How to Play Gnomestones
By Rayford Four-Fingers
My first encounter with gnomes went exactly as the tales said it would. Less than a day had I climbed into the Groutian foothills when it happened. I was hoisting myself up yet another jagged rock when I heard a peculiar plick-plocking sound, like pebbles rolling down the side of a granite slab. Fearful of landslide, I listened intently, stilling my breath in the silence of the shadowy wash, waiting. I nearly jumped from my walking sandals when the plocking sound was abruptly subsumed by a sharp clamor. It sounded like several weasels fighting in a pantry had knocked over a basket of spices and were thus struggling to snarl through their sneezes. There were all manner of predators in the Mountains of Grout; this was why the Octavians never touched the ground if they could help it. I braced myself for death.
The racket echoed away down the slopes, the subsequent silence revealing more of that infernal plick-plocking. So fast it came and went, I was shaking. My arm was in a twist. I felt positively hoodwinked. I was told by my basketman, when I was back in Octavia, that the feeling of hoodwinkedness was the only gift I would ever receive from dealing with gnomes, so I concluded that I was in the right place.
I stood still and scoured the rocks, and then, in the space beneath an overhanging boulder, I spied four small creatures. They were hairier than I expected, and incredibly dirty, and I did not blink for fear of losing my sight of them among the dusty rocks. They wore what looked like burlap sacks over their torsos, and though their hats were faded and sun-stained, I could tell that they has once been conical and dyed with fine colors. The creatures squatted in a huddle, engrossed in what I could only conclude was their fabled gnomic dice game. I was startled when two of the bickering gnomes began to brawl, the others jeering them on, and I dropped my walking stick. The wrestling gnomes stopped mid-punch as they all turned to look at me.
After several minutes of pathetic pleading for my life and frenzied threatening of said life with daggers and diminutive wooden clubs, the gnomes apparently decided that I posed no danger. I had always possessed a certain way with the small things of this world.
When my sobs began to recede, I saw through my tears that a gnome was brandishing their quivering fist directly under my nose. Its hand smelled like peat and vinegar. I sneezed, and the gnome laughed and opened its hand, revealing a pair of marked dice. They looked like the ones you see in the divehalls of Kyroa, except that they were much smaller, and made of polished skarn. On each face of each die there was a symbol, but I could not comprehend them.
The gnome shrieked at me and pushed the dice up towards my face with a degree of insistence that hadn’t previously known to be possible. I looked at the gnome with confusion. It shrieked at me again, a heinous sound like metal being rent in two. The dices’ edges were cutting into my cheek. I panicked and nodded, a strategy that I had used to alleviate similar situations in the past. The gnome bellowed a third time, face beet red from the exertion, and I realized it was repeating a word.
“RRRRROLL,” it screamed with all the air in its diminutive lungs. If I had to identify a similar sound, the most comparable for me would be the time I witnessed a miserable court wizard bestow a cat with outsized intelligence in an attempt to impress the King of Rutne. For three days the cat futilely attempted to speak to the residents of the Twinfort with increasingly desperate and disturbing utterations before it eventually threw itself from the high wall. The court wizard followed soon after.
“RRRROLLLLL,” shrieked the gnome, shoving one of the dice into my hand. Then, from a hidden pocket, it produced a single oversized coin, and I gasped despite myself. Gnome gold. I stared at the coin’s lustrous surface greedily, though I was not covetous at heart, and the gnome smirked with satisfaction as it regarded my expression. The other gnomes motioned for me to do the same, by which I mean that the gnomes assisted me in removing the coins from my purse to place them on the flat stone in front of me. How thoughtful they were, and persistent!
I gulped, took the single die, and rolled it on the flat stone. When it stopped, the symbol that faced up at me looked like a turnip or possibly the moon. It was hard to tell. The gnome screamed another syllable, different than the first, and then rolled its die next to mine. The symbol that appeared looked like an arrow, or possibly a tree or a fish.
The gnomes all shrieked in unison, in what was either an approximation of glee or rage, I could not tell. As fast as I could blink, my challenger swiped up the dice and the coins too. It looked at me over its shoulder and muttered one more phrase, and then the gnomes dove into a hidden crack in the side of the hill that I had not seen before. In the silence and the fading light, I was alone. But in my ears, I could hear the echoes of that gnome’s last laughing words, words that would haunt me for many a sleepless Octavian night, wasted in those plush basket-mazes in the sky.
“That’s how ya play Gnomestones!”
I had to know more.