The Weeping Cairn

This tale is never sung. It is spoken in half-light, near low-burning hearths or on the path to the cliffs where the wind speaks in howls. Children are warned not to whisper it too loud, lest they stir the restless. It is never spoken within 30 paces of a burial cairn.
In the days where the smoke of rebellion clung to the valleys and clans had begun to settle once more upon their ancestral stone, there rose a chieftain named Darnak. He was strong in shoulder and voice, a builder of walls and a gatherer of names. It is said that when he walked through the mountain pass, the stone cracked to let him through, and when he called a moot, no voice dared speak over his.
He was bound in braid to his brother-by-choice, Kelvarn, a quiet smith whose hands knew truth better than the ears of most men knew lies. Their braid was a double-knot, each thread coiled by the other—one gold-blond, the other coal-black—worn together in oath and in trust.
But the years turned, and Darnak grew wary of the stone around him. He looked to the lowlands, saw green banners and plundered timber, and his heart kindled with hunger. The southern traders came with wine and coin, asking for rights to mine the frost-veins beneath Hearthfell. Kelvarn counseled against it, speaking thus:
"The mountain gives us what we need, and the gods take the rest."
But Darnak struck his name into fresh stone regardless and gave away the land.
When the southerners came with fire-drills and iron teeth, the veins bled ice and stone both, and the spirits screamed in silence. The mountain quaked, and the tunnels collapsed. Forty-seven kin died beneath the rocks. Among them was Kelvarn, still pleading with the traders to leave, his hand upon the same stone that bore their names.
Darnak did not weep. He did not speak. He ordered a cairn built on the edge of Varnesk Hollow, tall and broad, carved with glory. But when he approached to place the braid of the fallen into the tomb, his own braid came undone and would not return to its shape, frozen stiff in the ice. Darnak held the braid to the stone, but the braid would not bind to the stone. No rune Darnak carved would hold, fading away over night as the winds whipped against it, tearing his name alone from the cairn. The message was clear: Darnak was no brother to Kelvarn.
On the third night, the wind carried Kelvarn's name through the longhouse chimney, and Darnak's hands grew numb with cold. Still, he refused penance. Still, he denied fault. So the stone itself spoke.
On his trip through the mountain pass, the mountain quaked and shook. The name of Kelvarn echoed through the pass, but still, Darnak pushed forward, ignoring the calls of his once-brother. The stones fell from the mountains, tears shed by the land itself, crushing beneath them the arms of Darnak, as he would never again carve a name into rock. He sought to return from the pass, and a fissure opened, causing him to stumble, the stone gripping his leg and breaking the bone, as he need not travel under his own power.
Darnak struggled against the world, and it struggled back against him. He crawled, one-legged, back to his village. When he arrived, he found that his people did not recognize the man he had become. His name would not come to tongue, and he was truly alone in his home.
He sought the traders of the south, those he had done business with. On death's door, they offered him one final deal. They had learned the wall of remembrance, kept within the longhouse, had veins of adamant metal within it. Should he sell it to them, they would erect him a grant cairn, to have him remembered for all time as a grand chieftain. Darnak agreed, and sold his people by breath and deed, dooming them to be forgotten.
The southerners were true to their word, and erected a great cairn for Darnak, laying him within it as he breathed his final breath amongst the living. None wept for Darnak, but his story was passed along by the traders, who believed he truly was a force of nature, for when his cairn was sealed, a single tear of ice welled at its base from thin air.
The cairn weeps to this day. Every year, it shed a single frozen tear—not melted by sun, not shattered by axe. No birds nest near it, and no child is allowed to play within its shadow. Those who pass it in silence are safe. Those who speak aloud the name of Darnak without reverence return with frostbite upon their tongues.
It is said only a true son of Hearthfell may stop the cairn's tears, but must bring the braid of Kelvarn to the cairn to do so. However, the braid was never recovered—only a single black thread, frozen to Kelvarn's cairn remains, and Hearthfell's wall was shattered, leaving no true son bound by stone.

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Table of Contents

Date of First Recording

187 CR

Date of Setting

164 CR

Related Ethnicities

• Tharneskari

Related Species

• Human

Related Locations

• Hearthfell

Related People

• Darnak of Hearthfell
• Kelvarn of the Second Flame