“Yes, Hyden Hawk, Pavreal,” King Aldar finally nodded.
Hyden blushed even harder hearing the King of Giants use his nickname. He glared daggers at Vaegon, who had a slight grin on his feral looking face.
“He was also known as a Marked One. ‘The Marked One’ really. As a child, he’d been a pit slave in one of the Demon King’s forge furnaces, and the soot and ash that that settled in the whiplashes that crossed his back healed, leaving him marked with stripes like some wild beast.”
Mikahl thought of Loudin and his tattoo striped-body. He didn’t think the Seawardsman had ever been a slave. Maybe it was a religious thing, or a rite of passage. He remembered something from his lessons about why those southern men marked themselves, though he couldn’t recall what it was at the moment; something to do with the sea, maybe? He chided himself for not paying better attention to his lesson master. Then, he chided himself for not paying better attention to King Aldar. He didn’t want to miss any of what the King was saying, so he shoved the abstract thoughts out of his mind for now, and listened.
“…such was Pavreal’s hatred of the Demon King.”
King Aldar paused, and puffed deeply on his pipe. He exhaled a fat, swirling ring of smoke, watched it waver and rise for a moment, and then blew it into a misshapen cloud. His eyes fell to rest on Ironspike.
The small section of exposed blade was glowing softly, bathing Mikahl’s side and upper thigh in pale, blue light. King Aldar’s brows narrowed, then he brought his gaze up and gave Mikahl a look that conveyed the importance of what he was about to say.
“A great gathering of the leaders of all the races was held, and a decision was made. A plan was formed. We giants supplied the purest of ores that these mountains hold: iron, titanium, and silver, among others. The dwarves forged the metal under dragon’s fire, and the elves weaved spell after spell into the weapons that were made that day. Then once the items had been dipped in the magical waters of Whitten Loch, the great human wizard, Killton Alx, put enchantments on them as well.
They were still far too hot for a man to handle though. They were placed on a block of Wardstone, in a secret cavern in the eastern range of mountains beyond Xwarda. After almost a year, they finally cooled, and then the War Hammer of Doon, the Arrows of Tayllah, and the Sword Errion Spightre were ready. The name Ironspike grew out of the old language’s strange pronunciation of ‘Errion Spightre,’ which means Demon Fighter, in the old tongue of lore.”
Hyden wanted badly to ask where the Hammer of Doon and the arrows were now, but was afraid to draw the wrath of the Giant King.
Mikahl looked down at the blade glowing at his hip, trying to imagine dragon’s fire bathing it while dwarves hammered it into shape. He couldn’t quite fathom such a thing.
“To get to the point of the matter,” King Aldar continued through another cloud of pipe smoke. “Pavreal somehow used the sword to draw the demon’s essence out of King Steven. Then he, and the wizard, Killton Alx, went to the place in the southern marshes we giants call the Black Tooth, and made a passageway back into the world of darkness. They put a lock on this passage that they called the Seal. The demon was banished from the blade through this Seal, back into the hellish Nethers where it came from.
Pavreal hunted demons with the sword his whole life. Each time he took one, he brought it to the Seal, and banished it back to the darkness. Pavreal had become the unquestioned leader of the campaign against the demon hordes, and soon all the humans eventually called him King. For an age, hope prevailed, while things were rebuilt and restored. Slowly, the dark things that lingered, were hunted down, and sent back into the hell from which they had come.
“Generations passed, and it was learned that the demon, while in King Steven’s body, had spawned several children. They had children, and the demon seed was passed on. Most of those demon-kin were only mildly evil in nature. They lived as slavers, tyrant lords, or dabblers in the dark arts. Nothing seriously dangerous to the world, but then came Shokin. Birthed from a half penny whore, and more demon than man, Shokin was obsessed with reopening the seal. Eventually, he found a way to do it. That was just two and a half centuries ago.
“Shokin was no fool. He bound the power of the greater demons to himself as he released them, and used their power as his own. Once he had gathered enough power, he stole their essences, and killed them. The things he did, the horrors he committed, the evils, the torments, and all the sinister connivery he brought to the world, earned the respect of the Abbadon. The Hell-god himself granted Shokin eternal life, by making him a fully fledged demon.