Jason Weiser

Picking his way carefully through the forest with his oaken staff, he followed light after light until he knew a bog was in front of him, tore up some peat moss and threw it in the water, telling the dwarves, nice try, they couldn't trick him.

If you see the obvious issues with suddenly being alone in a dark forest, surrounded by angry creatures, you have officially thought about this more than he did.

His friends found him half dead and babbling incoherently on the edge of the wood, the duergar having taken turns beating him up and chasing him through the woods.

Anytime he tried to land a blow on them, it was like he was fighting shadows.

The duergar are mythological dwarves.

They are in Dungeons and Dragons, where they're called grey dwarves and they live in the Underdark.

My last character was a duergar bard.

Anyway, the name is said to come from the dialectical variations of the word dwarf on the English-Scottish border.

One other prominent story comes from a weary traveler who found an abandoned camp.

There was a pit with a bunch of fuel, wood next to it, and a tent left up.

Since it was too dangerous to keep going on a moonless night, he stopped and built a fire.

When he was sufficiently warmed by the blaze, he decided it was time to turn in.

But that's when he saw something emerge from the trees on the far end of the clearing.

A mythological dwarf wordlessly ambled toward the fire.

When he got close, he took off his hat, made of moss with a feather sticking out of it, and settled down, unbuttoning his lambskin coat.

The traveler took one of the smaller sticks, broke it over his knee, and fed the blaze.

Watching with his milky, all-white eyes, the duergar seemed to think it was a challenge.

Raising a discarded fence post over his knee, he snapped it in half with one go before giving the pieces to the flame.

There was a long silence between the pair and the traveler was not about to try to one-up the creature.

The duergar's beard bobbed with an acknowledgement to the traveler's prudence.