Chapter 107 Delilah
Third Person Point of View
Dwarves were cursed hundreds of years ago, killing most and making most born female. It meant that most families consisted of a single male dwarf, with ten to twenty wives. Dwarves were much more evil than other races. Being the dominant race, they also enslaved most other races, and the slaving practices used today were the ones the dwarves invented to make slaves more obedient.
A former slave freed himself before taking revenge, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of people to feed the curse that killed ninety percent of dwarves and made them have their abnormally high female birth rates. The person originally wanted to remove dwarves from existence, killing them all, but it was impossible; even if he sacrificed ten times more people, they still wouldn’t have succeeded.
Dwarves were almost wiped out in the subsequent wars; only a few mountain strongholds were left, going from the majority to a minority race over a single decade. The only thing that saved them from extinction was the guardian golems of the strongholds that still stood, as powerful as an army; the cost for destroying them would have been too high for any king to handle without being assassinated after all the pointlessly sacrificed lives.
Delilah’s childhood was normal. She was born into a large family and had many siblings; the tight-knit closeness meant that most viewed all the children born as their own. Most females were treated fine, at least until a male was born. All the mother's attention became focused on him after that. That’s what happened to Delilah; she grew up fine until she was thirteen, and her brother was born, and all her parents' attention was focused on him.
She knew one thing: even at her age, she wanted to be a blacksmith, which was another problem because of her sex. Dwarven blacksmiths were very popular still; most dwarf males would become blacksmiths, but females… No one wanted a girl competing with their boys, so she had to get creative and pretend she was a boy to start apprenticing under her local blacksmith.
She worked as an apprentice until the blacksmith asked where her beard was, then she made a fake beard with a dyed orange mop, slowly increasing the size over the next year or so until he finally caught on that she was actually a she and not a he. He regretted it because she was one of the most skilled blacksmith apprentices the blacksmith ever had.
Male dwarves tended to be spoiled since they were young, so they would take some time to assimilate to the hard work a blacksmith had to do. Some never did and just became terrible blacksmiths, some received jobs other than blacksmiths, but the way it was set up, she had to be punished for trying to steal a male's job. She was banished a year before she would gain her class.
She left and did the same thing again with the blacksmith in the town she moved to. Instead of pretending to be a male, though, she pretended to be much younger than she was, also much less skilled than she was. That was until she gained her class and moved away. Then met the same problem she had inside the dwarven fortress. No one wanted a woman to make their weapons, even if they were a dwarf.
Also, most towns already had a blacksmith; the only way to replace them would be to work under them, and Delilah was done working under anyone else. She was forced to move to the outskirts of the country, practically into the wilds, where she could finally, FINALLY, just do what she loved. Being a blacksmith was in her blood; she wasn’t the first female to try and become one, and wouldn’t be the last.
Life was good; she finally got to do the profession she wanted all her life, and only the lack of a familial bond was the only thing she wished she had. She loved her family, of course, she did, at least the family that existed before her brother. She felt lonely and was by herself, only having a fling here and there, but never really falling for anyone…
Honestly, she didn’t see herself falling for the farmer. She already had enough of large harems; she couldn’t see herself ever joining one… Until she did. She didn’t think she’d like it, and she was right; she loved it. She loved being part of something bigger, helping raise the family she wished she had, and being a better mother to children she viewed as her own more than any of her own mothers ever did.
She felt loved, everything just… Worked, it shouldn’t, it really shouldn’t, but it did. How was everyone so happy? It was like everyone naturally fit puzzle pieces together from different puzzles and made a completely new picture that somehow worked, no, not just worked, but was more beautiful than the pictures they came from.
She grew pregnant, and was worried, even hundreds of years after the curse took effect, there still wasn’t much information on it. Only in the past hundred years did they open up the fortresses to allow in selected people and give exiles a chance to regain their citizenship. They had no idea what the effects of breeding outside their race would cause because anyone who married outside of dwarves was no longer allowed back.
The curse was far more insidious than anyone could have imagined. Slowly, fewer and fewer males would be born; every woman who left wasn’t keeping the male numbers up. Females were treated as second-class citizens compared to males, which would push more and more away as their numbers began to dwindle. More and more would be related to one another, trading female dwarves between strongholds might slow the process, but soon enough, there wouldn’t be enough genetic difference to stop inbreeding defects.
Not to mention that if a dwarf were born gay, he would exclude himself from the breeding pool. All of this went unknown by Delilah; all she knew was that she gave birth to a male heir, an heir that looked surprisingly like her, but wouldn’t go through the hell of being born a female and having to fight for the affections of any of their love interests. That was the other part of the curse; while dwarves had a harder time giving birth to pure dwarf males, they had no problems; no, they favored giving birth to male half-breeds.
The curse couldn’t kill all dwarves, so the person made sure it had the best chance to kill them off with lessened effects after the initial wave of deaths. All the effects were built into diluted dwarf blood because that is how much the caster hated dwarves, even willing to sacrifice his own mortality to make the curse more sentient.
The caster’s life didn’t end; he lived on through death as a lich, and that lich is still alive, ruling the southern continent. His hatred was still there, still strong, but it had tempered over the years. He could wait now, wait until there were no pure-blooded dwarves anymore. Enough time had passed that those who could find out how to break the curse had died. To break a powerful curse like that, you needed to slay the caster.