The First Runesmith

By: Nakis

As the histories show, the Khazad were created to shape the world and this was their task. To shape the world is not as it sounds, for humans say they shape the land as they till the fields and plant shrubberies. The elves say they shape the land as they form the forest and work with the trees to live. All races claim to "shape the land", but to the Khazad, we were built differently in that our work was not to simply move the trees and dirt, but to place the dirt and create the trees themselves.

Shaping what was made, however, takes more than raising a hammer and striking with intent. To raise the mountains and dig the oceans, to give form to all, requires thought beyond the sparks of the hammer strike, and understanding of how it all connects within the fabric of reality. Of the Khazad, some were more proficient than others with their task, and while the craftsman toiled endlessly, there arose some whose work was an artform.

These craftsman had the knowledge of the underpinnings of creation, that where you or I might move a hillock, they wove the spines of mountains and smoothed the beaches with the skill of a weaver making a tapestry. With skill, wisdom, and no small amount of work spanning decades, these Khazad guided our ancestors' work to make this world we inhabit so beautiful and thoughtfully placed, placing power within creation itself.

Many think that we hold no magic skill, but this is a presumption based on a misunderstanding of the timeline of history. The Khazad were formed before magic, made to work without magic. To ask us to cast a spell would be as to ask a farmer to make an apple or orange. The farmer tills the fields, plants the seeds, and cares for tree and then you will have decades of apples but the farmer themselves do not create the apple. This is an important distinction.

The gods put us to rest, as if in storage, when we were first made from stone, as you know, and it was the god’s game of tossing stones to the ground that woke us from rest. When the debates raged and the votes were cast, some of our most knowledgeable chose to return to rest, and even as the Khazad explored and mingled amongst the elves, others yet returned to the earth and mountains to rest. Perhaps those who most closely reflected the will of the gods questioned leaving the caverns in the first place, or maybe they were simply desiring to rest after their monumental efforts to reshape the world.

As the curse of flesh stripped us of our stone bodies, the connection that we shared with the will and power of the gods also left. In time this would be felt most keenly, and so there were those who sought out ways to rekindle this power; and also in time the Khazad would lose one or two from their holds, in search of long-lost knowledge. Some hoped that they would find lost relics that still bore a connection to the divine, and yet others hoped to find some other method to regain their access to the fabric of the world.

It was Hagrin Stonebrow of Clan Shovelfist who made progress where many others failed. While scouting new tunnels revealed by a cooled magma overflow vent for new mines for his clan, Hagrin dug into a hollow room. The walls and floors were smooth, and a simple chair and table formed from the same stone the walls were made from. In his description the chair and table were a part of the floor itself, as if someone had brought the floor up and made a table and chair from it. Setting his gear down, the Khazad inspected every element to the room and found nothing else that was interesting. Everything was stone, it was just finely shaped and without decoration.

Laying down to rest, Hagrin’s breathing began to slow and his mind quieted, and at the cusp of sleep he heard something just out of his hearing. Rather, not a sound, but a feeling of the absence of sound. Imagine a bear roaring at you; normally you’d feel the sound in your beard just as well as you can hear it. Hagrin said it was like hearing the bear’s roar but not feeling it. There was something not quite right with it. Laying still again, Hagrin heard it again. The sound only ever happened on the verge of sleep, never the same sound, and he never could quite make out what this whisper in the darkness was saying.

Hagrin left the room the next day and returned to his kin to report the strangeness. No one could ever replicate it, and so they wrote it off as a tired scout having too few brews to stay steady. Over the next few years he would return to the chamber to try and hear the voices but again and again he failed to properly find the source of the voices in the dark. This would change when Hagrin finally gave up.

Even Khazad mines are dangerous, if simply less so than those of other mortal or immortal races. The earth does not care how many buttresses you installed, helmets you are wearing, or even if the inspection said the mine was perfectly safe. If the cave-in is more determined than you were when shoring up the ceiling, then the cave-in is going to win. The Shovelfist clan lost several good Khazard in the accident, one of which had caught Hagrin’s eye, and so the loss weighed heavy on his beard.

Finding his way into the caves for quiet solace, with a few too many travel kegs for a trip but not quite enough for a full journey, the troubled Khazad’s feet found their way to the chamber once more. Yielding himself to his sorrows and to the hangover that tomorrow would bring, he drank his sorrows and most of the beer until he joined the empty kegs on the floor for a quick nap.

Hagrin reported his dreams were haunted by an almost memory-like state, where he saw and felt the world being crafted by him. The rising of mountains, the furrowing of seas, great forests growing as the seasons themselves were born, and then he awoke. Over the next few weeks, Hagrin repeated the process, throwing himself to the work to cover his grief, and slowly learned that alcohol wasn’t really needed, it was mainly the sleeping bit that was important.

The last vision Hagrin witnessed was himself slowly walking through the earth itself, filled with a deep, deep sadness that reflected his own. He felt anger, bitterness, worry, sorrow, and great loss. The hands in his dream fashioned the room he was in, and then he sat in the chair and felt himself dissolve into the stone around him.

We believe this "memory" belonged to one of the loyal Khazad who learned that Durgarth had slain the messenger of the gods, and that they were cursed by the gods themselves for this crime. His unstable emotional state caused him to unmake himself, a great reversing of the creation he had gifted the world, and that Hagrin’s tears allowed a connection to the echoes in the chamber.

It is here that the Runesmiths arose, in deep sorrow and loss that was reflected through the ages. For the next year or so, the first Runesmith set up camp near this cavern and worked to find ways to connect to the echoes, finding that his emotional state often mirrored that of the memories he experienced. Through deeply tapping his feelings and meditating Hagrin began to develop ways to touch yesteryears. These methods are kept secret and are passed from runesmith to their apprentices. The key, from what many can tell, is “finding a bridge.”

Hagrin’s exploits pulled him from Khazad society but in return he began to widen his connection to his ancestors who helped shaped the world as we know it. While we are stripped of the raw connection to the elements in our flesh bodies, our souls still harbor a connection to the fabric of our world. Time has put space between our greatest ancestors, and as a result we’ve lost knowledge that raised the mountains themselves and planted the great forests. These efforts have enabled the Khazad to reclaim some of the knowledge that was once lost.