6SS: The Rooted Stair

In keeping with last week's Six Sentence Sunday - another six sentences from my fantasy work-in-progress concerning dwarfish mayhem, currently entitled Karst. In this excerpt, Gair and the other dwarves are on an urgent march to the surface, to scavenge for food before the pier-lamps that guard their city against the millipedes burn too low, and the gigantic insects overrun their city:

Through the brittle layers they moved, rising like vultures through gloriously festooned clouds, heaped with fascinating embellishments – some natural, some obviously dwarf-made. The closer they came to the surface, the more Gair noticed other details – expert carvings drawn straight out of the damp rock. At first the etchings were mostly of millipedes, their lithe bodies and countless legs twisting in and out among the folded stone. But these soon gave way to other pictures: great trees, their roots stretching down into the cavernous folds; birds, flying fearlessly between the wet teeth of grinning flowstones; cougars and wolves, prowling the blank surfaces as though they only waited for Gair to look the other way before pouncing. They were carved so deftly, so very life-like, that they seemed almost real.

“Why would our father-dwarves carve such things?” he wondered aloud.

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