Hatred

Hatred has a way of drawing people together, though the ensuing alliances are brittle and fraught with weakness. Tyhr knew this, as he walked the plains in the first days of man. A broken man was what he was called, his clan-home was the first burnt and made barren in the god-war. The very lives it protected slowly ended in needless bloodshed. Tyhr knew now that he was truly a broken one, the last in a line.

As he wandered down the peninsula, further into the land of carnage this new god had created, he oft wondered why he still lived. Those who loved him had left, why must he live on. Why must he watch as the pristine night sky is filled with the souls of slain gods, and turned into some macabre lightshow?

Nights turned to days, days to weeks, and still he marched on. Inexorably drawn south and west, through bog and field, through lakes of blood where the children of the Black gnawed at the bones of the freshly dead; he pushed onward, drawn by some suicidal desire to inflict as much pain on his conquerors as they had on him. His sword slaking it's malign thirst on the Servants of the Night, on man, and on beast.

One morn, busy tending to his wounds, Tyhr saw a host of conquerors returning to their new liege-god and trailing behind bound and chained were great multitudes of slave and prisoners; man, woman, and child bound and lead forth like chattel. It was then that he finally understood the true depth of his hatred, and some legends say that then his rage poured forth in a bath of fire and death, and that it was from this that the legends of dragons sprung from.

It doesnt truly matter however whether it was he that slew every warrior by himself, or if in the chaos, the slaves broke free of their bonds and set to their captors, or if a great demon of hell lead forth an army of ghouls to feast upon the flesh of the holy ones. All that matters is that in the end the ravens and the Black had a great feast before them, and suddenly Tyhr had a horde.

Ill equipped, untrained, and with the rage of a god on their neck they fled the Samahan peninsula, the last truly hostile force to set foot on that most holy ground. And drawn together under the black sword of Tyhr the horde fled into the mountains to the east, living in valleys and on plateaus. Soon though, safe in their relative isolation, they settled down under the leadership of their Dragon King. And when he died, as all men must, his sword and his title were passed onto the best warrior and leader in his clan.

The sword itself is remarkable only in that it is still in one piece after lifetimes upon lifetimes of use. The obsidian blade looks as though it should shatter the first time it hits something harder than flesh and bone, and in truth it should have long ago shattered, being held together solely by the hatred of it's wielder.

The sword itself is without any ornamentation, though it often seems to burn with a fire from within, and those few that have been cut by it and survived say that the blade feels as though it should shear the flesh shut as it burns it's way through your body, only to leave you bleeding from wounds that healers have problems staunching.

Though the dynasties have changed, as men lost to the fierce valkyries of the royal bloodlines, the sword has stayed. It stands even now as an irrefutable testament to an age old hatred and an unending crusade.