I have quite the collection of dwarven assassins. With their affinity for the earth that lets them turn their flesh into solid stone, they all have the same bright idea - concealing themselves as statues to be imported into my chateau, then transforming back while I sleep to throttle me in my bed.
It’s not a bad plan. I’m well known for my statuary after all, though they don’t realise until it's too late that they are all their brethren who came before them, chiseled down from thugs into beautiful things.
Nor do they realise the enchantment around my chateau locking any dwarf within their stone form until they leave the grounds. Which, once they’re in my collection, they never do.
Their petrified flesh makes such wonderful, workable material for a sculptor. Some are like granite, others marble, while some even become creatures of brass, though it is all the same softness under my adamantine chisel. To a master, the statue is already there within the stone, just waiting for the superfluous material to be removed, begging to be exposed to the world as items of feminine perfection. Which I do, carving away all the ugly dwarven musculature and brutish pronounced brow until at last I step back and admire my creation.
I like to leave a little something of the men they were to remember them by. The latest, one-eyed, devilish-looking cut-throat to grace my abode had such a pronounced hunchback I couldn’t resist carving it into a pair of angelic wings.
He makes a fine effigy of Aphaea, goddess of fertility and childbirth. My hand graces his thick thighs and broad, childbearing hips, and I press one ear to the statue’s breasts, listening for a moment to the stifled, terrified dwarven oaths echoing within, before sending him to be presented publicly in the grounds.
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