Dwarven Shortbow

The Stocky One

Thick, heavy, and that is why she never breaks.The dwarven bow has the shortest range of any bow, but it is the only one you can drown, freeze, or hold to the fire without it failing, where the least wooden bow already dreads the damp of a single night.
A bow is grown, they say: it rises from the patient wood of the forests. The dwarf will not wait for a tree to deign to give him one, and distrusts anything he has not forged himself. His bow comes off the anvil: short, thick steel limbs, tempered to bend without breaking, and a string of twisted wire where others stretch gut or hemp. Nothing in it can rot, swell, or slacken, for nothing in it ever lived.
This bow was born underground, where no wood survives. In the seeping galleries, near the burning forges, in the frost of the high tunnels, a human's bow warps and cracks in a single season. The dwarf's cares nothing for any of it: damp, the one enemy an archer cannot aim at, does nothing to it. Where others keep their string dry and never leave their bow strung for fear it takes a set, the dwarf has but one rule, the same as for his blades: oil the metal against rust. He strings it in the morning and unstrings it at night, or never; the bow doesn't care.
What it loses in range it returns in certainty. Its massive limbs take a dwarf's arm to bend and give back less than supple wood; the arrow does not fly far, but underground one never sees far, and its range is exactly that of the dark it is shot into. Up close the arrow leaves hard and flat, weighted with a rock-iron head that punches through where a wooden arrow would shatter. It is the weapon of the deep watchers, of those who hold a bend in a gallery or cover a low door: they have no need to reach the horizon, only what rises at the end of the tunnel.
Here lies the whole nature of this weapon: other bows reach far and fear everything; the dwarven bow reaches short and fears nothing.