For twenty-two years, Alkador was exactly what the world expected an Orc to be: a creature of impulse and fury. He led a small warband in the Belkzen wastes, surviving on raw strength and the fear he inspired in his subordinates. Even then, something nagged at him. It was not a moral crisis, but a deeper, stranger ache. Looking at his kin, ragged and blood-soaked, he felt a weight close to grief. Not for the dead, but for the waste of it all. He looked at their rusted blades and crumbling camps and saw a people who had forgotten how to build anything that lasted.
The breaking point came at Iron-Grip Pass. Alkador's warband was ordered into a suicidal charge against a heavily fortified Dwarven line. He watched his brothers die in the mud, not bravely or gloriously, but messily and without purpose. The Dwarves did not win because they were stronger. They won because they had built something worth admiring. Their shield-wall was immaculate. Their discipline was beautiful. When the assault failed and his kin retreated, they left a wounded Alkador behind, pinned beneath the wreckage of a siege engine. He lay there in the silence, unable to look away from the flawless geometry of the Dwarven line.
The patrol that found him did not execute him. They found an enemy sitting calmly among the dead, splinting his own leg, his eyes fixed on the polished surface of a Dwarven shield catching the morning light. They took him back to the Sky Citadel, less out of mercy than curiosity. He was an Orc who looked on their masonry with awe instead of hate.
He spent six years in the deep forges. He did not only learn to work steel. He learned what steel could become. He learned that a weapon, properly made, was a kind of prayer, and that a shield, properly maintained, was a kind of sermon. Before he left, the Dwarven priests of Torag challenged him to prove he had truly understood the Law of the Hammer. They asked him, “Have you ever made something worth remembering?”
Alkador answered by forging his knuckle dagger. It was his version of the Dwarven clan dagger: a heavy, deep-iron blade with a spiked guard, designed for an Orc’s grip but finished with a Sky Citadel master’s precision. It was his first prayer, a brutal piece of functional geometry that balanced perfectly in his hand. It was the first thing he had ever made that was built to outlast him. On that day, Alkador felt Torag’s attention turn toward him, and he became the god’s Champion.
