The Hearth at Kharanos

The cookfires of Kharanos kept their smoke going up into the weather, and the doors stayed open against the cold. Inside, the hearth made a sound like a page being turned, slow and warm. Tovrik set the Whelp-Gnawed Hatchet on the bench beside him, where his hand could find it, and where everyone else could see he was not looking for a fight so much as refusing to misplace the last one.

“Kharanos,” he said, to the fire, to the room, to the chronicle that had followed him from a borrowed axe. “This will do for a beginning.”

The fire did not argue. He was a dwarf warrior of six levels and one death, in a vest that still smelled of the shelf. He let the bench hold him. The chapter closed there, in the heat, with the finished road quiet behind him.