Whispers From the Veil
The Horseman Arc Continues...
The Hero of the Mountain: A Recounting of the Journal entry discovered by explorer and story teller Olin.
From the Journal of Halgrim Ironclad
I told the boys to run.
They didn’t argue after they saw what became of Oskaba... poor bastard barely had time to scream before the heat took him. Flesh turned to slag, armor dripping from bone. I lit the fuse myself. The blast sealed the way out, but it also locked me in with him.
The mountain’s heartbeat. The forge given form.
A blacksmith learns to live with heat. You measure it by feel, not by sight. You know when steel is ready by the tremor in your arm, the sting in your lungs. But what Prometheus carried… it was no forge-fire. It was the sun chained in flesh. Every breath burned my throat. The skin on my knuckles split and curled like old parchment.
I couldn’t kill him, not truly. I learned it didnt like sound, So I drove him back, step by step, hammer ringing against the stone like a war drum. When he finally spoke, it was not in rage, but in longing.
“I only wish to see the sun. To feel the air.”
He said it like a man dreaming of a lover’s touch. But the truth is, the world above would never survive him. Grass would blister. Rivers would boil. Flesh would char before shadow could save it.
“One day,” he told me, the ground trembling with his voice, “but not today.” Then he sank into the depths, swallowed by the same molten womb that birthed him.
I clawed my way back to the sky. My hands shook when I touched the wind. The sun felt cold.
Tomorrow, I’ll return to the vent. I’ve gathered him a basket — stonefruit, rainwater, a sprig of pine, and a shard of sky-iron. Offerings from a world he’ll never touch. Maybe it will be enough to keep him dreaming, and not rising.
— Halgrim Ironclad
Find out How this hero came to serve The First King Orien as he lead an onslaught against the non-human nations.
