Strawberry's Descent

The dismantling happened three days later, exactly as promised, publicly, deliberately, witnesses gathered at the mountainside exactly as Gorthruk had asked, so no one, on any side, would ever wonder whether the weapon truly stopped existing.

It went faster than the build had, if only because taking something apart never carried the same uncertainty as putting it together for the first time. The staged chambers came off first, then the elevation gearing, the traversal struts, segment after segment of barrel lowered carefully back down by the same dwarven riggers who'd raised them, each piece catalogued, each piece, at Arista's insistence, either melted back down or repurposed into something that couldn't be reassembled into anything remotely resembling a weapon again.

The harpoon rod itself, spent in the hydra's crater, she chose not to recover at all.

"Leave it," she'd said, when Petrov asked. "It did its one job. It doesn't need to come home."

By the third day, only two pieces remained: the rear mounting base, too deeply integrated into the mountainside's own structure to remove without genuinely damaging the rock itself, and five meters of the original barrel, the very first segment she'd mounted, cut clean and capped where the rest had once continued.

Gorthruk walked the site slowly, inspecting what was left, nodding once, satisfied. "This is acceptable. What remains cannot fire. It cannot be extended, cannot be repurposed into anything resembling its original function. It is, functionally, just... a marker now."

"That's the idea," Arista said.

She spent that final evening at her forge, alone, working on one last piece, not a weapon, not a tool, just a simple plaque, cut from ordinary steel rather than anything precious, meant to sit at the base of what remained.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

She thought a long time about what to actually put on it. Not a boast. Not a warning, exactly, though some of that belonged in there too. Something closer to what she'd actually learned, standing at the edge of that crater, watching a title she'd never wanted confirm exactly what she was capable of when the choice was taken away from her.

She etched it slowly, carefully, the same patient precision she'd once given her very first pickaxe.

When something seems impossible, someone will eventually be forced to prove that it isn't.This mountain remembers what that costs.Build carefully. Dismantle honestly.— S.

She mounted the plaque herself, the next morning, at the base of the five remaining meters of barrel, no ceremony this time, no crowd, just Gorthruk, Petrov, Nettle, and Bram standing quietly nearby as she set it into place.

Bram read it twice, then looked at the stub of barrel, then at her.

"...No mention of the statue," he said, mildly.

"The statue's a separate project. I haven't forgotten." Arista managed a tired smile. "This one wasn't about you. It's about the gun. What it was, why it isn't anymore."

Gorthruk studied the plaque for a long moment, running a thumb over the etched words with the same careful respect he gave good metalwork.

"...'Build carefully. Dismantle honestly,'" he read aloud, quiet. "That is a fine principle, Strawberry. I hope you hold to it as thoroughly the next time something forces your hand."

"I hope there isn't a next time," Arista said, honestly. "But if there is—" she glanced at the stub of barrel, at the crater still visible in the far distance across the Wastelands, at everything that single, terrible, necessary weapon had cost and proven "—yeah. I'll hold to it."

The small group stood together a while longer, quiet, the mountainside settling back into its ordinary stillness now that the enormous, gleaming thing that had briefly dominated it was gone, nothing left behind but five meters of capped barrel, a simple steel plaque, and the memory of exactly what one demon blacksmith had built when the world finally, briefly, gave her no other choice.

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