Maldrik Varran: The Weight Of Iron That Remembers

The forge beneath Khazdun-Thul was quiet in the hour before dawn, when even the magma rivers seemed to hold their breath.

Maldrik Varran stood alone at the anvil, bare hands resting against warm steel. He did not flinch. Heat had never frightened him, only what the metal remembered.

He was Draalyn by blood, born in Zar’Korran’s crucible halls, where children learned to read flame before they learned to read words. His clan had been Firecallers once, smiths whose blades sang in battle and ceremony alike. But Maldrik had walked away from the clan trials, refusing to bind his soul into a weapon forged for another’s war.

The Council of Flames called him oath-shy. Coward, some whispered.

They were wrong.

Tonight, Maldrik forged not for war, but for reckoning.

Before him lay a shard of voidsteel salvaged from the lower Iron Below, a living alloy rumored to remember every strike it had ever endured. The metal pulsed faintly, like a second heart. When Maldrik touched it, images flared behind his eyes: broken cities, screaming furnaces, Mechanarch constructs collapsing under their own forgotten commands.

He staggered back, breath tight.

“Easy,” he murmured, voice rough. “I hear you.”

Few believed metal could listen.

Fewer still believed it could answer.

Maldrik stoked the forge, not with bellows, but with emotion. Rage made the flames lash and spit; sorrow cooled them into a steady, aching glow. He let neither rule him. Balance, he had learned, was the only language iron respected.

The hammer fell.

Each strike rang with more than sound. Memory bled from the voidsteel, visions of Draalyn warriors dying beneath collapsing forges, of Mechanarch overseers calculating losses without ever understanding grief. The anvil shuddered, runes flickering awake along its surface.

Maldrik gritted his teeth and kept working.

If the metal remembered pain, then he would teach it restraint.

Hours passed. Sweat steamed from his skin. His arms trembled, not from exhaustion, but from the weight of what he was shaping. The blade emerging beneath his hands was unlike any weapon he had seen, broad-backed, unadorned, its surface dark as cooled magma, shot through with faint, ember-red veins.

When he quenched it, he did not use water or oil.

He pressed the blade into the forge floor and let his own heartbeat guide the cooling.

The metal quieted.

A voice, deep, slow, almost thoughtful, echoed in his mind.

Not command.

Question.

Maldrik exhaled, a long, trembling breath.

“You don’t belong to a war,” he said softly. “And neither do I.”

The blade accepted this.

When dawn reached the forge halls, Maldrik carried the finished weapon into the light. He did not present it to the Council of Flames. He did not carve his clan mark into its spine. Instead, he wrapped it in ashcloth and turned toward the upper tunnels, toward a world cracking under the weight of forgotten choices.

Behind him, the forge rumbled once, approving.

Somewhere deep in Zar’Korran, ancient mechanisms shifted, as if something long-dormant had taken notice.

Maldrik Varran walked on, bearing a blade that remembered pain, and a resolve that refused to repeat it.