Born in 141; the youngest daughter, sixth of eight children of the brewer Olin Lashrinse, later militia commander of The Gravel of Bristles, and Erush Craftauthored, master astronomer and author of many books.
Lòr was a lively and energetic youth, always more interested in the pursuit of thrills rather than studies, following her heart more than her head. This disposition would often get her into all sorts of trouble and exasperated her long-suffering parents. Her scholarly father Erush in particular was troubled by his daughter's wild demeanor – she seemed to be in all things his exact opposite.
As she grew, Lòr started to feel the pressures of society upon her. She made a conscious effort to conform and focus her energies on traditionally acceptable dwarven occupations.
In 153, Lòr married Melbil Workflags, a humble fishery worker. They settled in the hillocks of Salvechained, where Lòr became a jeweler. For fifty-four years they led a quiet and uneventful life. Lòr worked diligently enough, producing cut jewels end jewel-encrusted goods of an adequate but unexceptional quality. Her heart was never really in her work.
Kogan Beastchanneled, Lòr and Melbil's eldest daughter, was born in 161. She was a happy and content child, and when she became of age, she followed her father into the fishery trade.
In 185, a second daughter was born. They named her Dîshmab Curldaggers. Dîshmab was her sister Kogan's younger double in looks, but in temperament one could not have been more unlike the other. In fact, Dîshmab was very much like her mother at her age. While Kogan would sit quietly in the tavern listening to a poet or a storyteller, Dîshmab would be in the war dog kennels instead, playing and fighting with the dogs, coming home long after bedtime covered in bruises and scratches but laughing happily. Once she caused an incident that had both her parents sternly berated by the local overseer. She had only wanted to help one of the craftsdwarves whose bone supplies were running low – what better way than to bring him an animal with a lot of big bones. She had ended up riding a wild draltha through the food stockpile, knocking barrels over and making a mess that took so long to mop up that no-one in the hillocks could ignore the resulting miasma. Melbil was mortified, but Lòr was forced to cover her face to hide her mirth.
No mother would admit to loving one of her children more than another, but the fiery Dîshmab brought out something in Lòr that the milder Kogan never did. She reminded her so much of herself, of the real her that she had kept hidden all these years. When all others frowned upon Dîshmab's unseemly behaviour, Lòr smiled and consoled her child and gently encouraged her to follow her own heart and not let her path be dictated to her by the timid mores of her conservative little community. Lòr wanted to give her daughter the free life of adventure that she had not got for herself, and with the support of her mother, Dîshmab became more rebellious and impulsive yet.
In 197, Dîshmab married Vucar Bodicepick, son of the bone carver she had once tried to help with her youthful draltha-wrangling. He was handsome and charming, and a few years older than her – she was quickly swept off her feet, but the relationship didn't last. Beneath his dashing exterior, Dîshmab found Vucar provincial and uninteresting. His ambitions reached no further than to follow his father's career as a bone carver in Salvechained. The disappointed Dîshmab left Vucar after only a few months and decided to find her own destiny in the wild world. She left Salvechained against the will of all but her proud mother, and wandered the wilds looking for adventure and great deeds for three years.
In the year 200 in The Colorless Jungles, Dîshmab's impetuousness got her into trouble of a terminal sort. She confronted the bronze colossus Lek Reignmost the Iron of Influences. It was one of the only ones of its kind, associated with war, strength and metals.
Lek Reignmost had been undefeated since the Age of Myth, and sadly, remains so to this day. The brave Dîshmab was struck down.
When news reached her of her daughter's untimely death, Lòr Ropefly was utterly devastated. She never worked another day as a jeweler, and for seven years, she seeked solace in a goblet of bilberry wine. The worst part of her grief was the guilt she felt. Her husband, the heartbroken Melbil, never blamed her in any way for encouraging the life choices that had led to their daughter's death, but in her heart, Lòr wished he did; felt that he aught to.
In 207, Lòr had finally had enough of herself and wallowing in bottomless self-pity. The decision had been growing in her for a long time, and now a dam broke. Continuing to live this quiet lie would be to shame the memory of Dîshmab. She smashed the glass goblet that had been her constant companion for too long, armed herself from the hillocks' weapons and armour stockpiles, and with only a brief goodbye to her baffled husband and daughter, left Salvechained for good. Lòr began wandering the wilds.
At first, she followed the route of Dîshmab, harbouring vague ideas of taking revenge on her bronze killer, but the trail ran cold after a while. Lek Reignmost had long since moved on to terrorize other, distant communities. Fortunately so, for few who ever encountered the colossus escaped with their lives. As the months and years wore on, Lòr's vengeful anger faded, remaining a deep sadness but no longer blinding her with hate. At times, sitting by her campfire under the sheltering overhang of a cliffside, she could even find some measure of peace.
In 218, after many years of lonesome wandering in the wilds of the world, broken only rarely by brief meetings with other travelers, Lòr crossed the path of an elven trading caravan near the edges of The Beautiful Jungle and they shared a campfire for safety against the night. Sitting around the fire that the elves made in their odd fashion out of uncut logs, grown and shed by trees under the weird coercion of the elves, the merchants told Lòr a harrowing tale. The elven communities nearby had been plagued by a ghastly creature. An eyeless freak! One elven herbalist had been attacked and defeated but managed to escape. The beast had then abducted the scout Thilu Scholarblossoms, and using some horrible mutative power, twisted and deformed her into his own likeness – turning her into his eyeless freak bride. This had happened some three years earlier; now the vile thing had again been spotted in the jungle not far from here.
At this, Lòr's anger flamed up anew. Here was another stricken community, another mother whose daughter had been robbed from her by some foul, evil being. And it was nearby, here in this jungle somewhere. At first light the next morning, Lòr left the elves and went monster-hunting.
She found her quarry easily enough; it lumbered along steadily through the jungle, with much rustling of bushes and cracking of branches.
Its name was Ufalo. A large eyeless humanoid, it had three stubby tails, its muscles and sinews moving visibly under its translucent leathery skin.
Lòr confronted Ufalo and, at last, let go her years of frustration and grief, venting all of her accumulated pain onto him. The ferocity of her attack overpowered her much larger foe, and the hulking fiend went down under her furious strikes. Lòr did not quit hacking and slashing at the quaking corpse until she was completely exhausted, long after Ufalo's breathing had ceased.
For a long while, she sat with her back to a tree trunk, staring at ufalo's mutilated carcass, until her pulse and breathing had evened out again and feeling returned to her fingertips. When she dragged herself back onto her shaking legs, wiped the gore from her iron short sword and sheathed it with some difficulty, Lòr realized that she had never in her life felt such satisfaction, such exhilaration and pure joy at being alive, as she did during the fight – in the very jaws of deadly peril.
From this moment, Lòr's aimless wandering of the wilds was transformed into a self-imposed quest. She now focused all her energies on the hunting down and eradicating of monsters, and on other endeavours that would further that aim. She entered ancient ruins looking for monsters and treasures, spending what loot she found on food, drink, and upgrading her weapons and armour for the next foray. For nine years she lived in this way, finding sufficient meaning for her existence in the thrill of danger and the joy of victory. On one such raid in a forbidding old ruin, she found the masterfully crafted bismuth bronze spear that became her signature weapon.
In the year 227, the now eighty-six-year-old Lòr started to feel tired of sleeping rough, and began seeking employment in dwarven settlements. She visited a number of villages, towns, and fortresses, looking for a site where access to deep caverns would provide plenty of opportunity for monster-hunting as well as the comforts of a well-supplied dining room and a comfortable bed. Her restless nature did not make it easy, though. Over a few months, Lòr visited eleven different sites, eventually settling in the town of Workerdwellers, but already after a scant year she moved on again.
She was stopping for a while in the town of Wispzeal, a favourite location that she had stayed in repeatedly in the past, when events conspired to force her into an unwelcome situation that would test all of her particular set of skills.
In the early spring of 229, The Bear of Wading attacked The Fellowship of Urging of The Union of Meeting at Wispzeal.
The Bear of Wading was an elven civilization, or rather a marauding tribe, that was notorious for attacking peaceful settlements. They had already been here in the year before and caused much grief, so the town council were unprepared for the threat to return so soon.
The attack was led by the elf Ave Growlqueens. The scars of past battles made her a fearsome sight. She had lost her right eye and upper front tooth to dwarves in previous raids on other sites, which added to her warlike look.
Although all of Lòr's fighting experience was in single combat and not in organized military tactics, she was still by far the most seasoned warrior in Wispzeal. She quickly rounded up the able-bodied citizens, armed them as well as she could with mismatched pieces of armour and weapons from the local stockpiles of mainly trade goods, and organized a hastily thrown-up defense in the natural choke-point of the trade depot access tunnel, just inside the main gates.
Despite Lòr's fierce efforts, her skills as a tactician were no match to those of the experienced raiding party captain she faced. She fought in the front lines with the fury of a cornered wolverine, but her mighty spear alone was not enough to turn the tide of the battle. It was only the desperate ferocity and unrelenting doggedness of the defenders that stopped them from being overrun, and they suffered many casualties.
Among the attackers was Nidela Lerimawada Ale Equuyi, "Nidela Hairybeans the Leaves of Perfecting", one of the first of elvenkind. His primal power was not easily withstood, and he single-handedly struck down five defenders. In all, twelve lives were lost in the defense of Wispzeal, and many were wounded before Lòr managed to wrest a slight positional advantage from the attackers, and finally repulse the invasion.
That night, Lòr dined in the tavern with the citizens of Wispzeal, and they raised toasts in her honour. Despite the losses they had suffered, they knew that she was the one who had saved the town from being pillaged by the elves. Her deeds in the battle earned her the sobriquet that she would proudly carry for the rest of her life: Dëngstamtagùz Noglesh, "the Vermilion Leap of Savages".
The morning after the battle, the tired and aching dwarves of Wispzeal started the tedious and gruesome work of hauling corpses and cleaning up, but Lòr packed her backpack with a few portions of quarry bush roast, shouldered her spear, and headed down the hillside.
She kept looking for a place to settle permanently. Over the next couple of years, she visited several sites and stayed for a year at a time first in Whippedcook and then in Holdbored.
In the late spring of 232, Lòr visited Healedsilvers. It was a booming new fortress, having gone from a small outpost to a thriving metropolis in just a couple of short years. Recently, the busy miners of Healedsilvers had pierced the ceiling of a vast and uncharted cavern system. The many precious gems and ores therein, and the bottomless magma pool that now powered their metal industries, were at once the source of their newfound wealth and the hunting ground of many dangerous creatures. The halls of Healedsilvers were famous for the beauty of their engravings, their kitchens for the skill of their cooks, their bedrooms for their opulence. This, finally, was what Lòr had been looking for.
In the early summer of 232, Lòr made an agreement with The Joyous Theater, becoming a resident of Healedsilvers to eradicate monsters.
Healedsilvers was a beautiful and comfortable place to live for a warrior who had spent most of a quarter of a century in the trackless wild. Lòr did not rest on her laurels, though: she worked for a living. On most days, she would walk down past the farm plots and the fishery workshops, following the shoreline of the underground lake to the gold veins, where the miners and haulers were always busy extracting the wealth of the fortress from the bones of the earth, to the downward ramps and the forests of enormous fungi in the deeper caverns beyond. This vast, dark world was full of the echoes of dripping and rushing water and the stirrings of myriad lifeforms that provided Lòr with many worthy uses for her time. These would range from the giant olms and cave toads of the levels nearest the fortress, to more exotic and challenging prey further down.
Sometimes, her prey did not wait in the caverns to be found, but came up looking for trouble.
In the early spring of 233, the cave crocodile Confinedworlds the Indigo Fords found his way into the waters nearest the fortress, and burst upon the unsuspecting fisherdwarves and farmers on the shore. Six dwarves were brutally mauled to death before a thrust of a bismuth bronze spear brought the rampage to an end.
It was not always beasts from the deep that required the special attention of Lòr. Sometimes, threats would arise from within the very population of the fortress itself. Mistakes made in the organisation and management of the fortress caused a number of problems, that would, in many cases, escalate into unsustainable stress for certain workers. In the early autumn of 233, one such case came to a tipping point. The surgeon Rigòth Cunningboard had been toiling under impossible conditions for far too long, and now her mental fortitude broke. She went berserk, attacking the nearest random bystander. Stukos Goodceiling was mortally wounded. Lòr stepped in and humanely euthanized the screaming, raving Rigòth with a spear through the brain.
Saving this worrying incident of civil unrest, time had hitherto passed peacefully enough for Lòr, hunting the natural animals of the deep places, but in late autumn she had her first encounter with a living relic of another age.
In a time before time, it had begun wandering the depths of the world.
Its name was Amo Larimothida Dipíraca, "Amo Arrowdented the Scorching Cut", and it was one of the only ones of its kind. its form was like that of a great scorpion, its bloated body covered by a tough taupe-coloured exoskeleton. In its fearsome head, the violet glow of three eyes was framed by a pair of squat antennae. High above its back, a massive stinger swayed on the end of a powerful tail, pregnant with a deadly venom. It was associated with chaos and caverns. An old enemy of both humans and dwarves, this was not his first killing foray; and he knew what he was doing.
Three dwarves were killed before the squads of the fortress militia could assemble to face the beast. Their iron short swords stopped Amo's advance and held his attention long enough for Lòr to seize her chance. While the swords of the militia kept him hemmed in, Lòr's spear found its way into the vitals of Amo Arrowdented and ended his ageless, hateful life.
Shaken as she was by the horror of the forgotten beast, killing it gave Lòr a taste of that same satisfaction that she had felt when she killed Ufalo, the eyeless freak. This was not just a dangerous but innocent wild animal driven by natural instinct, but a darker thing with a mind and a will to do harm to dwarvenkind. She had rid the world of an ageless evil, a thing that should not be, like the thing that took her daughter Dîshmab thirty-three years ago. With joy, she dedicated the kill to Dîshmab. Her daughter would be avenged, the weregild accumulating kill by kill with every evil creature that her mother brought down.
A year later, in the late autumn of 234, her revenge was again wrought upon a forgotten beast.
Squirming and fidgeting, pushing its massive bulk between the stalagtites of the caverns, its jagged and close-set dark peach-coloured scales scraping against the stone, Ór Tholnalthish emerged from the depths. Its name meant "Ór Deepmenace", and it was fitting. Born in eternal darkness, it was a huge eyeless monstrosity, shaped like a stegosaur with long curving horns.
Lòr was not by any means the only monster slayer in Healedsilvers. There were many deep caverns and many dangerous creatures to hunt, and many adventurers had settled in the fortress. One was Atír Futuretreaty, a former ranger and thief who had seen action in war against goblins in Earthenburns in 228. Atír and Lór, along with the other slayers, had spent many nights drinking together and were on friendly terms, but not close; the violence in each of their pasts having made them both distant and self-sufficient.
Atír was the one who first encountered Ór Deepmenace. She cunningly used the beast's ungainly bulk against it in the narrow passages, and managed to manoeuvre it into a tight space between stalagtite pillars, where it stuck, unable to advance or turn. Its unprotected side was now exposed, but when Atír closed in for the kill, the beast suddenly squirmed, tore its front part free and with a wild twisting of its neck, impaled her on its long horns. Alerted by the sounds of the fight, Lòr arrived on the scene too late to save Atír, but just in time to deliver a swift strike before Ór could fully squirm free and turn to face her. The bismuth bronze spearhead wedged itself under a scale and slid in between two ribs, piercing the lung. The forgotten beast let out a choking bellow and jerked its bulk back, almost ripping the spear from Lòr's grip, but she managed to pull it back out of the wound. The beast made a shuddring lunge at Lòr, but she jumped out of the reach of its horns. She could see that close-quarters combat with such a hulking monster many times her size would be suicidal, and she correctly judged the wound she had given it to be mortal. In the narrow caverns, Lòr nimbly kept her distance from the erratically swinging horns and retreated in front of the wheezing, gradually slowing beast until, its lungs filling with blood, it finally stopped advancing and sunk to the loamy cavern floor. Its fidgeting finally subsided into stillness.
That night, at the banquet arranged by the mayor of Healedsilvers in her honour, Lòr raised a toast to the memory of Atír and of Dîshmab, and of all whose lives were cut short by evil forces.
Despite her sorrow for the death of Atír and the other victims of the monsters she fought, and the mounting general unease within the fortress, Lòr felt these few years in Healedsilvers to be the best of her life. She had found a place to call home, where the people appreciated her for her talents and were grateful for everything she did. She was fulfilling what she saw as her calling – fighting the good fight against the forces of Chaos.
And for a time, she was happy.
In the midwinter of 235, the tale of the fortress of Healedsilvers was nearing its end. As has been told before, a horrifying zombie outbreak had been followed by cascading bouts of madness among the dwarves, murders; and then the calamitous attack of the forgotten beast Slitherbait the Mastery of Reigning. Spending much of her time exploring the deep caverns, Lòr was not present for any of these events. When she returned from her hunt to find that the militia had killed a beast at the cost of sixty dwarven lives, she promised that next time there was an attack she would be there to defend the fortress. She would soon deliver on that promise.
In the early spring of 236, goblins from The Curses of Hate attacked The Joyous Theater of The Pillar of Paper at Healedsilvers. The invaders came in overwhelming force, while the dwarves were still reeling from losing two thirds of their population to zombies and beasts.
There was no warning, and no way to mount an organised defense. The dwarves were scattered, separated from each other, and killed one after the other. Lòr gathered a handful of civilian dwarves and attempted to create a defensible position by barricading the entrance to the library staircase, but there was no time. The goblins swarmed over the defenses and pushed Lòr back, down the stairs and into the library itself. It was here that she made her last stand. Surrounded and outnumbered twenty to one, she nonetheless sold her life dearly. Ten goblins fell to her spear before the end came.
In the early spring of 236, Lòr was struck down by the goblin Osnun Sinfulracks with a copper war hammer in Healedsilvers. The fortress fell with her.
She was a short, sturdy creature, fond of drink and industry.