Before the Forge
Before there was fire, there was only the cold.
A smith walked through it. Nobody remembers his name, and in time neither did he. He wanted one thing: to make something that would never break.
He struck a spark into the dark, and the dark answered. The flame that rose was blue, and it was alive. He built walls around it and an anvil beneath it, and called it the Forge. It asked only one thing in return: to be fed.
He fed it iron. Years passed, then hundreds of years, and the iron melted into the fire until the flame burned teal, thick and slow like lava.
When he pulled the metal back out, it wasn't iron any more. The teal fire had made something new: the first Soulsteel, metal with something alive inside it.
So he fed the Soulsteel back into the fire. More ages went by, longer than anyone could count, and what was alive inside the metal caught. The flame turned purple, a flame of souls. Wherever it burned, the dead began to stand.
Even that wasn't enough. So he fed it himself, poured his own heart into the fire, and waited. When the flame finally burned orange, the world he had come from was long gone.
He wasn't a smith any more. He was the Forgemaster.
He thought the flames were nothing. But every time one was put out to make way for the next colour, it screamed. He never listened. He didn't know what he was waking.
For an age longer than all the others, only orange burned. Then he felt something stir. One by one, the old flames were rising again.
Purple rose first. The Forgemaster remembered what purple could do: it raised the dead. So he caught it, chained it, and burned it for years to command his army, until it was nearly gone.
Then teal, slowly pulling itself together out of cooling lava, and hiding. Then blue, the oldest of all, which had never really gone out. It had been burning quietly for thousands of years, watching everything.
The Forgemaster felt them all. So he reached into his own fire, and made a hunter.
Feed the Forge.
