For as long as the Grimtusk clan has held the high valleys northwest of the Red Crown Mountains, they have raised their children on a single hard lesson: a life is worth only as much as its ending. Die blooded and witnessed, and you are remembered. Die any other way, and you have wasted the chance.
That lesson never fit Jandrak — he was slow to anger, quicker to notice who was hurting than who was winning, and he spent more of his boyhood at the shaman Gromak's side than in the training yard. Gromak served Gruumsh, the only death-rite he knew was one that declared a death glorious before the god. Jandrak learned its shape while never believing its premise.
His sister Varka though, believed it completely. At twelve, she forced her way into training meant for warriors twice her age, certain she could prove herself early. Jandrak tried to stop her, he was close enough to see the accident happen, and fast enough to carry her off the field himself.
He laid her down and did the only thing he knew how to do — he began Gromak's rite over her, the one meant to bless a death as glorious. But that wasn't what Jandrak wanted from it. He twisted the words as he went, pleading instead of praising, arguing that an overconfident girl's death wasn't glory at all, just a mistake the world could still take back. He was pleading to a god that he didn't understand using words that, without knowing, reached toward something that answered a very different kind of prayer. What ever crossed in him that night did not bring Varka didn't come back, but some part of her never left. He could feel he, hear her, she was furious, he stole what should have been hers.
He fled half crushed that he had failed, half terrified of what he HAD done. The Grimtusk still believe grief simply broke him.
He found himself in a temple to Karnoduur in Mulsantir, where the priests recognized his struggle before he could name it himself. Over they years, his mentor Yusev slowly untangling what Gromak had planted from what had grown beside it, and taught him, finally, to pray to the Warden of the Last Door on purpose. Jandrak thought he could finally find peace in the teaching that death isn't a wound to argue with, only a threshold to be honored at its correct hour. Jandrak carved his first name into the shaft of his mace that day. It was Varka's. However. the peace he thought he'd found was elusive. He believed, but she will still there, reminding him that what he did was wrong.
