Trollheim Chronicles
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Dead Hills Stir Bones Teeth of Kloor Hollow Accord Mark of Hrond
The Dead Hills Stir
Trollheim - Late Summer, 1907
Smoke curled from the firepit in the Atrium of Stone, rising into the cold sky through the oculus above. Hrond the Mottled stood at the speaking stone, his thick fingers resting against its ancient grooves as voices buzzed around him like flies in frost.
“The Dwarves bring coin, aye,” rumbled Brusk Ironshoulder, his arms crossed over a belly of stone muscle, “but their price is patience. Their words are like butter on rock—soft and full of trickery. We trade with them, and soon they’ll want rights to the hills.”
“We already took their ore,” snapped Jangra the Bent. “Used it for plow teeth and roof-spikes. Their wagons roll in peace, and you think that’s weakness?”
“It is weakness,” Brusk growled. “We are not hill sheep to be shorn for their ledgers.”
Redna sat at the rim of the circle, quiet but attentive. She had spent enough time in the high paths to know what silence hides. “The pact was made,” she said. “And now we must hold it—or break it. What we cannot do is hover between.”
Hrond raised a hand. The voices stopped.
“We do not hover. We watch. And we prepare. The Dwarves are not friends—but they are not yet foes. We’ll let their wagons pass. We’ll see what grows from that.”
He looked around the circle of elders, each face carved by time and skepticism.
“The Dwarves stir beneath their mountain. Let us not be the ones to awaken what sleeps beneath ours.”
He had barely spoken the last word when the stone beneath his feet began to shake.
It began as a groan in the bones, a pressure that made teeth ache and toes curl. Then came the sound—a low, subterranean growl, like mountains grinding their teeth. In Dwarfheim, tools rattled on stone tables and lanterns swung in warning. But it was across the ridge, in the craggy wastes known as the Dead Hills, where the earth truly spoke.
And the Trolls of Trollheim heard it clearly.
In a stone hall carved half into a cliffside, Hrond the Mottled stood still as the walls trembled around him. He was ancient, even by Troll reckoning, his skin mottled with age and a lifetime of mountain weather—slate gray streaked with pale moss and ash. His tusks were cracked but sturdy, his shoulders broad as a cart.
When the quake passed, Hrond opened one eye and muttered, “So it begins again.”
Behind him, the fire in the central pit spat a single plume of ash. Around him, five younglings froze in silence, unsure whether to run or wait for command.
He lifted a hand.
“Fetch Bolg. And the rest of the eelders. All of them.”
The young trolls ran.
The Dead Hills stretched for miles beyond Trollheim’s eastern gates—rolling, uneven terrain like the broken knuckles of the Grey Mountains, stripped of trees and left barren. Jagged ridges clawed at the sky, and the ground was littered with shattered boulders, weathered bone, and strange sinkholes that whispered in the wind.
Long ago, this land had been verdant. Streams once wound between green slopes. But something had gone wrong—too long ago for even troll-elders to remember. The ground soured. Trees died. Water vanished. Trolls who ventured too far into the interior sometimes returned… different. And some never returned at all.
It was said the hills had fallen asleep, but would one day awaken angry.
Hrond now feared that day had come.
By midnight, a small band of scouts stood before him, assembled in the Atrium of Stone—an open-roofed circle of carved basalt columns, crowned by the stars and a single dangling lantern of molten glass. Snowflakes drifted on the mountain breeze.
Redna was first among them. She wore dark-hide armor, stitched with silver thread and earth-blood runes. Her tusks were short and her eyes sharp, reflecting firelight with a glint of caution.
“We reached the southern ridge,” she said. “The quake split one of the ravines. New vents are steaming. Something is moving underground.”
“Not a cave-in?” asked Hrond, his voice low and steady.
“No. The heat comes in pulses. Not constant. Rhythmic. Breathing.”
Murmurs circled the gathering. Bolg, heavy-jawed and broad as a smith’s anvil, stepped forward. “And we found the old stone markers. Cracked. Shoved aside from beneath.”
That stirred the elders. Jangra the Bent muttered a word no one liked to hear.
“Snath.”
A hush fell.
Redna’s voice dropped. “I did not see it. But the tunnels beneath the ridge are open again. And something in them has left claw tracks… too many to count.”
No one in the Atrium said the word again, but it hung there like smoke between tusks and torchlight.
The Snath.
It had not been seen—if it had ever truly been seen at all—in hundreds of winters. Yet every troll over the age of ten had heard tales whispered around bonefires.
Some said the Snath had once been a troll itself, warped by the deep earth and cursed by the Flame Below to consume endlessly. Others claimed it was never a creature at all, but a hunger made flesh, left behind when the world cooled and the old gods fell asleep.
The most trusted accounts came from stone-shamans of centuries past, whose journals had been scratched onto bone tablets and stored in the Archive Hall. One such fragment, etched by the long-lost seer Gruggra of the Southern Crag, read:
“The thing did not crawl. It flowed. Like ash across embers. Its body shimmered like wet stone, its mouth stretched wide enough to swallow a forge.”
“It does not eat the dead. It seeks the living. The warm. The moving.”
Other tales claimed the Snath could smell iron, that it hated bells, or that it whispered to those who ventured alone into deep caves. Trollish miners sometimes hung little charms of braided moss and forged nails in tunnel entrances—not because they truly believed, but because their fathers had, and their fathers before them.
In recent centuries, the Snath had become a half-joke—a way to spook a youngling into finishing chores, or to explain strange echoes in the deep mines. But beneath the jesting, the fear had never entirely died.
Hrond remembered his grandmother’s voice—harsh but trembling—as she told him never to sleep near warm stone, lest the Snath mistake his heartbeat for a signal.
The torchlight in the Atrium of Stone flickered as a gust of wind swept down from the open ceiling. Hrond said nothing more that night, but his gaze lingered long on the old carved etchings behind the council stones. In the oldest one—now worn smooth by time—six trolls stood in a circle around a jagged hole in the ground. No enemy was shown, only the darkness itself.
The legend had a name now.
And the hills were opening once again.
The next morning, Redna led a second expedition.
They descended deeper into the newly opened fissure, bearing lanterns of obsidian glass filled with glowing resin sap. The tunnels were slick with condensation, and the air grew hotter the farther they crawled. Strange fungi clung to the walls—new growth, feeding on something old. The passage widened into a hollow chamber rimmed with broken stalagmites. Across the floor were dozens of furrows, some shallow, some deep—each trailing off into dark, downward holes.
At the center of the chamber was a pool of still water. It had not been there before.
And rising from it, just barely visible, was the corner of a rune-stone.
Cracked.
Burned.
Hollowed.
Redna did not speak. She simply turned and began marking the tunnel with shards of chalk and iron scent-strips. The hills had indeed awakened. And something beneath them was hungry again.
When she returned, Hrond met her alone.
“You saw it?”
“I saw enough.”
“Snath?”
Redna hesitated. “I don’t know. But I’ll say this: it doesn’t fear our markers anymore. And it’s not alone. The claw-tracks… they weave over each other like a nest.”
Hrond closed his eyes. For a moment, he looked very tired.
“We’ll keep this quiet, for now. No need to frighten the hill-kin or the younglings.”
Redna nodded, but her gaze drifted past him—toward the carved cliff wall where old legends were etched into stone. One etching showed a troll with raised hammer, standing against a sea of writhing lines.
It had always been a story. A warning.
Now it was prophecy.