In the deep places where flame once roared and laughter rose with the forge-smoke, silence had claimed dominion.
The Emberblight did more than char flesh.
It hollowed hearts. It stripped names from memory.
The Ironvein line—once honored among all clans—was stricken from the stone-ledgers, their runes scored over with marks of mourning. The great forges of Stonefang Stronghold lay cold, their anvil songs silenced beneath drifts of ash. Stonefang had endured siege and famine, quake and collapse. But never had it feared its own flame. Never had its halls sealed themselves against kin.
For thirty years, no hammer rang.
Yet stone does not burn.
And dwarves, though they crack, do not shatter.
It began again with three:
- Tharna Flamebound, who had watched her husband consumed in the Smoldering, returned to the upper forge-halls and sat vigil before the cold anvil—seven days without rising, as if daring the embers to wake her grief again.
- Borin Grayshield, once a battlerager, now a one-armed blacksmith, hefted a hammer for the first time since the seals were set. Each strike was not defiance but remembrance. Every spark was a promise to the fallen.
- Marrun Deepword, last apprentice to the Ironvein archivists, unearthed a half-burnt scroll preserved in pitch—a record of Thrain Emberwake.
It spoke of the frost sapphire buried in Frostvault Peak. Of phoenix tears mingled with obsidian dust. Of the day the Heart-Furnace shard was quenched.
“He lives,” Marrun whispered. “And he took the fire with him.”
The dwarves gathered again in the upper halls. Fear clung to them like soot. But the memory of Thrain’s journey—his burden, and the quiet ending of the Blight—kindled something older than fear.
Hope.
They spoke of Thrain’s climb to the shattered glacier spire. Of the godfire dimmed at last. Of the mountain’s long-held blaze snuffed to embers. If the fire could be bound, it could be beaten. If the Stronghold had survived the Blight, it could be reborn.
They called it The Rekindling.
This time, they did not kindle the forges with coal or oil. They laid frost-shards from the Frostvault across the hearths, etched in quenching runes. They reforged the central anvil with veins of sapphire and threads of ash-steel—a marriage of what was lost and what endured.
The forge-fires were relit not with the Heart-Furnace flame, but with flame carried from the sun—a sanctified blaze, untainted by the Emberblight.
On the first morning of the new year, the hammer rang again.
Not to forge weapons of war.
Not to awaken old curses.
But to build.
Stonefang Stronghold is not what it was. It is something stronger. A bastion where flame and frost are kept in balance. The forge-priests now bear twin flasks—one filled with burning coals, the other with glacial water from the Frostvault.
Every tool is cleansed in both before the work begins. Every blade bears the rune of Thrain. The sealed halls remain, a memorial carved in cooled stone. They say the fire-spirits still whisper there, though more softly than before.
The Ironvein name is no longer spoken in shame. It is spoken in reverence. A reminder that fire may betray. But stone remembers. And dwarves rebuild.
They took a new name for their home—Andarag.
In the common tongue, it meant the oaken—for oak grew stubborn and strong along the mountain’s skirts and in the deep glens of Silvergrove Forest. To the elves, the oak was a living emblem of endurance. But in the oldest dwarven speech, the word had once meant simply strength.
It was a name chosen not to erase what had come before, but to root their rebirth in something both familiar and unbroken.
Where Stonefang spoke of sharp defiance, Andarag spoke of patient resilience—the quiet power to grow again after fire.
So they carved it across the lintel of the great gates, binding stone and wood, memory and promise, into one:
"The forge may change— But the craft remains."
—Inscription over the new gates of Andarag Stronghold