Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
((How do you respond?))
“My story?” he says, voice like distant thunder rumbling in a deep cavern. “Fine. You’ll have it.”
He pulls a thin iron ring from his beard and turns it in his fingers, the metal catching the flicker of candlelight.
“Down there, the rock breathes heat, and the air tastes of iron. We live by the rhythm of the forge — the hiss of quenching steel, the drumbeat of hammer on anvil. It’s not just work. It’s life.”
He glances up, meeting her gaze.
“My people — we craft. Always have. I grew up in the glow of molten metal, watching hands far steadier than mine pull shape from flame and ore. My father was a smith of some renown, though he never said as much. “
A smile — faint, wistful — curls his lip.
“My father was a smith of the Workers’ Guild of Urguan, though he never said as much. Me? I was the boy who carried coal, cleaned slag, watched and tried. I made things, sure — rough things. A knife that wouldn’t hold an edge, a buckle that snapped if you breathed too hard. Once, I hammered out a helm so off-balance it nearly broke my neck when I put it on. But I kept at it. Not because anyone told me I should — I just… couldn’t help myself. The metal spoke, in a way. I didn’t always understand it, but I listened. They said I had a knack. Not skill — not yet. But something in the hands.”
The smile fades.
“But watching wasn’t enough. I’d look at a blade and wonder what it felt like to swing it. Wonder what it was like to stand in the place where the metal met flesh and fury. So I trained — quiet hours, away from the others. With a borrowed axe, bruised arms, burning lungs. I never had a teacher. Just instinct. Curiosity.”
His brow tightens, shadows settling into the lines of his face.
He stared into the fire for a while before he spoke — not like someone recalling a tale, but like someone peeling a scar open.
''I was hauling a wagon of gear — hinges, chisels, some half-finished hammers — down to a trading post past the southern crags. Place doesn’t have a name anymore. Or if it does, no one speaks it.''
His hand drifted to the hammer at his side — old and worn, but clean — and lingered there.
“Middle of the pass, the stone just… split. No tremor. No warning. Just a groan, deep and low, like the mountain itself was cracking its back. Then the ground opened up, and the world turned black.”
He looked at the fire, but didn’t seem to see it.
“The tunnels beneath tore wide, like the mountain was hollow. And from the dark, they came crawling out. Not duergar. Not dwarves gone bad. No. These things had never been kin to stone or forge. Pale-skinned horrors with limbs like snapped branches, jaws that opened too wide, and eyes that gleamed like wet coal. And worse things still — things I only ever saw once and still can’t quite describe. Things that made the air feel wrong just standing near them.”
He flexed his hand once, then let it fall still.
“There were no warriors with me. Just tradesfolk. A cartwright. A pair of miners. A rune-priest who’d lost his voice. But we fought. I fought. Took up one of the half-cooled hammers from the crate and swung it until the haft split. We held a broken trail for three days, ash choking our lungs, blood soaking the stone.”
His voice dropped to almost nothing.
“I didn’t sleep. Didn’t stop. Just kept swinging. When it was over, and the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the road. Or the post. Just a ruin. Just silence.”
A long breath escaped him — heavy, bitter.
“They started calling me Anvilheart after that.”
He said it like it tasted wrong in his mouth.
“I never asked for it.”
He looks down at the iron ring in his fingers.
“After that, nothing felt the same. The forge was too quiet. The walls too close. I wasn’t made for stillness. So I left. No title. No oath. Just my hands and the things I could build — and break.”
He lifts his head again, eyes scanning the candlelit interior of the tent.
“I’ve crossed forests where the trees whisper in dead tongues. Walked ruins that sink into the mud, their stones too smooth, too old. I follow the pull of iron and ash — and lately, it’s led me here.”
He leans in slightly, lowering his voice.
“Something’s under this swamp. Not just rot and roots. Something old. Forged. Wrong. I’ve dreamed it — a shape in the deep, humming with a song I half-remember but never learned.”
He fixes her with a stare, hard as cooled steel.
“You said you’ve been expectin’ me. Then speak plain: what is it that stirs beneath this mire, and why does it call to me like the song of the forge?”
Recommended Comments