Azrael about his laziness.
His parents took his silence about the unfortunate accident as contrition, but they knew he could not return to the forge. Instead, young Azrael found himself in his mother’s solitary workroom.
To his surprise, he liked this place even less then the ironworks-not because he’d expected to enjoy cutting jewels, but because he hated his father’s work so vehemently. In the forges, he was one of three dozen apprentices. There no one seemed to notice if he disappeared for an hour or so. Just he and his mother occupied the small workshop, so she made certain his day was filled with tasks to help him learn the jewel cutter’s craft. Polishing the finished stones, collecting up the chips of ruby and diamond, even sharpening the cutting tools-all these tasks required concentration; somehow, his mother knew that his heart was not in the effort, even before he realized it himself.
Azrael soon proved to be incompetent in his mother’s craft as well. His short, stubby fingers worked against him in a profession calling for a delicate touch, and he refused to abandon his daydreams, even when handling the most precious of stones. Finally disaster struck. Azrael dropped a rare and fragile gem, and it fractured like glass. His mother, fed up with his incompetence and stunned by the thought of paying to replace the shattered stone, banished him from her workshop.
For the dwarves of Brigalaure, craft was status, and Azrael’s failure made him an outcast. Without a trade he could not be considered an adult. He could earn no money, no place in society, no respect. No one would take him in as an apprentice, not after gossip about the forge fire and the shattered gem. As he stood outside his mother’s workshop, her tirade still ringing in his ears, the young dwarf understood that he had failed definitively and that there was no place left to go. Brigalaure held nothing for him.
He packed his few belongings late that day without any idea of where he was to go. When his father confronted Azrael, demanding that he pay for the jewel he’d broken, a red swell of anger engulfed the young dwarf's soul. The moment his father turned his back, Azrael caved in his skull with a hammer.
His mother was next, then his brothers and sisters. Azrael didn’t use the blood-spattered hammer on them, but his bare hands. While his fingers were too short for delicate craft work, they were blunt and strong enough for murder.
Because his sister had managed a shriek before he killed her, Azrael found a politskara at his door. Such watchmen spent their time breaking up feeble quarrels over who could craft the most perfect arrowhead, so this one was totally unprepared for the bloody sight that greeted him. Azrael almost got away, too, but the politskara had enough sense to call up a mob. The gathered fletchers and stoneworkers were enough to bring an end to the murderer’s hope for escape.
What happened next was unclear in Azrael’s mind. He was struck by an arrow fired from the crowd, and he had passed out as they closed in around him. He awoke in a dark tunnel, deep underground, banished, without food or light or any hope of finding his way back to Brigalaure. The citizens hadn’t had the nerve to kill him.
A voice spoke to Azrael from the darkness, though it seemed to come from everywhere around him, even inside his head. It offered him life and power, but with the condition that he use that power to destroy the beautiful dwarven city. As the words of agreement left his mouth, sharp laughter filled the cavern and a terrible pain stabbed through Azrael’s gut. He tumbled facedown onto the cold stone as his bones twisted. His head pounding, he screamed, and the sound that came from his mouth was like the yowling of a wounded beast.
He became a werecreature, part dwarf, part giant badger. With his newly heightened senses of smell and sight, he followed the trail left by his captors all the way back to the city. There he used the shadows to cloak his evil deeds. Over the next fifty years, he preyed upon those on the outskirts of Brigalaure, destroying homes and shops, killing those he found alone. Hundreds fell to his claws. The citizens of Brigalaure tried to hunt him down, but without success.
“I’d found my craft,” Azrael noted proudly, leaning back against the white marble pillar. “And I was much better at it than any of ’em were at stopping me.”
Despite herself, Magda was caught up in the tale. She sat close to the dwarf, leaning toward him in the darkness. By the pale moonlight she could just make out his face as he spoke.
“I was leading a hunting party through the labyrinth of tunnels I called home,” the dwarf said, a look of wonder crossing his features. “I was hoping to separate one particularly fat baker from the rest-I hadn’t eaten in a few days, you see. Anyway, I finally lured him away from the rest when, out of nowhere, this fog rises. One minute I’m wondering about the mist, the next I’m standing on the edge of a huge lake.”
“In Barovia?” Soth asked. They were the first words the death knight had spoken since Azrael had begun his tale.
The dwarf shook his head. “No, in a grim place called Forlorn, to the south of here. The place is creepy-no people, no animals, just this big castle. Needless to say, I stayed-well away from the castle.”
The dwarf rummaged through his pack for a piece of bread but found nothing. He’d finished his share of the rations earlier that day. “Er, Magda, do you have anything I could eat? I seem to have supped the last of my supplies.” When she tossed him an apple, he frowned at it as if she’d handed him something inedible, then shrugged and took a bite.
“That’s when I came to Gundarak,” he said. “I was only here for a couple of months. Not much good in preying upon villagers who have nothing worth stealing.” He took another bite from the apple. “Besides, the peasants themselves are all skin and bone, nothing to sink your teeth into.”
Closing her eyes, Magda turned away. Soth, however, seemed intrigued by the dwarf’s tale. “Did you ever encounter the duke?” he asked.
“I’ve seen Castle Hunadora, but I never went inside,” Azrael replied. “Lucky for me, I say. Just outside the place, I escaped from a dozen or so of his guards by jumping into the moat. They’d caught me sleeping in the woods and were bringing me in for ‘questioning.’ In most of the lands around here, that means torture.”
At Soth’s prompting, the dwarf went on to describe Gundar’s castle, but his knowledge of the place consisted largely of details about the fetid moat that circled the estate. “I’m lucky I can hold my breath for a long time,” he concluded. “The water is thick with sewage from the castle and the refuse from the experiments Gundar’s son, Medraut, conducts in the dungeons.”
A deep, liquid laughter filled the clearing. “You’re right, Fej,” they heard someone say, “it is a dwarf what set off the alarm. You can read them signals better’n anyone.”
The sharp sound of steel striking flint echoed from the boulders, and two torches flared to life on opposite ends of the clearing. The skeletal warriors fanned out in a circle, but Magda had her cudgel at the ready before any of them could draw their swords. When the Vistani saw the two grotesque figures bathed by the light of the torches they carried, she couldn’t suppress a gasp.
They were giants, standing twice Soth’s height, but their features were horrific, their bodies misshapen. One had an eye that was twice the size of its mate. The mismatched pair rested below a brow lined with deep wrinkles, over a bulbous nose and a mouth that hung open like a gaping wound. The giant’s teeth were missing from his lower jaw, and his gums had been scraped away from the bone by jagged upper teeth. One of the creature’s arms jutted from his side, not his shoulder. A torn shirt covered his bulk, but he dragged a length of thick chain that ended in a studded iron weight.
The other giant was equally hideous. His features retained more humanity-apart from the piggish snout spread across his face-but large blisters dotted his skin from head to foot. These welts sprouted tufts of hair as red as any flame. He was hunchbacked but had managed to put together a motley collection of armor that protected much of his torso. He carried no weapon, but his hands were three times as large as they had any right to be. The giant flexed a fist as he stepped into the clearing.
“Awright, you lot,” the first giant managed to say, his lower jaw moving little as he spoke, “you’re coming with us. If you put down the weapons, we won’t hurt you… much.” Both giants laughed at that pitiful jest.
Magda’s head swam. How had the giants managed to sneak up on them? They hardly looked capable of stealth. And what alarm had Azrael set off? She glanced at the pillar. The dwarf had been resting against it for much of the evening. Suspicions of treachery filled her mind again, but she hadn’t long to dwell upon them.
A battle had begun.
An arm’s length from the Vistani, Lord Soth moved his hands in the complex patterns of an incantation. The air before the hunchbacked giant suddenly filled with snow, then an ice wall appeared, stretching between two boulders. Barred from moving forward, the giant bellowed in rage.
Narrowing his overlarge eye at the death knight, the remaining giant advanced. He swung his crude flail, and
