Zundrak-Khaz

Zundrak-Khaz, the Bane of the Bloodline

"We write this name so that no one can say they did not know."A dwarf is not a man who lives under the stone. A dwarf is a piece of the mountain that has learned to walk. His fathers, himself, his sons: one single vein of metal in the rock. Kill a dwarf and you kill a man. Poison the vein and no one is left, not today and not ever.
The Zundrak-Khaz does not kill. It is far worse.
It is not found, it is made. It takes months, a sealed room, and things that must be taken from the living. Whoever prepares it breathes the fumes the whole time. You can tell them afterward: yellow skin, teeth falling out, the smell. None of them grows old. They make it anyway. The recipe was written here.
[Four lines scraped away. One word is left in the margin: enough.]
And yet, look at the vial. It is small, it fits in one hand. The glass is clean, without a single bubble. The liquid is clear, faintly golden, and near a lamp it moves slowly, like honey. The stopper is fine work. It looks like a perfume, or an expensive medicine. No skull, no mark, nothing. It is the prettiest object on this page, and that is why it puts out whole families: no one has ever been afraid while picking it up.
You drink. Nothing. No pain, no fever. You live your whole life, you may die old and respected, having felt nothing at all. The poison was not for you. You were only the container.
Then a child is born in your house. It does not cry. At first they say it is a quiet one.
What it becomes cannot be looked at for long. Grey, thick skin that grows in plates and splits between the plates. Fingers that fuse together. A mouth that no longer closes. And the smell, through the whole house, a smell of wet stone and meat. It grows too fast, it becomes too heavy, and it never stops growing. It does not speak. But it follows you with its eyes, and you can see that it suffers, and there is nothing you can do.
One day the family has to decide which of them will hold the hammer.
The second generation is born grey already. The third is not born at all. The vein is dry.
And there is worse, but it is only said in a low voice. We give our dead back to the rock, and the rock keeps them. Those ones, it spits out. No one knows where they go.
There is no cure. A family that knew itself struck would close itself: no more marriages, no more children, one generation growing old in silence and shutting the door behind it. Three clans died this way, of their own will. Their halls are empty and clean.
Whoever pours this poison has decided that an entire family can be made to disappear. We return his judgment to him: his clan is led out into the stone desert that same day, down to the last child.
Another hand, recent ink.
Taken from a dwarven death knight. He carried it under the breastplate, where a man carries what he is delivering, not what he is keeping. He was bringing it to someone. I had no time to ask who. And I cannot empty it: to pour it out is to give it back to the earth, and the earth is exactly what it poisons. If you are reading this, I failed. Do better than me. And above all, do not find it pretty.