chair out of thin air?"

Adrian took his seat calmly. "Not exactly," he explained. "You could say I made it come here out of thin air. There was no immediate creation involved."

Damien leaned forward, rubbing his beard in thought, his mind struggling to process the concept.

"Storage... from thin air," he murmured. "By my ancestors’ anvil, that’s still a feat I’ve never seen nor heard of. Magic can conjure light and fire, but to pull a solid object from nowhere..." He shook his head slowly.

"You truly are a man of surprises, King Adrian. I never even questioned that armor you wore during our fight. You made it appear from the air just like this chair," the Dwarf remarked with amazement.

"But before we speak of your strange abilities, I have a tale to tell first."

Adrian sat back on the chair, giving the Dwarven Lord his complete attention.

Damien’s expression grew serious, his voice lowering to a deep tone, the voice of a storyteller passing down a sacred legend.

"From what has been passed from lord to lord since the beginning," he began, "the first lives on Thanad were the humans. We do not know how they came to be... if they were shaped by a god or born from the soil itself, that part of the tale is lost to time.

What we do know is that they were resourceful and thoughtful. They fought for their survival above all else, conquering territories from magical beasts and building the first settlements. But in all this, they never knew magic. The world, to them, was a physical thing to be tamed with physical means."

He paused, letting the image sink in.

"Then came the Elves. Just like the humans; they simply... emerged. And with them, they brought knowledge of something new. Mana. They could feel the energy that flowed through the world, and they learned to shape it. That was magic.

The Elves were naturally talented, and soon, it was obvious they had an edge. Their hunts were always successful, their crops grew more vibrant, their skill was unmatched. They were masters of the new power."

"This, as you can imagine, drove the humans mad with jealousy and fear," Damien continued with a laugh.

"So they began to study. They dedicated themselves fully to understanding this force the Elves wielded so effortlessly. And after years of trial and error, they finally cracked it. Humans learned to use magic. They were never as graceful or as potent as the Elves, but they were clever and adaptable. They found their own ways, their own spells, becoming decent practitioners in their own right."

"But not all humans agreed with this path," he said, his voice dropping lower, taking on a tone of gruff pride.

"A faction among them saw this pursuit of magic as a weakness. They argued that by chasing the Elves’ power, humans were abandoning their own.

They believed that true strength was not in chanting words to bend nature, but in the power of one’s own body, the sharpness of one’s own mind, and the quality of the steel in one’s hand. They saw the growing reliance on magic as a crutch."

"This disagreement grew into a great disagreement. This faction, the ones who held to the old ways of physical prowess, broke away. They left the fertile plains and the lush forests to their magic-obsessed brethren and traveled to the harshest, most unforgiving environment they could find: the mountains. They declared that they would not borrow power from the world; they would conquer it with their own might."

Damien’s eyes glinted with excitement. "And here is the heart of it, lad. In the mountains, they found that they could not manipulate mana externally as the elves and other humans did. But the mana was still there. So, over centuries, their bodies adapted. Instead of casting it outwards, their bodies began to absorb it inwards.

It settled in their bones, hardened their muscles, and fortified their spirits. They didn’t learn to cast spells; they learned to become living fortresses. This faction, King Adrian... they became the Dwarves."

He finally leaned back in his throne after completing his story.

"So you see, we are three branches of the same tree. The Elves, the masters of pure magic. The Humans, the adaptable jacks-of-all-trades, dabbling in everything. And us," he finished, striking his own chest with a heavy fist, "the Dwarves, masters of the physical form, of stone and steel, who turned the world’s energy inward to forge ourselves into weapons."