It began with an arrowhead.
It was an orcish arrowhead, buried deep in the shoulder of the warrior who had staggered back to camp almost delirious with pain and fever from the wound. The healer there gave him poppy-seed tea for the pain, and willow bark for the fever, and placed a thick strip of reindeer leather between the man’s teeth as he cut the broken shaft of the arrow out of the swollen shoulder. Afterwards, he cleaned the wound, smeared it with rendered bear fat, and wrapped it in strips of soft rabbit fur. Only then did he turn to inspect the object he had retrieved.
The shaman to whom the trembling healer brought the object turned it this way and that in the palm of his hand, before washing it in clean water to get a better look. He sniffed it, tasted it, and finally drew it along the side of his gnarled staff, watching with interest as the sharp edge scored deeply into the wood. And then he called a meeting of the tribal council.
In the chieftain’s tent, made of heavy seal furs hung on a lattice of mammoth bones, the elders examined the object, while having the skald recite the relevant Stories. Passing it between their gnarled hands, they wondered at it, comparing its dull gleam and sharp edge to the words of the Stories, an object out of legend. But in the end there was no doubt.
It was iron.
The Stories, passed down through the generations since the time of the Worldbreaking, told them that iron had once been plentiful, how every hunter might have a blade of the grey metal on his belt, or on the tip of his spear. Pieces of iron had been stitched onto leather vests, deflecting axe-blows and shattering flint arrows. It was worked into tools that could hew through rock, and forged into mighty hammers that could shatter bone. Their ancestors had worked great wonders with it in their service.
But iron had a flaw. The cold and the wet ate at it, making it brittle and the colour of blood. Slowly, inevitably, the years would eat it away, as the glacier grinds against the mountain. It could not survive the climate that had engulfed the land after the Worldbreaking, the freezing winters, the cold, rainy summers, the endless damp chill. Over time, the belt-knives corroded into dust, the armour-plates into red stains, the great hammers into piles of red flakes. Iron passed from knowledge into the Stories.
Perhaps the dwarves still had iron, scraping it in traces from the walls of their exhausted mine cities. But if they did, they did not share it. The taciturn folk would happily trade coal, gold and dark, shimmering gems at the annual trademeets in the smokey shadows of the burning mountains, but all the wheat beer and smoked meats, arrayed temptingly on woolen blankets, could not entice them to talk of iron.
There was still bronze, of course, although only in tiny quantities, as few tribes were willing to pay the terrible price that the troglodytes demanded for the metal. In past generations, a few of the more unscrupulous, or desperate, tribes had launched raids, or full scale assaults, to obtain the captives necessary for such desperate trade. The troglodytes accepted such payment with cold, hungry eyes, leading the wretches into the dark mouths of their steaming caves, and provided the agreed price in bronze knives, spearblades and axes in return, but refused all alternative offers of payments.
But no-one had iron.
And now the orcs had it. And they had enough that they could use it on something as disposable and easily lost as an arrow-head.
All that summer, while the people of the tribes worked to hunt, and trap, and gather, hoping that they would be able to store enough food against the coming months of darkness, the chieftains met in the great hall of the Overchief, in the great cave said to have been cracked open in the earth by the Worldbreaking itself, warmed by the river of fiery lava, the world’s blood, that ran through it.
While they argued, and posed, and bickered, more reports came in, both from human hunters and, at second hand, from the nomadic elven tribes who followed the caribou herds through the northern Mistwoods. Reports of orc parties pushing further south than they had for generations, and far more organised. The leaders of such groups more often than not bore blades or spears of grey-black iron. One hunt-leader, veteran of a dozen hunts, swore that he had lost half his party to a great hulking brute who had wielded a great double-bladed axe with blades that glinted in the wan sunlight. And a wild tale, whispered fearfully around campfires, even told of a huge orcish warlord clad in plates of iron, like the great lobsters that the halfling fishers, in their walrus-skin kayaks, pulled from the icy depths of the frozen sea.
Long the chieftains argued, while the meat was smoked and salted, the berries dried, and the roots pounded to paste. And as the first powdery snows swept down on icy north winds, they emerged from their council, and the Overchief spoke.
The world was changing, he announced. In generations past, the tribes had united to repel orc hordes, but these had been sporadic, unorganised incursions. Now the orcs were more organised, and they bore weapons out of legend, iron weapons that could shatter flint, break stone and blunt bronze. The tribes would not wait to be overrun. During the dark and cold of the winter, each tribe should prepare, and when the melting came, and the snows retreated, they should all send scouting parties north, across the Burning Rivers. The parties should seek out the source of the orcs, determine who, or what, was organising them, and above all, find the source of the iron.
No person, resource, or ally should be spared in this search, for if the tribes did not succeed, they would surely fall beneath the inevitable orc horde. They needed luck. They needed iron. And above all, they needed heroes.
