Five hundred potential years of conquest cut short when Bunulbilg saved the world. Bunulbilg mastered his time and moved it forward. Born to his clans their name lost to the Destoyers brutality, Bunulbilg as a child quickly stole his father’s hammer. Bent, dented, rusty, and a simple wooden and iron tool it only has to be used for one more year to be destroyed. Bunulbilg took it and began its repairs.
The clan was a wandering mountain dwarf clan, like most of their time. The mountain halls were filled with orc raiders. Goblins barricaded the entrances, and demons filled the dark corners with their lashing tentacles, gelatinous ooze, and gnashing teeth.
“The last thing that hammer made was this here shield.” Bunulbilg's father grumbled when he finally saw the child had taken it. The shield was a circle of dirt iron. Dirt iron was poor impure iron that had brown spots within it. The shield had been mercilessly beaten into shape by the hammer. Now it was beaten out of shape by use.
Beard greying his father was four hundred years old and had twenty-five dwarven children. Their mother had been killed in the forges when the clan had tried to hold their hall against the orcish invaders. The clan sought to find a new mountain to forge into a home. They headed to the wild eastern peaks that no mountain dwarves had been to yet.
A field of mountains as numerous as blades of grass in a field surrounded the clan the whole journey. Snow slicked paths, gravel-covered thin roads, and screeching cliffs made their highway east. The hammer was Bunulbilg's only work for their journey. When they weren’t fighting off mountain roc birds from carrying them off, poaching eggs from the same birds, or just walking, he worked. First, he bent it into shape.
Brittle as a stale cracker the hammer now straight threatened to break more easily now. Passing the center of the mountains where the great Rise mountain split into three great peaks was when Bunulbilg had finally gotten a good enough stick to replace the hammer hilt. A brother had been pushed off the mountain by a roc. A sister carried into a dark passageway by a massive gelatinous cube.
Eventually, they ran into another clan on a pilgrimage. Ironfists they called themselves. Cleaning armor, anvils, and wagon wheels announced them as they came into view on a parallel mountain pass. Joining the hundred strong clans Bunulbilg met an Ironfist dwarf named Roktoc.
“Roktoc pounds for Ironfist clan.” He had said. Then a week passed with no more words, and many strikes upon the anvil. Roktoc was the lucky owner of a forge wagon. A special creation of the Ironfists. A mobile forge on wheels. It was long and thin and bent in several places, allowing it to snake along the mountains. Bunulbilg turned ten and became known for his beard braiding among the dwarves. Roktoc braided Bunulbilg muscles into knots teaching him metalwork.
The hammer got a new head. Bunulbilg had convinced Roktoc to use precious wood to melt down the head and use the same metal to reforge a more pure and smooth hammerhead.
Bunulbilg showed his father the hammer. His father smiled and laughed when he saw the new things. Thanking Roktoc he laughed when he heard the hammerhead was the same metal he had mined from their old mountain halls a hundred years ago.
Bunulbilg's father died a week later defending the clans against a goblin raid. The raid had dropped out a section of the road with fake supports. Losing many dwarves his father had slain a few goblins before being tackled into the screeching cliff behind them. The wind carving the halls of stone was the only sound Bunulbilg had heard as he fell.
Roktoc took Bunulbilg under his wing. Assuming control of the clan Bunbelbilg’s older brother swore the clan’s subservience to the Ironfists. During a morning feast, and unitary celebrations, Bunulbilg and Roktoc have silently replaced the hammer’s hilt with new oak and leather gripped one. Bunulbilg and hide the tears in forge sweat.
Bunulbilg turned twenty when the hammer bent again. Roktoc had made him an apprentice officially, and the clan numbers dwindle. They had circled the eastern mountains but found only more monsters in every cave. Bunulbilg had made a new beard braid named the Rock strata braid. Flowing through the hair the knot made one’s beard look like lines of rock strata. This cheered many and distracted them from dead family and friends. Crying children calmed themselves as they tried to braid their own short hairs.
Bunulbilg finished straightening his hammer and had lengthened the grip so he could hold it in two hands. Now he swung it back over his head. The moons arc into the sky reflected in his own downward swing to pound the anvil. Reshaped armor from the dead now fit the younger replacement warriors. Swords chipped smoothed and thinned when heated. Silently he worked.
His elder brother said he felt a voice when he attended clan meetings in the forge wagon. Striking the anvil far behind the meeting Bunulbilg would silently listen to the clan elders discuss where to look next. Swearing by it Bunulbilg elder brother said he knew which direction to go based on the resonance of the strike after a suggestion was made for where to go.
So Bunulbilg became know with his first name, the long arm of the forge god. His elongated hammer inspired Roktoc to try new things and the clan became fascinated with the work of the two.
The clan found a place to stay eventually. It was a large circular lake amidst the mountains. An underwater cave only a few feet below the surface extended upwards then dived downward. No water filled the cave after the upturn allowing for a secret dwarven place to take hold. The clan fished all day then feasted all night in celebration, back home beneath the earth.
Work began in Bunulbilg's twenty-fifth year of life. Now the head apprentice to Roktoc he had quickly outpaced many of the older near hundred-year-old apprentices. His long forge hammer became the standard. The first iron he mined from the new undertake homes mines he used to create a long hammerhead with a hole in the center. This hole he slipped the old hammer into and melted the two together. The core still his father’s old iron the dwarf emblazoned his first symbol. Practicality was not as important anymore with safety around them. The forge of Roktoc slowly began to relearn and be taught the skills of liquid metal. To forge a mold and emblazon the armor and weapons they made with finery. Bunulbilg made a mold of a bent hammer in front of a dawning sun.
“It shows how at the end of something, you can start something new, the dawn is the end of the night and the beginning of the day,” Bunulbilg said. Roktoc had nodded to this and adapted the symbol to be the forges. The bent hammer forge, dawn forge, Roktok & Bunbelbilgs forge, were the names whispered by hopeful children who wanted to learn the ancient dwarven art of metalworking. There came a day when an orc suddenly stepped into the mountain cave entrances. Dripping wet he had been beheaded on sight by Ironfist guards on duty.
The elders murmured trouble to each other at another hoard finding them. They still held the meetings in the forge, its soothing tones and reverberations a pearl of wisdom they enjoyed. Bunulbilg long hammer with its new wide head and spiked trailing end cast shadows over the meetings.
Bunulbilg suggested they take back upon the art of stonemasons. Shaping the stone they could build walls in the center of the lake and use it as a moat around them. So the work began. To move stone through the water and pile it up on the lake bed. The lake was not deep nor shallow. They work hard on the slowly growing Dwarf population. Another wandering orc tribe found them and left without a skirmish.
The rocks had piled to the surface as stonemasons remembered, learned, and taught their work to all. Many were taken from the dawn forge to use their built bodies in cutting stone blocks and moving them along iron rails. Long rope made of treated plant fibers pulled these blocks from the cave mouth to the center of the lake. Huge pulleys and scaffoldings surrounded the lake to speed the work along. A dwarf rider said a hoard was a week away.
The meeting of panicked elders following that info was punctuated by Bunulbilg forging his first shield, on its face a dwarf climbed a cliff face. Skulls of goblins behind him.
Those who live in Potestatem know the rest of the story. The first battle of the Ironfists and Bunulbilg clan that held against the orc hoard. Bunulbilg hammer glowed with holy forge light none knew the source of throughout the month-long conflicts. Thousands of orcs drowned in the lake. Shoddy wooden boats smashed on the stone walls. Never once did the Orcs find the real entrance to the cave. They never thought to look. Bunulbilg became clan head after he recited the first dwarven cleric vows and sent up a sky-right spell to summon the
Dawn Mountain Range - Fotgral Kegbrand dwarves to their new fortress home.
Hundreds of years passed and his hammer was reforged many times. The bent hammer remaining the symbol of his people, his remembrance to his father, and his thankfulness to the kind Roktoc.
The Sentinels were his final task. Forging together a bond so strong, his hammer paled in comparison. Together, they saved us from calamity.
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