The goal he had feverishly pursued all these years was finished, yet the fire of yearning in his breast didn’t so much as waver. A spark of egoism, of superbia, had perhaps been passed on from the woman by whose side he had done all this.

“Then I would wield you in pursuit of glory, so that Sagas may be written in the honor of myself and my shield-siblings. You will break the backs of the wretched things in this world, be they mindless beast or vile tyrant. Our names will be sung of while we yet live, and those who would stand against us shall curse them in fear and awe of our coming.”

A memory surfaced; from that time, in the Leyline Well, when he had risked turning his friend to stone in order to bestow her the power of the earthly spirits. He remembered what they had said through him. Yes, that name would do.

“Your name will be Superbia.”

“TO DESTROY EVIL IN PURSUIT OF GLORY. YES… I SENSE THAT THINE HEART IS RIGHTEOUS. THOU ART WORTHY, SON OF HUL.”

He pulled it free, the Black Rod’s obsidian-gleaming matter crumbling around it. It was a simply shaped thing, its spearpoint a thick, four-faceted spike with a diamond footprint. Meant not for slaying men, but beings with skin of stone and iron. Each of its facets was as though a northlight-tinged mirror and each of its edges was razor sharp. The whole thing was one solid piece of antediluvian starmetal. Its metal was twisted where the spearhead met the shaft, and the bottom of its length was twisted just the same, widening out to a mushroom-shaped counterweight.

Whence freed the spear from its tomb of ice and blackstone, it shuddered in his grasp and its head twisted ninety degrees. In the blink of an eye, the spear of legend had become a beaked warhammer. It was as tall as Jorfr, but knowing of its shape-changing powers, he made the mighty hammer shorten its shaft such that it could easily fit on his belt.

He found it asinine that the only weapons he had encountered which possessed such powers were either legendary artifacts of Borean provenance, or Ikesian Captain’s Cleavers. But then, the Sage of Fog had visited Borea when Jorfr was but a child; he recalled hearing of his visit. Unlike theirs, the Sage’s time in Borea had barely left a mark.

“Perhaps he just got inspired,” he thought.

The druids who had guarded the spear’s resting place politely stopped him before he could leave. One of them snapped into a trance, his eyes glazing over and filling with ice-blue light as he looked at Jorfr. The druid’s presence grew a hundredfold in that moment, and his voice boomed with a semblance of the Revenant King’s own speech.

“HUL’S WEAPON. I WOULD SEE IT.”

Jorfr raised the hammer, and willed it to extend to its full length.

“...TRULY, YOU HAVE IT. GOOD. YOU MAY GO.”

That druid proceeded to snap out of it just as Jorfr made his way away from that place, and he dispersed his compatriots, turning their efforts to something more productive than guarding nothing.

His return to the Bjorn longhouse served to reignite the revelry to a yet higher fever pitch than before. The fact the legendary weapon of Hul was now a hammer roused only marginal surprise, with the strongest reactions nearly universally consisting of people double-taking at its shape and then suddenly remembering that it could, indeed, change its form. Though knowledge of Hul had been restored to every living soul under Borea’s sky and every trueborn Borean in the world, many had simply never thought of Hul or of the Serpentkiller, so it took a direct and overt trigger for this new knowledge to surface.

Time continued to pass. While the Revenant King enacted his righteous judgment upon the guilty and the city’s hardy people came together to rebuild, Zelsys, Zefaris, and Ingvald worked on preparing the Impelling Arm for its protective role in the Butcher’s final reforging. In compounding Antediluvian glyphs with Ingvald’s own skill and knowledge, they created an array of five starmetal talismans and a great array of supple fabric bindings. Both of these were densely populated by eldritch glyphwork; Ingvald chiseled, etched, and inlaid the talismans, while Zefaris used a great amount of precious ink to inscribe the bindings.

Zel had looked forward to hunting down the beasts to use as sacrifices for empowering these talismans, but it was cut short when several clans stepped in to offer beasts from their own vaults. From what she’d done publicly to the recently-revealed truths of the Hulson-Ramdall Blood Feud and the restoration of Hul’s memory, it seemed that many people in Oasis City felt indebted to her and hers. Knowing well that it wasn’t a good idea to deny a Borean the opportunity to settle a perceived debt, she accepted these offers.

The sting of disappointment was quenched by five absolutely massive frozen beasts, lined up on a heavy-duty cargo sled. With these beasts in tow, she ventured to the Spirit Grove, deep within the Crescent Jungle, leaving the Butcher with Zefaris so as not to risk its spirit manifesting in that place. She expected it to take several days to transport the sacrifices to the grove, as she had assumed that the sled wouldn’t be able to go there directly. A high-up path built between massive trees proved her wrong; as it seemed, the Crescent Jungle had some significant infrastructure, when it came to important locations.

Guided by druids to this sacred place, she found that the feelings it elicited were unsettlingly similar to the Leyline Well beneath the Newman Sect grounds, and yet, the atmosphere was also fundamentally different.

Neither visiting the Spirit Grove nor creating the talismans for the Impelling Arm led to any incidents of note. In fact, the Spirit Grove’s druidic order seemed to be nearly totally disconnected from the politics of Oasis City. As far as she could tell, they were merely loyal to the Revenant King, rather than acting as a direct arm of his authority. They had been largely unaware of the Hulson-Ramdall Blood Feud, or its wide-reaching consequences.