Grnman thought as the dark waters swirled around him, "it was swimming."

He tried desperatley to stay afloat, but his heavy robes and High Council garb kept tugging at him, bringing him down to the bottom, to the dark and sandy floor of the Sea of Blood. He couldn't let that happen. Not yet. It was no sense of duty that kept him going, no ideal that if he decided to float away and die the dwarves would never get fair representation at the assambalege of Torn where all the races were expected to talk over the next "age of peace", and how the elves weren't supposed to shoot anyone, and the humans weren't supposed to take over innocent lands, and all that completely useless talk that meant nothing because it would take more than all the boulders in his home to stop hosilities amongst the races. It was simply that he liked living. He liked to keep going, to cling onto the hope that someday, one day, they would let him back down into the mines to work. It was a selfish impulse, but when twenty Ions below the raging surface of the contested Sea of Blood, he was not about to have a philisophical argument with himself.

After much painful struggling, his muscular and bearded head made it to the surface. There was a fire on the shore. Which probably meant another cursed group of war-mongering humans that would get themselves killed. But they had a fire, and Grnman was much more willing to try his luck at getting ambushed than drowning terribly in the depths. He pushed himself forward, towards the huge flames.

But the wrath of the Sea was too strong. It buffeted him from all sides, its windy, raging surface torn into whitecaps by the raging elements. It was in times like these that Grnman wished the dwarves had gods for things other than rock. Someone, something, to whom to pray when he was in the middle of the waters of a battleground.

He could pray for a great boulder to come rising up out of the depths to save him, but for obvious reasons, he didn't.

A small piece of wood floated by, the crushed spar of some ship or another. He grabbed onto it reflexively, he needed something onto which to hold. He doubted it would do anything though. The waves suddenly picked up power as he paddled his undersized but overmuscled legs towards the shore. He would never make it.

A massive crest slammed down upon his head, and in the chaos, the spar onto which he was holding slammed into his head. Colours swarmed in his head. And then all went black.

His nearly dead body washed up upon the shores, right by the bonfire.