Dueling Wyrms
Forged deep within the halls of Thornbeard Forge, the Dueling Wyrms of Gunabash preserves a legend still whispered among the mountain holds—spoken low, as if loud voices might wake something old in the peaks.
In his youth, Raggard Thornbeard witnessed a battle unlike any recorded in song.
The sky above Gunabash had been restless for days—clouds stacking like piled slate, winds snapping down the passes with the bite of winter even in fair season. Hunters returned early. Pack-beasts balked at narrow trails. The mountain itself felt as if it were bracing.
Then the storm broke open… and something far larger than weather moved inside it.
Two ancient dragons met above the peaks, their first collision cracking thunder from clear air. One burned with furious heat—fire that turned cloud to smoke and painted the stone below in ember-light. The other carried cold like a crown—frost and lightning threaded through its wake, leaving the air glittering and sharp. They did not circle like beasts testing weakness. They struck like rivals who already knew one another’s name.
For days they fought.
Not in a straight line that a scout could track, but across the whole spine of the range—appearing above one ridge, vanishing into cloud, then erupting again over another pass in a burst of flame and storm. Their war shook stone and sky alike. Avalanches answered their dives. Thin towers of rock snapped under the pressure of their wake. Dwarven lookouts sheltered behind crenels and watched in silence, because there are moments when even the proudest halls can only bear witness.
No victory came.
Claw met scale. Flame met frost. Rage met restraint. Neither wyrm could finish the other. Each seemed to know exactly when to retreat, exactly when to press, exactly when to deny the killing blow. It was not a duel of simple strength—it was a contest of will, of ancient grudges, of power measured across lifetimes.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the battle slipped away.
Storm and cloud swallowed both dragons. Lightning stitched the sky shut behind them. The wind changed. The mountains went still again—too still, the way a forge goes quiet when the metal is removed and the heat remains, lingering in the stone.
No carcass fell. No triumphant roar echoed down the valleys.
Only absence.
Only the uneasy certainty that such a war does not end merely because it leaves your sight.
Few believe their conflict is truly finished.
This relic captures that moment suspended in time—twin wyrms coiled in eternal conflict, mouths open in challenge, locked at the height of battle. Their bodies form living motion around the tower’s paths, as if the dice must travel through the very shape of their rivalry. The sculpt is not peace. It is balance held under strain—the thin line where outcome has not yet chosen a side.
Each route reflects the tension of fate itself, where every roll echoes the clash of titans long past. And in the way the wyrms oppose one another—heat and cold, force and refusal—you can feel the lesson Gunabash remembers:
Some struggles don’t resolve cleanly.
They persist.
They return.
Raggard’s Note (Curator’s Commentary)
A mountain teaches patience. It teaches the value of holding. It teaches you that some things can be endured, and some things must be answered.
What I saw above Gunabash was not a beast-fight. It was a feud given wings.
I do not claim to know why those wyrms hated one another—only that the hatred was old enough to shake stone, and disciplined enough to last for days without either losing control. That is what haunts me most.
Rage is common.
But rage with restraint?
That is a weapon.
So I forged this piece to remember the shape of that moment—and to remind the table that not every conflict ends with a victor. Sometimes it simply waits beyond the next cloudbank.
