Iorrjaer

Chapter 44

The Tengu Raven's victory had lasted only as long as its success. Upon the impaling and subsequent destruction of Häsmæl's left eye, it involuntarily released a mental block that Häsmæl had subconsciously placed around his past trauma.

He was instantaneously transported back to the cave where he and his mother had fallen. He had only been with the Käbb Orc horde for five years when Hämayl convinced Häsmoday to send him down into the mines that supplied their stronghold with pig-iron. He was sent to live with the goblins that ran the mines while Hämayl continued his push to be seen and known as Jörcnir.

Towards the end of those years, he started to dream of a cave with a special shrine. It was calling him, beckoning him to find it. The dreams had started subtly and were vague enough for him to pass them off as dreams and not think about them afterwards. They steadily became more frequent and more intense. As their intensity grew, Häsmæl began being unable to ignore them and, even though his work in the mines was mindless, he could not concentrate. He was distracted and seemingly more lost.

The dreams became more intense and dire until he could not ignore them. He told his goblin friends, Claire, and Ulu, about them and they said that he needed to head up and into the peaks of the mountain. He was being called and it was important for him to go.

The next morning, in an act of defiance, he marched himself through the stronghold to take the mountain path that led into the peaks. There he found his birth mother, the Troll Queen Phæ. She was being chased by the wolves of Kodiik, the Father of Wolves. Häsmæl intercepted but their feral hunger was too much for him. He was driven back, along with Phæ, into a cave and in a desperate attempt to escape and protect his mother, they fell through the back of the cave and into the depths of the mountain.

Two of Kodiik's wolves fell with them and only Häsmæl survived the fall.

In the depths of the cave, he found a crude shrine. On it were runes, rudimentary runes along with ancient elvish. It looked like whoever built the shrine had done so as a means to create a new set of runes, breaking down the elvish into a new, simpler but coherent, language. The new set of runes were shorter, and more direct than the long, flowing and detailed elvish.

As he studied and sounded out the new runes, he recognized some of them as Claire and Ulu had taken to teaching him how to read. Kÿr, the only other one of the Käbb Orcs that did not buy into Hämayl's ego, had secretly taught Ulu some basics in reading. She worked with Claire to teach Häsmæl some of the fundamentals. He studied for hours or days, he was not sure, but he figured out one word that all of the shrine's mess of runes was pointing to - a name: Jörcnir.

Once the name was said, the shrine and the cavern came alive and he was shown a small forge that had been left with all of the materials that he needed to forge a weapon. The only thing that he did not have was some sort of liquid that he could use to quench the metal. Grabbing the two dead wolves after giving his mother a burial and an orcish farewell, he set to put what he had learned from the goblins to work.

He worked tirelessly, using the blood of the wolves to quench the iron he forged. Much of what the goblins produced for Häsmoday and his stronghold was what Häsmæl later learned was called pig-iron. A colloquial smithing name for impure iron ore that had been crudely smelted and then forged. The result was a strong metal, heavy and moldable, and strong against bare flesh.

The ore that he found at the shrine, was pure iron. His goblin friends and even Siph's mother, the stronghold's smithy, would have killed to get their hands on such a pure piece of iron ore. It was so heavily entangled in roots that he had to figure out a way to heat and forge the ore as it was within the mess of roots.

It took him what ended up to be the equivalent of a week to forge out and get the heat tempering correct. With little sleep and two full wolves, the size of tigers to eat, he finished his axe - a concept that he had thought of while exploring the various weapons that Kÿr had shown him. Lots of hammers and spikes, but nothing meant for cleaving. His finished product was a heavy head with a half-moon blade. The center was soft while the blade was hard - a trick that he had learned from Siph, who had learned from a dwarf that Häsmoday had captured. His beveling of the outer edge had been done crudely and roughly but it also needed to be as huge and heavy as it was to withstand the force of impact that he possessed.