Prelude – Eddie

Eddie Downhill was born in Imperial Calendar 2242, though the true weight of that date would only reveal itself like a festering wound many years later. At the fragile age of four, in 2246, he was left—perhaps abandoned, perhaps spared, perhaps delivered into the arms of fate—at the lonely doorstep of Hara Ironwright. She was a peculiar dwarven woman, kind in her own weathered way yet marked by an eccentric solitude. Hara lived far from her kin, in the bleak foothills near Zhufbar, the ancient hold whose forges belched steam and iron-dust without cease. Zhufbar’s engineers were among the most revered in the world, led by a mighty Forge Master, yet Hara had exiled herself for reasons she shrouded in silence.

Her isolated home rested near the borderlands where Mootland frayed into the cursed reaches of Sylvania. Here, the air carried the whisper of graves, and undead things wandered through the mist as if searching for the warmth they had forgotten. Hara patrolled these roads tirelessly, tending to travelers wounded by horrors that should have remained buried.

Unlike her kin, Hara followed the gentle deity Valaya. A peace-lover. A healer. A vegetarian among a race famed for their hearty feasts. She raised Eddie with books of Valaya and Shallya, planting in him sacred virtues of kindness and mercy—delicate lights flickering against the world’s darkness.

Eddie remembered nothing before age four. His early past was a void, an amputation of memory that throbbed with phantom pain. Only two things tethered him to that lost life: a small wind-up catapult of exquisite dwarven craftsmanship, and a recurring dream that seemed carved into his bones. In the dream, he sat as a small child, frozen with the dread of understanding too little. A dwarf with cold, predatory eyes entered, feigned a smile that didn’t touch his gaze, inspected the catapult with unsettling interest, then drifted into another room where familiar voices murmured—voices Eddie sensed he had once known, though remembering them filled him with terror.

In Hara’s care, Eddie grew, and his fascination with the catapult only deepened. He filled journals with sketches—exploded diagrams of gears and mechanisms that seemed to whisper half-remembered truths to him. His hands moved with instinct he could not explain, as though echoing forgotten lessons. Yet whenever he dared ask Hara about engineering, she became tense, fearful, sometimes angry. She insisted such knowledge was unnecessary for their quiet life, her refusal masking something darker than simple practicality. Her fear created a hollow ache inside Eddie—an itch beneath the skin, the sensation that his mind reached for something once known but now swallowed by shadow.

By twelve, she brought him along on her mercy runs, collecting herbs and tending to those wounded near Sylvania’s haunted borders. Over time, she gave him more freedom, and by seventeen he roamed the foothills alone.

Then came 2261.

At nineteen, Eddie’s life cracked open.

He was gathering herbs when he saw a billowing pillar of smoke rising in the distance, thick and ominous. Instinct urged him to avoid the road; he crept through brush and over silent hills until he reached a nearby rise.

Below him lay devastation.

A dwarven caravan, annihilated. The central wagon—a massive six-wheeled armored titan—had been blown apart, a smoking crater yawning beneath it. The ponies were torn to pieces, their bodies flung like broken dolls. The soldiers of Zhufbar lay scattered around the wreck, their armor twisted and charred. Some had died by the explosion, but others…

Others bore wounds no forge-blast could cause. Throats torn out. Heads twisted backward. Bite marks savage and deep, as though something ravenous had torn its way through the living.

Among the wreckage gleamed twisted machinery—cogs, wheels, gears—each one calling to Eddie’s long-buried curiosity like siren songs.

Then he heard it.

A voice rose from beneath the shattered wagon—raw and grating, like metal screaming against metal. A voice thick with pain and madness, yet disturbingly lucid. It rasped to him intimately: “My little friend… so curious…”

It claimed to be a victim. It pleaded. Bargained. Asked whether its life was worth less than the dead scattered around them.

Eddie approached despite the dread crawling along his spine.

Beneath the wreckage lay a dwarven figure charred beyond recognition—skin cracked and peeling, clothing fused into ruined flesh. Its eyes were cloudy, wrong, like dim embers. When Eddie instinctively stepped back, clutching a cog from the ground, the creature whispered its final lure: forbidden knowledge—secrets of machines and ancient machine gods.

Eddie convinced himself mercy demanded action. Perhaps the creature was a wizard, a priest, someone who could be healed. He freed the figure from the beam pinning it and wrapped it in cloaks taken from the dead.

The creature named herself Vorada Steelsinger.

A dwarven vampire.

Yet strangely buoyant, almost cheerful, with a manic enthusiasm for engineering. She spoke of secrets long lost, of mechanisms ancient enough to border on the divine. For nine years—from 2261 to 2270—Eddie harbored her in hidden workshops scattered throughout the foothills. He fed her sheep’s blood to keep her curse at bay. And she taught him everything he had ever hungered to know. His mind bloomed with forbidden knowledge. The hollow inside him filled with gears and wonder.

Until the firelight again brought ruin.

In 2270, Hara saw flames licking at the foothills and rushed with Eddie to investigate. They reached Mill Pond Burrows—a halfling settlement Hara knew well.

It had become a nightmare.

Homes burned. Silos exploded into embers. Male halflings and dogs lay butchered, limbs twisted and throats opened. In the central burrow, Eddie beheld a horror he would never forget: a male halfling impaled against a wall with such force his broken bones were embedded deep into the timber. Children lay dead beside him. On the walls, someone had scrawled in soot and blood:

I’m sorry.
So hungry.

A pregnant halfling woman clung to life in an untouched room. Hara examined her and whispered the truth: her unborn child had been surgically removed.

Eddie fled. He knew.

He raced to his secret workshop.

It had been ravaged—torn apart as though by a cyclone of rage. Machinery destroyed. Journals burned. In Vorada’s surviving writings he found the truth. Months of mounting hunger. Sheep’s blood no longer enough. Thoughts turning to violence. The final entries degraded into endless scratches of hungry angry eat, gouged so hard the quill tore the page.

Vorada had succumbed.

And the halflings were dead because of him.

Hara followed him and found the ruins. Eddie confessed. Her sorrow was a blade sharper than any anger. She told him his mercy had been born of kindness, yet its consequences were his burden to bear. He could no longer stay. With Vorada still roaming the night, it was too dangerous.

She revealed he had a distant refuge—a sister named Pushka in Talagaad. He must go there and start anew. She prayed Valaya might grant him some measure of absolution.

In Talagaad, Fuka took him in. She helped him secure work with Alabaster von Spitzwalden, a human engineer whose shop stood defiantly outside dwarven guild control. For two precious years, Eddie lived openly as an engineer, shaping metal with pride.

Then fire struck again in 2272.

The shop burned—perhaps from black powder stored improperly, or perhaps from the lingering curse that seemed to follow Eddie. Alabaster died, and others with him. Surrounding homes collapsed in flame. With the shop gone, the dwarven guild seized total control of engineering in Talagaad, leaving Eddie with no legitimate work.

For four years—from 2272 to the current year, 2276—Eddie labored in Pushka’s merchant shop, performing quiet repairs in the basement, hiding his talents from prying guild eyes. Now thirty-four, he bore the weight of two unforgiving tragedies—the massacre at Mill Pond Burrows, and the destruction of Alabaster’s workshop.

He kept the small geared catapult close, a relic from his lost past. He kept his journals of designs, his memories of Hara’s soft teachings, and the knowledge that his mercy had cost innocent lives.

And somewhere in the wild dark places of the world…

Vorada still wandered, her hunger unending.