I am of the Brotherhood, and I don’t care who hears it. I’m told you think we’re bandits. That we live just to steal babies and…turn them into us. Make them stronger.

Who wouldn’t want to be stronger? But even if you don’t, I’ve never heard anyone suggest it and they weren’t on the lash [note: he means under the influence here]. The only ones we ‘take under the hills’ are soldiers, British or Leagueist. The ones who try to storm our homes with poison gas, knives and fire tubes [note: he appears to mean flamethrowers here]. That’s if we don’t shoot them on the spot.

Out past the river and Lough Corrib, there’s no law beyond what the Brotherhood or the bandits like those O’Rourkes up near Letterfrack set down. There’s nobody else to provide it – the League left us to die out there, and then tried to wipe us out. All they do – all you bulldogs do – is sit safely behind your walls and inside your steel-clad trains, while we sit between you and the banshees and their war-birds and hired snakes. We’re the front line. Not you.

I killed my first banshee at ten years of age. Took a while for it to sink in, but it was either myself or it. Out there, everyone who can fight learns to do so early. But even if you can’t, you pull your weight. Everyone does in the Brotherhood. An crann roimh an chraobh, agus an chraobh roimh an duilleog [transl: the tree before the branch, and the branch before the leaf].

You probably think I’m a monster. Maybe you should look in a mirror! For all your talk of “Leave No Dwarf Behind”, once your people are lost out there you don’t care. We don’t leave our people behind. Yet we’re the bandits?

Tomas Gradaí


This has been sitting around for a while. I couldn’t resist the title, or referring to this awesome music video for Wind Rose’s cover of Diggy Diggy Hole 😁.

The only stories so far that cover Grady are Night Shift (where he’s mentioned in passing) and Washing-up Wrangling, which focusses more on Diarmuid’s home life before he was kidnapped. I also haven’t really touched on the Fomorian Brotherhood very much, apart from that they have been fighting a guerilla war against the dwarves and the British for decades. So, this is my first attempt at covering their side of things. Whether or not Grady’s interpretations are accurate is another thing.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.