A Borrowed Axe · Tovrik · JourneyChronicle

A Borrowed Axe

Levels 1–3

Tovrik left Anvilmar with forge-soot in his beard and a hand axe that had already taught three other recruits how to lose. The haft was polished where their palms had worried it. The edge was honest enough, if you did not ask it to be proud.

Coldridge Valley held the cold the way a cellar holds a smell. Snow lay thin over the rocks, and the rocks never pretended to be anything softer. He walked until the cave-mouth glow behind him became a comfort he could stop checking. Then a trogg came up out of a cleft with a club the size of a keg and no interest in talking the matter through.

The first exchange was ugly. Tovrik got the axe in the way because his arms remembered the training sergeant even when his thoughts did not. The club glanced, numbed him from wrist to shoulder, and took a chip out of the axe that would never grow back. He stepped in anyway. That was the whole of his tactics. Step in, while the other fellow was still pleased with the noise.

The trogg smelled of wet stone and old meat. It made a sound like a millwheel catching a bone. Tovrik hit it where the neck forgot to become a shoulder. The club went into the snow and stayed there. He stood over the body longer than a hero would have, breathing, counting his fingers, and finding all ten.

He wiped the axe on the snow, which did not thank him, and went on because the valley narrowed and the rocks above the path had started to move. More troggs waited in that gray on gray, easy to miss until they decided not to be. He fought two more before the light under the overcast changed. One he beat cleanly. One he beat because he was too stubborn to drop the axe when his shoulder said he should. In Dun Morogh, stubbornness is a kind of craft.