"Like Thunderer lights the night sky,

The Forgeson lights the MudComb.

Like Farseer gusting wrath from Nightside,

The Forgeson hammers scrap in the MudWomb.

Like Frigia scouring MudDens beneath her sleigh,

The Forgeson tempers weapons to fill a MudTomb.

-Forge of the Nords, as recited by Reverent Yore before the Third MudCull

The Nords rarely saw elderhood, thus orphans among them were common. Some became trekkers, some dedicated killers, the blundersome among them were adopted by the forgemen, those who stoked, cast, hammered and quenched; the men who formed and tempered the tools used by the bitter-breathed Nords to feed Hel’s teaming children back into her vile maw.

The whines of the hounds, the slather of their pants, the scraping of their clawing nails on the ancient MudMaze corridors, came to him and he quaked—he doubted.

How would he even survive the hounds to kill a Mudder?

Had he wasted his life already—spent his bitter breath feeding enemy hounds with his stringy carcass?

And then, with a crash, and a chorus of yelps, and a roar, and the savage song of a dozen tumbling rippers screeching, melting, and singing out balefully for a breath that did not peel away their lungs, all doubt, all decision, and all indecision was snatched from him by Thunderer’s mighty, doubtless hand.

The false floored corridor above his ancient forge—stoked now for a day with things ancient and vile that burned like the very breathe of Hel—that led over the concealed hatch of the access ladder, then over the forge to the stoking ladder on the other side where he had hung his weather hide, gave way under the force of the ten or more hurdling slather-jawed brutes, who all now cooked alive among the raging coals of The Forge of the Nords!

Above and behind, halted a tall Mudder, barely holding a beautiful skull crushing cruncher back from the smoldering abyss, his lead wrapped around leather armored wrists, beneath dangling Nord finger bones, his spectral black skull shinning in the forge light, pointed teeth of brightest white winking death at him down from the corridor above—but death sang both ways.

Singe hurled his heaviest broad knife, taking the Mudder in the groin and causing him to pitch forward, pulling the cruncher with him into the smoldering forge where four-limbed bodies yet danced horribly and yelped as their predatory faces did melt—touching Singe with a rare sense of joyful merriment.

Then streaked a feathered bolt of light into his belly, piercing his guts and causing a chill in his heart as heat wet his thighs.

Three savage beasts leapt out over the inferno from the ladder-top corridor as he reached for his hammers.

One struck his chest and pushed him back into the wall, while one grabbed his knee and yet another his left elbow.

The first chest-thumbing ripper was attached to his face, it’s double-hinged jaws clamping chin and skull—no, tearing away chin and helmet, leaving him shorn of face and head protection.

He squashed that creature with a hammer blow, brains dashing across the stark stone floor.

He smashed the back of the head that was clamped onto his left elbow with suck a vicious crunching blow that the head turned to mush and his arm broke clean under the blued steel maul face of the prized hammer that Quench Forgeson had bequeathed him.

The one at his knees tugged and bit, and he smashed it to quivering meat with one blow—arrows sprouting from his vest like pins from a matron’s sewing ball.

Three short Mudmutts, the men of wide head and deep brown hue, squatted before him knocking more arrows to their bows. He screamed his fury as he hurled the hammer that tore the wide head from its shoulders, and an arrow each sunk into his brain through the melancholy eyes that would thankfully never see the face of the fetid queen whose slave he was destined to be, dragged to Hel by the chords of his own curse, eighteen souls short of his own steeply set condition for admission into the somber Nightland that was his people’s brightest hope.