Brumdar Ironvow

Brumdar was born into Clan Ironvow, one of the clans charged with guarding the coastal cliffs of Edrenmor’s eastern mountains, overlooking the Grey Sea. The clans never knelt to the Troth; they swore something older: the Iron Vow, sworn at the very dawn of the Age of the Caedrahls to the first king of that line — an oath binding the clans to grant safe passage to any who crossed the dwarven mountains in peace or under a trading seal.

He was a hundred and ten years old when the Sundering came, and still the commander of one of the Range Companies assigned to the Saltgate — the lowest of the cliff gate-holds. Others of his generation had climbed higher or gone home to their families. Brumdar had done neither; the soldier’s life suited him.

The conflict did not stay in the lowlands of Edrenmor for long. Word of House Veranthas’s fall had barely finished traveling before House Haldreth turned on itself — some of its lords holding on to the Troth, others reaching for what had been offered to them in the shadows. The surviving Haldreth loyalists fled east towards the dwarven mountains, more precisely the Saltgate: soldiers, a straggle of common folk who had attached themselves to anyone still willing to fight, and a Haldreth heir — Edrinn Haldreth, young, and idealistic enough to believe the house could still be saved if he could only get his people somewhere safe. He carried House Haldreth’s piece of the Shattered Crown.

They did not reach the gate. Ten miles short of it, in the coastal cliffs, the pursuers caught them, and the retreat became a rearguard action — Haldreth soldiers wheeling to buy time for the heir and the common folk to reach the Saltgate, then Edrinn himself and his personal guard, the line already breaking when Brumdar brought his Range Company down to reinforce them.

Dwarves and the last of Haldreth’s loyal soldiers held the line together for a full day and a night — long enough for the column’s common folk to cross into the pass, reach the gate, and come through to safety. Of the force that had come to kill them, not one saw the dawn of the next day. Edrinn and his men lay dead with them. Of Brumdar’s own twenty, only he survived.

The common folk had carried word to the Saltgate, and every hand that could be spared formed a relief force; it reached the pass at first light, too late for the fighting. They helped Brumdar bury the dead — Dwarf and Haldreth laid down side by side. Brumdar saw that the heir had died clutching something — an heirloom of some kind, plainly worth dying for. He took it from the young lord’s lifeless hand and laid it in the grave with him.

Standing over the grave, he understood he could not go back to his clan. The company was gone. The pass itself would hold without him — another Range Company would come to keep it. He left his post that day.

The war paint he took up at the grave is a vow, a promise made to the dead that he will find the ones responsible for their death.

He went down into the lowlands of Edrenmor — the Everlit Realm — in search of answers, in search of revenge.

Twenty-five years on, he hunts those who sent the force that killed his company.