Gotrek the Runic Dwarf Berserker stands alone amidst a mountain of severed limbs in the lightless depths of the Under-Roads, his bare, violently scarred chest heaving. The stench of black blood is thick enough to choke a cave troll, but the old dwarf merely takes a deep, rattling breath. Where other dwarves encase themselves in heavy iron and shining mithril, he wears only his skin, his fury, and a thick, braided beard stained with the ash of his ruined homeland.

Every jagged scar across his bulging torso is a ledger. Every bite mark, claw rake, and blade gouge tells the story of a nightmare from the deep that tried to claim his life—and failed. The heavy leather straps, tattered kilt, and thick survival pouches at his waist hold no gold or gems. They hold only whetstones, dried rot-meat, and the heavy burden of a survivor's guilt.

Iron rusts. Mail shatters. A shield wall breaks when the coward holding it flinches. The only true armor a dwarf has is the weight of his grudge, and the certainty that he is already a dead man.

In his massive, calloused hands, he grips twin cleaving axes. They are brutal, heavy-headed instruments of slaughter, etched deep with the glowing, forbidden runes of Reckoning. The massive iron 'R' buckled to his thick belt marks him as a doom-seeker—an exile who has sworn a sacred blood-oath to die in glorious, overwhelming combat, yet is cursed with the terrible, savage skill to survive every massacre he throws himself into.

A heavy, iron-bossed wooden shield is slung carelessly across his broad back. It is deeply splintered and gouged, a crude testament to the cowardly strikes of cavern-assassins who tried to fell him from behind. He rarely brings it to bear in a fight. Blocking is an act of preservation, and he has no interest in living forever.

I drove the left blade through the spine of the Brood-Mother when she swallowed my kin. I keep the right blade sharp for the dark god that birthed her. Tell me, surface-dweller... which axe do you think your miserable little life is worth?

When he rolls his thick shoulders and steps over the corpses of his foes, the cavern floor trembles. He is the last echoing war-cry of a forgotten mountain, a berserker who has weaponized his own grief.

Do not pray to your gods for mercy, boy. I have walked the deepest pits of this earth, and I can assure you—the gods are all hiding from me.