KETHRAHAM

KETHRAHAM

Kethraham was born in Mahn-Tor in the early years of the Third Age, child of
a goring line older than the city walls. He came north as a young bull and
took blood-oath with the early Warmaster movement during the religious civil
war of Miruvhor, fighting at the side of ogres and giants against the Savant
towers that had built their empire on woven magic and the suppression of the
warrior caste. Of the duels and field battles of those years, the Encampments
require no further record: only that Kethraham was twice marked for death in
single combat and twice walked off the sand, and that his left horn was taken
from him by a mortally wounded Savant in a duel beneath the Tower of Lights -
a duel Kethraham finished with the short blade in his off-hand, having been
disarmed of his greataxe by the same casting that took the horn.

The deed that brought his name to the heavens was The Charge. After the long
retreat of the Warmasters into the encampments, after the Savants had grown
soft inside the last of their fortified towers, Kethraham gathered every
warrior who would still answer the horn - minotaur, ogre, slith, half-elf,
and even a small band of rogue elvish priests who hated the magical castes
more than they hated him - and rode upon the Tower at the Final Sounding
along the eastern reach of Miruvhor, where the Savant Council schemed and
plotted. The Charge crossed open ground beneath a full weaving of hellfire,
brimstone, blizzard, and steel. Of the four hundred and eleven warriors who
began the run, fewer than thirty reached the foundation. Kethraham took the
gate alone, climbed nine floors through wards meant to unmake him, and
brought down the tower with his axe at the keystone of its uppermost chamber.
The Savant Council inside did not survive him. Neither, in the end, did he.

What walked from the rubble two days after was not the same. The minotaur who
had begun the run was old by the reckoning of his kin and dying of three
wounds the best surgeons could not have closed; what stood atop the broken
pinnacle and lifted its face to the sky was something else, larger and still.
The Warmasters who had followed him say only that when that face lifted, the
sky lifted back. He has been a patron of the Warmaster Encampments ever
since, and the ways of Combat are a pathway held in his hand. He still wears
the armor he died in, the stub of the horn taken from him, and the short
blade that finished that lone Savant - three reminders that the duel is the
truest form of inquiry, and that what is taken from a warrior can be earned
back across centuries.