The history books of the Northern Kingdoms are filled with tales of light and valor, but the story of the Godslayer was written in soot, blood, and silence.
It began a millennium ago, in an era now referred to only as the Age of Iron. In a valley shadowed by the great jagged peaks of the High Mounts, there lived a master swordsmith named Kaelen.
Kaelen was not a man of war; he was a man of art. His steel was sought after by generals and kings, but his heart belonged entirely to the three small boys who ran through his workshop, their laughter ringing louder than the strike of his hammer.
They were his legacy. He did not forge for gold; he forged to ensure their futures.
But the gods, it seemed, were jealous of his joy.
The sickness came in the winter. It started with the eldest, Torian. A fever that burned so hot it seemed to radiate from his very bones.
Kaelen, a man who could bend steel with fire and force, found himself helpless against an enemy he could not hit. He fell to his knees in the local shrine, his forehead pressed against the cold stone floor. He prayed to the Goddess of Mercy, offering his fortune, his skill, even his own life in exchange for his son's.
The shrine remained silent. The stone remained cold. By sunrise, Torian was dead.
Kaelen buried his firstborn in the frozen earth behind the forge. He told himself it was nature's cruelty, a test of faith. He returned to his anvil, though his hammer struck with less rhythm and more anger.
Two years passed before the sickness returned. This time, it claimed his second son, Jaren.
The panic that seized Kaelen was primal. He did not just pray this time; he screamed. He dragged the finest sword he had ever made to the temple and laid it on the altar as an offering. He lit incense until the air was thick and choking. "Take my hands!" he begged the heavens. "Take my eyes! Just spare the boy!"
The silence of the gods was deafening. The only answer he received was the rattling last breath of his child.
When Jaren died, Kaelen did not weep. He stared at the ceiling, his eyes dry and red. A crack formed in his mind then, a fissure that would eventually swallow the world.
Then came the youngest. Little Elian, who had his father's broad shoulders and kind eyes. When the fever took him, Kaelen did not go to the temple. He stood in the center of his forge, the fires roaring around him, and looked up at the smoke drifting toward the sky. He spoke calmly, rationally, to the gods he once revered. He asked for one thing: mercy. Just one life spared out of three.
Elian died in his arms three days later.
Kaelen sat with the body for a week. He did not eat. He did not sleep. The grief that had burdened him for years calcified, hardening into something brittle and sharp. He realized then that the silence of the gods was not indifference. It was malice. They had watched him suffer, and they had done nothing.
If the gods would not save a life, he would forge something that could take theirs.
At the age of fifty, Kaelen locked the doors of his forge. He boarded up the windows. The local villagers stopped hearing the rhythmic clang of tools making plowshares or horseshoes. Instead, they heard low, guttural chanting and the erratic, violent pounding of metal being tortured into shape.
Rumors began to spread—whispers of travelers disappearing on the road near Kaelen's valley. First, it was beggars and outlaws, people no one would miss. Then, it was merchants. Finally, knights and soldiers sent to investigate never returned.
Inside the forge, the air smelled of ozone and copper. Kaelen had turned to the forbidden arts, digging up scrolls of black magic that had been buried since the dark ages. He learned that steel alone could not cut the divine. To kill a god, a weapon needed a soul—or thousands of them.
The legends say he killed hundreds. He did not discriminate. He captured the weak to form the spine of the blade, and he hunted the strong—warriors, mages, and holy men—to give the edge its bite. He burned their bodies in the great furnace until they were nothing but grey dust. He took this ash, heavy with the anguish of the dead, and mixed it into the molten steel.
Layer by layer, the sword was folded. With every hammer strike, Kaelen poured his hatred into the metal. He cursed the gods of the sky, the earth, and the sea. He forged his grief into the tang and his vengeance into the tip.
The years bled into decades. Kaelen grew withered and grey. His skin became like parchment, stretched over bone, but his arms remained thick with muscle, fueled by a supernatural rage. He worked until his hands bled, and then he worked some more, the blood mixing with the ash and the iron.
He was one hundred and twenty years old when he raised the hammer for the final time.
The storm that night was unlike any the
kingdom had seen. Lightning did not strike the earth; it struck the forge, drawn to the unholy energy gathering within. Kaelen stood before the anvil, the sword glowing a malevolent, pulsating purple. It was not a beautiful weapon. It was jagged, dark as the void, and it seemed to drink the light from the room.
"Done," Kaelen rasped, his voice a ruin of what it once was.
He gripped the hilt. The power of the blade surged through him, too great for a mortal frame to hold. His heart, tired and heavy with a century of hate, finally gave out. He collapsed over the anvil, dead, his hand still clutching his life's work.
When the King's soldiers finally broke down the doors of the forge weeks later, they found a scene of nightmares. The floor was thick with bone dust. The walls were scrawled with curses against heaven. And there, in the center, was the corpse of the smith, and the sword.
The captain of the guard tried to lift it and fell back, weeping uncontrollably, overwhelmed by the sorrow trapped inside the steel. It took the King himself, a man of iron will, to pry the weapon from Kaelen's grip.
The King held it up to the light. The blade did not shine; it devoured the shadows. He felt the hum of it, a vibration that promised the end of all things eternal. He knew the stories. He knew what this weapon was meant to do.
"This is no ordinary blade," the King declared, his voice trembling slightly. "This was not made to kill men."
He looked at the dead smith, then at the roof of the forge, staring up toward the heavens that had ignored a father's pleas.
"Let the priests tremble," the King said. "We shall name it Godslayer."