The town of Emberhold was burning at its eastern wall when the call for help went out.
It sat on Caldross, a top-tier world of black volcanic plains and rivers of slow molten light, and the thing that made it worth dying for was buried in those plains. Pyrethine. A Tier-65 resource, dense with raw fire-essence, rare enough that three kingdoms had already come sniffing and one had decided not to ask politely.
That one was the Vharn Combine, and they had brought an army.
Roken stood on the eastern wall with a hammer the size of a man, and he was the reason the wall still stood at all.
He was a Runic Blacksmith before he was anything, and he had built this wall himself, rune by rune, every stone of it laid with his own hands over the past three months. Now the Vharn were trying to take it down, and Roken was very personally offended by that.
