The Silver Warlord
U N D E R H O L D
The mountains had been silent for an age.
For eons, the Veshkaar Mountains had stood like a spine of broken gods across Mandalore's northern continent, peaks crowned in ice, valleys buried in storms that never broke. Even the old maps spoke of it in whispers: Silver Peak, the forbidden summit, a place where scanners failed and compasses spun, where the wind carried the echo of hammers long stilled. Miners who had gone searching for the veins of beskar rumored to lie beneath its skin had never returned. What little the surface dwellers knew was half myth, half warning. The ground was not dead there, it was waiting.
It was at dawn that the waiting ended.
The first sign came not from the sky but from beneath it, a low, steady pulse felt through the soil like a living heartbeat. Then the sound: a deep, metallic rhythm, too regular to be quake or thunder. It spread across the range, each beat reverberating through stone and air until it became a single, unified vibration. Birds fled. Clouds recoiled. The land itself seemed to tense at its utterance. Finally, the mountain opened its eyes. Silver Peak split from crown to root, seams of molten light etching runes into its flanks. Fire erupted from vents that had slept since days of the Mandalorian Wars, painting the snowfields in golden light. The ice didn't just melt, it evaporated. Countless millenia of permafrost vanished into clouds of steam that turned the clouds into a fog drenched dream. The world's crust groaned, and from within came the shriek of long dormant, ancient gears grinding against one another. Beskar pistons screaming as they moved for the first time in thousands of years. When the roar subsided, a sound rose in its place, deep, harmonic, deliberate. It was not music. It was chanting. A thousand voices speaking as one, their tones so low the air itself vibrated with them. The words were older than the modern Mandalorian tongue, older than Basic, born from Proto Mando'a:
Tor choruk dura.
Shen traar dralir.
Kad vaar soln.
It was then that the hammer answered. From the light and steam strode legions clad in the armor of myth, warriors of silver and gunmetal, their helms marked with the ancient sigil of Bruul. Each plate of their beskar gleamed like molten ore cooling into form. Behind them marched constructs of metal and beast, war machines whose joints hissed with living heat, Basilisk droids reforged in silver and black. The air trembled with the sound of them, a rhythm older than language: step, hammer, breath, chant. Right at their head came a figure carved of mountain and fire. Zurak Bruul walked like the mountain given form, his warplate veined in blue silver light that pulsed with every measured stride. In his left hand he carried a weapon too large to be mortal, a hammer whose head burned with trapped stars, kyber crystals bleeding their imprisoned light through cracks in blackened beskar. Each step he took struck the ground with a low thunder, each exhale fogging the air like a furnace sigh.
Behind him, the great gates of the Underhold continued to widen, vast enough for a starship to pass through, carved from the bedrock of Silver Peak itself. Within, the glow of the forges burned like a second sun. The interior stretched for miles, a cathedral of stone and machinery where magma flowed through runic channels, feeding reactors and anvil-strongholds. The Underhold had been myth. Now it breathed. When Zurak emerged fully into the pale dawn, the clouds split. Sunlight struck the mountain's crown, and the entire range shimmered as if awakening from a dream. Steam wreathed the valley in ghostly halos. The Taung had come back into the light for the first time in over four millennium. He stood there in silence, immense and still, the living testament of the creed that had shaped him. The air around him tasted of iron and ozone. His gaze turned upward, through the swirling mist, toward the empty horizon. The mountain had called to all of Mandalore. The Taung had come home.
The chant swelled again, echoing down the valleys like thunder made language:
Tor choruk dura.
Shen traar dralir.
Kad vaar soln.
The mountain answered with a roar. The chant faded, but the echoes lingered like heartbeats in the stone. The forges behind him roared anew, yet Zurak didn't turn. He stood at the gate, a colossus cast in metal and memory. Steam curled around his armor like incense. Beneath the endless sky, he waited. The mountain had spoken. Now it would listen.
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