"We will slay the beast!" Gunir declared, his knuckles tightening on the haft of his axe till his knuckles cracked like the popper of a bullwhip. The other dwarves nodded with similar bellicosity. Jocasta glanced between the dwarves and made an exasperated sound. 

"You can't be serious!?" she exploded. "We just barely escaped one dragon and now you want to fight another?" Otar's expression grew lofty.

"Aye lass, we wouldn't expect a human to understand the demands of ancestral honor..."

"Ancestral honor?! Even if you kill that thing... IF you kill it, something just as bad is going to move in the moment we leave," Jocasta snapped.

"Isn't there more honor in actually reclaiming this place by, oh I don't know, living to tell your people where it is?" she demanded. The dwarves were all stony faced and rigid now, their backs well and truly up. She hadn't counted on the Elder race's stubborn streak which her words had inadvertently roused. 

"We fight, to the last dwarf if necessary."

_______

"It might work," Beren cajoled the sulking Jocasta as she clandestinley copied down what she could of the dwarven spells and wards into one of her many notebooks. The dwarves were going over a battleplan they had already discussed a dozen times, sketching it out in the dust of the ancient temple's relatively unspoiled vestibule. It was plain to see that Beren was in something of a quandary, he was as obviously wiling to help the dwarves as he was to help anyone else, more so, for he had a kinship with them, but that still didn't quite make him a member of their clannish insular race.

"And it might get us all killed, and before I've even translated any new spells!"