Daren Thalgrin: The Tempered Wound
He was not born of stone, but the stone remembered him.
Daren Thalgrin first felt it beneath his palms when he was twelve years old, the hum beneath the Iron Below. Not the clang of forge-hammers or the rolling thunder of magma rivers through Zar’Korran’s underveins, but something older. Slower. A pulse that did not belong to fire.
The elders called it resonance.
The priests of the Tempered Creed called it destiny.
Daren called it a question.
He grew in the magma-lit corridors of Varruk Deepfire, where the Ever-Smelt burned without pause and the Council of Flames judged worth by steel. His clan, Embervein Thalgrin, were not known for softness. They forged voidsteel. They shaped magma engines. They believed emotion was a contaminant unless properly tempered.
But Daren felt too much.
When he touched raw ore, he sensed memory in it. When he stood upon cooling lava, he heard faint whispers, like distant hammers striking not metal, but bone.
On the day of his Ember Trial, when he was to carve his clan mark into a heated ingot, the forgefire flared silver instead of gold.
The ingot did not melt.
It rang.
The sound rippled outward through the forge-cathedral. Tools vibrated. Molten rivers shivered. A Mechanarch sentinel turned its head toward him and held still, as if listening.
The Council of Flames fell silent.
Daren placed his hand upon the metal again.
This time he saw it.
A shard not of Zar’Korran, but of Vael’Thera, the Titan Grave-Shard. A vision of Khor’Mhalok rising from skeletal plains, bone-citadels carved from the ribs of Theramos the Hungering Maw. He saw the Maw Bastion built inside a titan’s ribcage. He heard the Choir of Hollow Voices singing of battles that never ended.
And beneath it all, another pulse.
Not magma.
Not forge.
Titan heart.
He gasped and stumbled back.
The elders branded the omen heretical.
The Firepriests whispered that Titan resonance was forbidden, an echo of the Hollow Verge.
But the Mechanarch sentinel did something unprecedented.
It knelt.
Three days later, Daren left Zar’Korran with a single molten-rune hammer and the hum still lodged in his bones.
The journey to Vael’Thera was long and ash-choked. Skycaravels avoided the Grave-Shard’s drifting bone storms, and tether-wyrms would not land near its ridges. So Daren crossed the Drifthollows by fractured gate-paths and silent pilgrim ships.
The first time he saw Khor’Mhalok, it stole the breath from his chest.
The city rose from skeletal dunes like a cathedral grown from death. Rib-arches formed its gates. Bone-sculptors carved shifting monuments that seemed to breathe. The Maw Bastion loomed inside the vast curve of Theramos’ ribcage, its shadow stretching across the White Dune Archives.
He felt the pulse immediately.
Stronger here.
Bone-echo magic coiled in the air, faint whispers carried in ash-wind.
The Ossuary Triune received him not with welcome, but suspicion.
“Zar’Korran sends a forgeblood into Titan soil?” rasped Mortarch Sereth of the Ghulvorn Vigil.
“I was not sent,” Daren replied.
“You were called?”
He nodded.
They brought him to the Choir of Hollow Voices.
The cavern walls hummed with ancient battles. Echoes of warriors long dead murmured warnings and triumphs alike. Hollowforged Sentinels patrolled the memory-corridors, their metal frames etched with bone-runes.
Daren pressed his hand to the cavern wall.
The pulse aligned with his heartbeat.
The stone shifted.
A seam opened in the bone floor.
And beneath Khor’Mhalok, deeper than any ossuary, a chamber long sealed revealed itself.
In its center lay a fragment of Theramos’ heart.
Not flesh.
Not fully bone.
Something crystallized between ruin and memory.
It beat.
Slow.
Impossible.
The Maw Devout cult had been right about one thing.
The Titan was not entirely dead.
But it was not awakening in hunger.
It was… unfinished.
Daren stepped forward.
The Ossuary Triune shouted warnings.
The Hollowforged raised their weapons.
But he felt no rage in the pulse.
Only pain.
The heart-fragment flared when he lifted his hammer.
The molten runes along its head glowed not red, but silver.
He struck the Titan heart once.
The sound was not a crack.
It was a chord.
Resonance cascaded through Khor’Mhalok. Bone ridges vibrated. Echo storms dissipated. The skeletal monuments shifted shape, no longer twisted in agony but rising in steadier arcs.
The Choir fell silent.
For the first time in centuries.
The fragment did not shatter.
It tempered.
Daren fell to his knees.
He understood then.
The Thalgrin myth had spoken truth: “Stone remembers the steady.”
But Titans remembered too.
And what they remembered was not only hunger.
It was fracture.
He did not come to slay a god.
He came to finish one.
In the months that followed, Daren remained in Khor’Mhalok.
He worked beside bone-sculptors, teaching them molten-runic tempering.
He walked the rib ridges with Ghulvorn Vigil Orders, mapping pulse-lines not to predict collapse, but to heal it.
He forged anchors of voidsteel and Titanbone fused together, embedding them where fractures spread.
Some called him heretic.
Some called him bridge.
When the Maw Devout rose to seize the heart-fragment, claiming resurrection, Daren did not meet them with fire.
He met them with resonance.
He struck the fragment again.
And every cultist felt the Titan’s memory.
Not of conquest.
But of being torn apart mid-thought.
Most dropped their blades.
A few fled into ash.
The fragment’s pulse steadied.
Not alive.
Not dead.
Held.
Balanced.
Years later, when shard diplomats spoke of Vael’Thera, they no longer called it solely the Grave-Shard.
They began to whisper another name.
The Tempered Wound.
And in Zar’Korran, deep beneath magma rivers, the Ever-Smelt burned silver for three days without explanation.
Some say a Mechanarch core recalibrated.
Others say the Iron Below adjusted its rhythm.
But the elders of Embervein Thalgrin carved a new clan mark into their forge walls.
Not flame.
Not hammer.
A heart split, but ringing true.
And somewhere beneath Khor’Mhalok, the Titan fragment beat,
Not in hunger.
In harmony.
