James Lowder - Knight of the Black Rose

Azrael’s tale was as bloody a story as any Magda had ever heard, though, like most such stories, it started innocently enough.

His parents were crafters of modest income, and like all youths in the vast underground dwarven city of Brigalaure, Azrael was destined to learn one of their skills. He might have gained the lore of iron from his father, or the ability to cut rare stones into jewelry from his mother, but he was suited to neither type of work.

The pounding, the heat, and the stench of sweat in the iron forges made him sullen. His arm wasn’t strong enough for the strenuous task of beating the metal into shape, and he lacked the stamina to tend the bellows or carry heavy burdens all day long. Still, his father possessed great patience; he decided to allow Azrael an apprenticeship of ten years to grow accustomed to the work.

For a dwarf of Brigalaure, who could expect to live for five hundred years or more, a decade should have been a brief enough time to learn a craft, but Azrael grew bored in less than twelve months. He spent each workday daydreaming, his mind lost in imagined exploration of the land above the city. Legends told of monstrous lizards-ones larger than any of the great winches the dwarves used to move stone-that ravaged anything standing in their way. This was the reason the dwarves had first moved underground, thousands upon thousands of years before Azrael’s father had been born.

His father let his daydreaming go on day after day, even over the objections of his forge-mates, until Azrael’s carelessness caused a fire. The youth was not bothered by the near-destruction of the smithy, and the plight of the apprentice who had been maimed in the blaze affected him even less. After all, the other young dwarf had taunted Azrael about his laziness.

His parents took his silence about the unfortunate accident as contrition, but they knew he could not return to the forge. Instead, young Azrael found himself in his mother’s solitary workroom.

To his surprise, he liked this place even less then the ironworks-not because he’d expected to enjoy cutting jewels, but because he hated his father’s work so vehemently. In the forges, he was one of three dozen apprentices. There no one seemed to notice if he disappeared for an hour or so. Just he and his mother occupied the small workshop, so she made certain his day was filled with tasks to help him learn the jewel cutter’s craft. Polishing the finished stones, collecting up the chips of ruby and diamond, even sharpening the cutting tools-all these tasks required concentration; somehow, his mother knew that his heart was not in the effort, even before he realized it himself.

Azrael soon proved to be incompetent in his mother’s craft as well. His short, stubby fingers worked against him in a profession calling for a delicate touch, and he refused to abandon his daydreams, even when handling the most precious of stones. Finally disaster struck. Azrael dropped a rare and fragile gem, and it fractured like glass. His mother, fed up with his incompetence and stunned by the thought of paying to replace the shattered stone, banished him from her workshop.

For the dwarves of Brigalaure, craft was status, and Azrael’s failure made him an outcast. Without a trade he could not be considered an adult. He could earn no money, no place in society, no respect. No one would take him in as an apprentice, not after gossip about the forge fire and the shattered gem. As he stood outside his mother’s workshop, her tirade still ringing in his ears, the young dwarf understood that he had failed definitively and that there was no place left to go. Brigalaure held nothing for him.

He packed his few belongings late that day without any idea of where he was to go. When his father confronted Azrael, demanding that he pay for the jewel he’d broken, a red swell of anger engulfed the young dwarf's soul. The moment his father turned his back, Azrael caved in his skull with a hammer.

His mother was next, then his brothers and sisters. Azrael didn’t use the blood-spattered hammer on them, but his bare hands. While his fingers were too short for delicate craft work, they were blunt and strong enough for murder.

Because his sister had managed a shriek before he killed her, Azrael found a politskara at his door. Such watchmen spent their time breaking up feeble quarrels over who could craft the most perfect arrowhead, so this one was totally unprepared for the bloody sight that greeted him. Azrael almost got away, too, but the politskara had enough sense to call up a mob. The gathered fletchers and stoneworkers were enough to bring an end to the murderer’s hope for escape.

What happened next was unclear in Azrael’s mind. He was struck by an arrow fired from the crowd, and he had passed out as they closed in around him. He awoke in a dark tunnel, deep underground, banished, without food or light or any hope of finding his way back to Brigalaure. The citizens hadn’t had the nerve to kill him.

A voice spoke to Azrael from the darkness, though it seemed to come from everywhere around him, even inside his head. It offered him life and power, but with the condition that he use that power to destroy the beautiful dwarven city. As the words of agreement left his mouth, sharp laughter filled the cavern and a terrible pain stabbed through Azrael’s gut. He tumbled facedown onto the cold stone as his bones twisted. His head pounding, he screamed, and the sound that came from his mouth was like the yowling of a wounded beast.

He became a werecreature, part dwarf, part giant badger. With his newly heightened senses of smell and sight, he followed the trail left by his captors all the way back to the city. There he used the shadows to cloak his evil deeds. Over the next fifty years, he preyed upon those on the outskirts of Brigalaure, destroying homes and shops, killing those he found alone. Hundreds fell to his claws. The citizens of Brigalaure tried to hunt him down, but without success.

“I’d found my craft,” Azrael noted proudly, leaning back against the white marble pillar. “And I was much better at it than any of ’em were at stopping me.”

Despite herself, Magda was caught up in the tale. She sat close to the dwarf, leaning toward him in the darkness. By the pale moonlight she could just make out his face as he spoke.

“I was leading a hunting party through the labyrinth of tunnels I called home,” the dwarf said, a look of wonder crossing his features. “I was hoping to separate one particularly fat baker from the rest-I hadn’t eaten in a few days, you see. Anyway, I finally lured him away from the rest when, out of nowhere, this fog rises. One minute I’m wondering about the mist, the next I’m standing on the edge of a huge lake.”

“In Barovia?” Soth asked. They were the first words the death knight had spoken since Azrael had begun his tale.

The dwarf shook his head. “No, in a grim place called Forlorn, to the south of here. The place is creepy-no people, no animals, just this big castle. Needless to say, I stayed-well away from the castle.”

The dwarf rummaged through his pack for a piece of bread but found nothing. He’d finished his share of the rations earlier that day. “Er, Magda, do you have anything I could eat? I seem to have supped the last of my supplies.” When she tossed him an apple, he frowned at it as if she’d handed him something inedible, then shrugged and took a bite.

“That’s when I came to Gundarak,” he said. “I was only here for a couple of months. Not much good in preying upon villagers who have nothing worth stealing.” He took another bite from the apple. “Besides, the peasants themselves are all skin and bone, nothing to sink your teeth into.”

Closing her eyes, Magda turned away. Soth, however, seemed intrigued by the dwarf’s tale. “Did you ever encounter the duke?” he asked.