I was awoken the next morning at dawn by one of Bekhi's brothers. I was expecting to be taken to the barn for chores, but instead, Dak met me by the front door.
"Good morning, Kvalinn. I've arranged for you to use the local forge today. So go grab whatever you were writing yesterday and get ready to fill all the requests we made. And remember Bekhi's warning. No making anything that's not a weapon! Humbart doesn't need any more help in the kitchen of The Halfling's Haven."
For a minute, I wondered how he had arranged to use the town smith when it was still pre-dawn, but then I remembered that he had sent one of his kids on an errand yesterday after dinner and that's probably when he sent the message. I went back upstairs to get my notes of everyone's requests. Each member of the family seemed to want a different weapon with a different rune so it was going to be a long day.
Just as I was putting on the several coats that were being lent to me, the door burst open with a bang that echoed through the house. A middle aged dwarf with an earnest expression leaned in the door to pass on a message.
"Thredak! We've got a pack of snow wraiths coming up the mountain! They'll reach the town in less than an hour." He then ran off to the next house to deliver the warning. The rest of the house started packing and making preparations as if this had happened before, while I was left clueless.
"What's going on? What's a snow wraith?" I asked, hoping that anyone would answer my question. Dak answered while strapping on his armor.
"A snow wraith is a human who died from cold in an area with too much magic. Their one driving desire is to make everything else die the same way they did, and their touch causes severe frostbite. Now hurry, they can only be killed by a weapon with a powerful fire rune and guess who needs to make one for us."
"Wait, where is everyone else going?" The rest of the family was preparing for the attack as well, the men, and some of the women, were grabbing weapons and armor, while Mubrim and her younger children were getting food and medical supplies.
"They're going to be sheltering at The Halfling's Haven. It's the town's defense point for when monsters and humans attack. Now hurry! You'll need to make a rune of fire before the snow wraiths get here."
I was dragged out of the house before I had put on half the coats provided, Dak said I'd be warm enough in front of the forge fire. Outside it felt like it was at least twenty degrees below, possibly more. I wondered if the excessive cold had anything to do with the snow wraiths rising, but I soon had to use all my attention to get through the deep snow. Although it probably was only deep to a dwarf, and since I was only three and a half feet tall, a foot of snow felt deep.
Dak burst into the town's blacksmith shop without even knocking. "Grildem!" He shouted. "If you haven't heard by now, there's snow wraiths on the horizon! They'll be here in less than an hour!"
There was a loud banging sound as something fell from inside the living area in the back of the shop. Grildem emerged with a bleary look in his eyes from lack of sleep.
"Are you sure, Dak? Or are you just trying to get me to help the kid who used up my entire stock of steel last time he was here." Dak shook his head.
"Almut brought the warning only a few minutes ago to my house and since you are near the center of town you'd be the last to be alerted. Show me the best weapon you've got, Kvalinn will add the fire rune to it, and maybe this year we'll get through the winter without losing anyone to those worthless wraiths."
Seeing the serious look in Dak's eyes, Grildem repeated the warning to those inside the house before smashing the ice in the water bucket used to quench the blades and splashing it in his face to wake up. Now fully aware of his surroundings, Grildem started looking over the weapons he had in stock to sell. Eventually he came to a reluctant decision.
"This is the best I've got. Made by my father, who was once part of the Weapon Clan before coming up here and leavin' all that behind. It's never really been for sale but I'd say the situation calls for this." Turning to me, he glared with all the ferocity of an Elder. "If you break this, kid, I'm gonna crack your head open with it."
From behind the counter, Grildem almost reverently retrieved a long handled warhammer. After more than a decade behind the forge, I could tell that this was an extremely well made weapon. Well beyond what I could make, even with my rune of forging.
I respectfully took the weapon from Grildem. "Don't worry, I'll just be adding a rune of fire to it, and that shouldn't damage it. Probably."
Grildem was about to launch into an angry tirade when a gust of wind shook the building, just barely audible above the wind was the wailing of the snow wraiths. I could feel goosebumps crawling up my skin from their eerie cries of lonely despair. Once it died down, Grildem shook his head and began shoveling charcoal and pumping the bellows.
"Dak, Kvalinn and I have this. Get to The Halfling's Haven, the town needs you." Grildem said urgently with his back to Dak. However, Dak just shook his head.
"My son Rarik is already there, and has both mine and the town's trust. He can handle the defense of the town, but if the snow wraiths kill you two before the weapon is ready then it will be a loss for Vesturhildrun . I'm staying here to guard the door until the hammer is ready."
"Alright, give my greetings to the ancestors." Grildem shrugged as he worked the bellows. Evidently that saying was similar to 'it's your funeral' from my world. Realizing how deadly the situation was, I frantically recalled all of Elder Thrikrondromm's lessons on the rune of fire.
Unfortunately, none of the necessary ingredients were available on the surface of the world, or at least not in this shop, so I would have to use my own magic to forge the rune. Also, the forge song to make a rune of fire was at least a half hour long, and from the cries of the snow wraiths, they would get here sooner than that, so I'd have to rush the forge song. It was among the top things Elder Thrikrondromm had warned me against in his lessons, but it was a matter of survival that I finished before the snow wraiths killed us.
"Is the fire hot enough, Kvalinn?" Dak's voice took me out of my thoughts. Looking at the color of the fire, and feeling the heat on my skin, I nodded. It was just barely hot enough for the rune magic.
"I could use another few hundred degrees but we're out of time." As if to emphasize my point, another gust of wind carried the cries of the snow wraiths to us. "Just keep it as close to that temperature as possible, and don't interrupt the forge song. The building might blow up if you do." I was unfortunately being literal about blowing up the building. If the forge song was interrupted at any point, all the magic that would have gone into the weapon would instead go haywire and destroy anything nearby. That was why Elder Thrikrondromm's desk in the rune forge was so sturdy, so that he could take cover if I messed up.
Once I could see that both Dak and Grildem understood my warning, I took up my hammer and the warhammer I'd be working on, and began singing the forge song. Normally the pacing of a forge song was slow and ceremonious, but there was no time for that right now, so I had to cut the timing in half. So instead of the song time being one, two, three, four, clang, I had to speed it up to one, two, three, clang. I just hoped I'd survive this.
As I struck the final blow, and sang the final note, a pain unlike I had ever felt in this life radiated from the rune of forging. It was as if I had stuck my hand into a bucket of dry ice, with spikes of pain encapsulating my entire hand instead just the rune lines. It was so painful, that my voice cracked as I yelled in pure agony.
"Kvalinn!" Dak rushed from where he had been guarding the door to check on me. "Kvalinn! Are you ok? What happened?"
"N-never rush a f-forge song." I croaked out, my throat evidently hadn't recovered from the shout. "Help me up. I need to make sure the rune was successfully applied."
Dak and Grildem supported me as I looked over the hammer. Fortunately for our continued survival, a rune of fire was glowing on the head of the warhammer.
"Well done, Kvalinn. I knew you could do it. Now I'll take care of those pesky snow wraiths." Dak reached out to grab the hammer, but the instant his hand closed around the handle, he was forced to release it.
"Hot! Hot! Hot!" Dak yelled as he jumped around in pain. He then started blowing on his hand like someone who just touched a hot stove, before dunking it in the water used to quench blades. Grildem furiously glared at me.
"Great. You yell to attract the snow wraiths attention, and now we can't use my father's hammer. I'd kill you myself but I want you to experience death by snow wraiths. It's supposed to be excruciating." Punctuating his dour comments, a staccato of fists pounding against the door was heard, there was also a cacophony of wails from the snow wraiths as they tried getting inside to kill us.
"As much as I hate to say it, Grildem is right." Dak said, gingerly taking his hand out of the freezing water, and grasping his regular hammer. "I'll see you both in the halls of the ancestors."
The pain from the rune of forging was now beginning to subside a little, but it was quickly replaced by the pain from the rune of wrath on my other hand. There must have been a lot of snow wraiths outside to cause this much pain. Looking at the warhammer, I knew that I had to wield my failed creation. It was still a rune of fire that could kill the wraiths. But after seeing Dak's reaction to touching the handle, I was more than a little hesitant to use the weapon.
"Kvalinn!" Over the wails of the snow wraiths and the howls of the wind, I heard a familiar cry from Bekhi. She sounded panicked and exhausted, even more so than when she was on the receiving end of one of Elder Dworhick's especially intense combat lessons.
"Bekhi!" Instinctively, without giving it a single thought. I grabbed the warhammer and burst through the door, where I was met with the sight of a macabre sea of undead, made only worse by the fact that I was much shorter than the wraiths.
It was a scene straight out of a zombie apocalypse movie, there had to be well over a hundred snow wraiths packing the streets of the town. Their skin was blue and black from the cold, their eyes were merely frozen ice cubes, and each of them had terrified and pained expressions eternally frozen on their faces.
"For the ancestors!" I hollered out a warcry I had learned from Elder Dworhick in his lessons, and rushed to attack the snow wraiths. The long handled warhammer burned in my hands as it tore through the ranks of the undead, and both my rune of wrath, and the rune of protection sent unceasing pain through my hand and back. But at least they were unable to kill me as I was killing them.
Every blow from the hammer caused a snow wraith to vanish in a flash of fire, like a cobweb held up to a lighter. Evidently this rune was overcharged and had nitro in the gas tank, I just hoped it didn't run out of gas before ending the menace. But I didn't have time to worry, the rune of wrath was doing its usual trick and attracting the monster to me, the rune of wrath was burning in each of their eyes as they tried to kill me with shuffling steps and spectral sounds.
When the last snow wraith went up in a flash of fire, the rune of wrath stopped burning on my hand, and all the pain and adrenaline rush came crashing down on me like a freight train. "Oh, shit." I collapsed onto my knees, releasing the hammer into the snow, then fell flat on my face and slipped into unconsciousness.
"He's waking up! Dad, get over here! Kvalinn's waking up!" I heard Bekhi's loud voice echo in my ears, but it sounded distant, as if it was coming through pillows. Eventually I opened my eyes and tried to move.
"Whoa, easy there. There weren't enough bandages to wrap around you, so the poultices are resting on your back. Bekhi, go help your mother take care of Rarik." I felt Dak's hand on my shoulder, keeping me still. Looking around, I realized that I was face down on a table in The Halfling's Haven. Several other people were on other tables in the room, all being tended to for frostbite after having been touched by the snow wraiths.
"Wh-what happened?" I asked weakly. The last thing I remembered was collapsing in a heap after killing the snow wraiths.
"After you took out the snow wraiths and collapsed, Bekhi broke out of the defense line and dragged you inside. I tell you, when the physicians saw the burns on your body, they went paler than snow. It took them several hours to make poultices powerful enough to help you. But thanks to their work, I'm pretty sure you'll live without permanent injuries."
I flexed my hands instinctively, hoping that they were still working. I let out a strained sigh of relief when the jolts of pain showed me that I still had the use of my hands and all my fingers were there. It then struck me that in order to treat the burns on my hands, they would have needed to take off my gloves and expose my runes!
"H-how bad is it?" I mentally hoped that they weren't just bandaging me up before riding me out of town on a rail. Dak chuckled wryly.
"The insides of your hands are pretty well toasted thanks to handling that hammer, which, by the way, no one else is able to pick up due to the heat it's giving off. On the back of your right hand, where you have that rune of forging, it has severe ice burn that will hurt for a while. On the back of your left hand, the one with the forbidden rune, there was significant burns that will sting for a couple weeks, but won't kill you. The rune of protection on your back had the worst damage, somehow it had ice burn, frostbite, and regular burns surrounding the rune lines. Some of the nastiest burns I've ever seen, but thanks to the physicians hard work, and Bekhi's care, you should make a full recovery."
After taking a sip from his tankard, Dak set it aside and nodded respectfully at me. "As the Thane of Vesturhildrun, I thank you for defending my town. It was thanks to your efforts and sacrifice that we were able to survive today without a single loss of life."
The news that Dak, the person who always acted in the least formal way imaginable whenever possible, and who least embodied authority and responsibility, was actually a Thane, nearly knocked me out cold again.
In dwarven culture, the Thanes were either town guardians appointed by the king, or powerful dwarves who worked directly for the king of the mountain. It was the closest thing we had to nobility, and it wasn't hereditary, despite the government being a monarchy. So somehow, Dak had impressed the town Elders and the King enough to get appointed to be the Thane of Vesturhildrun.
Dak must have sensed what I was thinking, since the surprise was probably fully on display on my face, and he grinned in amusement. "You aren't the first person to not believe that I'm the Thane, it's just that I hate the stuffy rules and being called 'Thane Thredak' makes my head hurt, so I just go by Dak, and people call me the town's number one in matches and assemblies. But enough about me, those glowing runes on your body answer a lot of unspoken questions I had about you. I'm glad Bekhi has you as a friend."
"So, you aren't going to throw me out of the mountain for having magic power?" I recalled all the warnings that my father had given me over the years that I should never reveal to anyone my runes. Dak, however, just grinned and winked at me.
"I won't tell if you won't." The grin then vanished, and his face took on a more serious expression. "From Bekhi's letters, and what I just saw today, you have an extremely powerful gift. Letting another mountain or the human kingdoms acquire you for themselves just because the gods messed up would be stupid, so I'm going to do my best to tie you to this mountain."
The relief over the fact that I wasn't going to be exiled from the mountain for having runes on my body washed over me, and before I knew it, I had passed out again on the table.
It wasn't until the next morning that I woke up again. By that point, I was the only one who hadn't recovered enough to be taken from the tavern, so I woke to see the dining room completely empty.
"Hello?" I tried getting up from the table to see the room better, but was hit by several waves of pain from my back. Judging from the sensation, the burned and damaged skin around the rune of protection was still working on healing itself, and since the rune covered most of my back, there was a lot of skin to heal.
"Kvalinn!" Bekhi scrambled up from the cot she had been sleeping in nearby. "Get back down or you'll move the poultices!"
I gladly followed her instructions, and let my head fall back onto the waiting pillow. I could feel Bekhi moving any of the poultices that had shifted from their position on my back.
"Whatever's going on with your back is really weird." Bekhi said as she was applying fresh ointments and herbal medicines. "One part of your back looks like you leaned on a hot poker, while another part looks like you got touched by a snow wraith and got frostbite. At least the burns on your hands are easy to deal with."
Since I was face down on a pillow I couldn't see anything, but I felt Bekhi begin to tenderly change the dressings on my hands. "Dad says you went through a lot of pain to make and use that weapon. I tried to use it myself, but it was like trying to hold hot iron." Bekhi gently held the outside of my fingers, the only place on my hands that wasn't sore. "I'm glad you're alright, Kvalinn. When I heard you yell from the smithy, I thought something had gone wrong with the rune crafting and you had died horribly, like Elder Thrikrondromm is always warning you about. So seeing you burst out heroically from the smithy, wielding a burning warhammer, it was a relief to know that you were still alive. And then watching you take down all the snow wraiths, it was like the goblin attack all over again." Bekhi paused in silence, after knowing her all this time, I knew she had a thoughtful look on her face.
I then felt an odd pressure on the top of my head that felt suspiciously like a kiss. "I'm really, really, glad you are safe, Kvalinn. I don't want to ever lose my best friend."
Being completely unsure how to respond to that, I contemplated faking being asleep for a second, before deciding to lighten the mood with a joke. "I'm not going anywhere, Bekhi. At least not while your mother has good food waiting for me. I'll definitely be back here next year to fill out all the orders I got from your family. Thanks to the snow wraiths I don't think I'll be making anything for a while."
I grumbled for a while longer about the hammer and the snow wraiths putting me out of commission. But my grumbling was mostly to cover my embarrassment. Leaning up a little to steal a glance at Bekhi, I realized that she was now a fourteen year old girl. Her chestnut braid was a lot longer, and the face that had once been cute and childish, was forming into the beautiful face of a woman. She was also wearing a dress, something she had never done underneath the mountain since she preferred to wear something easy to fight in, and it made her look even more beautiful. Somehow without me noticing, Bekhi and I were both growing up.
Eventually my tirade against the snow wraiths came to an end when Dak entered the room. "Good morning, Kvalinn. I heard from Humbart that you're finally awake, and since he wants his table back we're here to take you home."
"Here we go. Slowly, slowly, you've got this, Kvalinn." Bekhi and Dak gently guided me up from the table, and with an arm over each shoulder, they supported me as we walked out.
Outside in the square, I saw the hammer with the rune of fire was still sitting in the middle of the town square. Although a ring of rocks was now surrounding it.
"What's the hammer still doing out, Dak?" I asked. "I thought Grildem would have put it back under his counter by now."
"He would have, if he could touch it that is. So far you are the only one who's been able to handle it for more than a few seconds. And since we don't have any gloves made of hellhound leather that can resist the heat, we're just waiting on the magic in the rune to run out."
"Grildem's pretty mad about his father's hammer just sitting in the mud, but what can you do." Bekhi shrugged while looking enviously at the hammer. "Hey, Kvalinn, I don't suppose you can make me a hammer like that, could you?"
"Maybe, I'll ask my father to teach me how to make something similar. Although I first need to recover from the burns on my hands. Since I can't hold a hammer until then, I'll be stuck pumping bellows for a while."
When we made it to the house, Mubrim had breakfast waiting for me, and since I couldn't hold utensils or my mug, Bekhi fed me every bite.
For the rest of the day, Bekhi helped me pick stuff up, changed the bandages and dressing on the burns, and took care of me. It was very pleasant, if a little embarrassing, to have such a cute girl take care of me. But Dak said that I'd earned it after saving the town. So I just let myself enjoy it. After all, it's not like I'd get the chance again.
On the final night of our stay before we had to go home, we all went to The Halfling's Haven to celebrate the defeat of the snow wraiths.
"Here's to the town's number one!" Several tankards were raised when Dak was spotted entering the tavern. "And here's to the man of the hour, Kvalinn!" I wasn't expecting to get called out so soon after entering, so I just nodded stiffly.
"Since you were the only one watching Kvalinn, Dak. Tell us what happened in the smithy while we were fending off the snow wraiths." One of the Elders prompted Dak to tell the story, apparently while I had been in recovery, the rest of the town had been assessing collateral damage from the attack and hadn't had a chance to hear anything but gossip.
"The story! Tell the story!" Half the hall started banging their mugs on the table and stamping their feet as they called for the tale to be told. Dak got them to calm down by stepping on a bench and started telling the story of me crafting the rune.
I was expecting it to be a boring story, since me singing a song and swinging a hammer doesn't sound that exciting. But I wasn't counting on the power of strong dwarven beer, within minutes, the mundane task of hammering out a rune had been transformed to me bending the gods power with my will, and seizing their power as my own for the sake of the town. After enduring the almighty wrath of the gods for my impertinence, I had apparently used the formidable fire hammer to single handedly kill the snow wraiths in just a dozen blows.
The tale was picked up and retold by the Elders of the town, alongside stories of their own bravery of course, and comparisons to their youthful exploits were abundant in the halls. But as the story was retold over and over, I seemed to grow more heroic with each retelling. I just hoped that the story didn't make it back home. Otherwise I'd be in for the scolding of several lifetimes from the Elders, and from my father.
Despite the excessive praise from everyone for what I saw as just ensuring my own survival, I enjoyed the night of celebration. The food was excellent, the beer was flowing like a river on Dak's tab, and Bekhi stayed by my side the entire night. I sincerely hoped that I'd get to return here next year.