After being turned away from service in the military for the third time, a shamefaced and dishonored young Bryn turned his back on the halls of Kal’Varoth, the dwarven capital, and struck out to prove his strength. Hefting a woodcutters axe on his right shoulder and humming a tune to himself, Bryn became a wanderer, a rootless warrior bent on reclaiming his strength through proof of his might and skill. Bouncing from small town to village, he insisted on taking the fight away from those too weak to fight it, as they represented the very weakness he strove to overcome. After years of life as hired help slaying monsters and aiding the needy, the lust for battle grew diminished and dull, and seeds of an idea began to grow in his mind. He would become a brewer, find a wife, maybe have a child or five. And so this idea came to fruit – Bryn became a proud father and loving husband, setting up a cider brewery and living in a small, unnamed hamlet in the middle of nowhere – where he dominated the economy with his aggressive business model. But soon his children grew up and left for good, and after the death of his beloved wife at the hands of a tragic accident, he could not stay there for a second longer. He hefted his trustworthy and battle-scarred axe and, humming a tune, trudged away down the road he knew so well, with all the hopes of a quiet death in mind. After roaming far away from the traces of his past, Bryn made his way into the snowcovered caps of a mountain range. Trembling and hopeless from the cold, consciousness failed him.
He awoke in a strange and beautiful cavern, on the moss-covered banks of a huge subterranean lake. With no knowledge of how he arrived, he set to tentatively wandering the empty halls, absorbing the alien beauty of his ruined surroundings. The eerie beauty and serenity of this underground world rekindled something deep within him, and in those dimly lit caverns he resolved to face his past and become greater – a greatness of which the young Bryn could never have imagined, a might born from a life of bitter loss. Gathering his wits about him, Bryn Byrgernworth left those ruinous caves a changed dwarf – with dreams of his wife’s proud face playing about his smile.
