The Smith's Hammer

Summary

Before thought gave the world had form, all that was, was dream and divine. From the collective dream, emerged gods and from the dream of the gods, emerged the thinkers - the sapient species of Ærth - who named the world and everything in it, and brought all things into being.
As the gods watched the thinkers craft reality and form and thought, the dragons of the void dreamed into being wraiths and spectres and wyrms, which they set against the thinkers. The gods saw that the dragons and their creations desired nothing more than the end of thought and a return to the eternal dream, and eleven of their number resolved not to take form, but to stand watch and to battle the great dragons for all time, carving out a space for thought in the dream.
Each deity took up a different weapon and, as each swore to protect the thinkers, they gave them the physical counterpart of their divine weapon through which the faithful would remember them and their holy duty. That one known as the Smith - for Theirs had been a dream of metal, and was responsible for forging the weapons - bore a hammer.
Each of the divine weapons, which are holier than totems and more revered than relics, resides in a place of honour, but where the hammer of the Smith should be is only an empty reliquary.
The story of disappearance of the Hammer begins and ends with the great fracture - a cataclysmic upheval that drove the rift between Northern and Southern Ewaes. The sanctuary of the Smith disappeared beneath the waves. Said to be the result of a scale of one of the dragon touching Ærth, the rift remains a magical dead zone to this day. The sancuary has been recreated in the @Witlandal and tended by the Guardians of the Forge and the vally echoes with the voices of the faithful singing the Smith's kennings in the hope that, by naming Them, the guardians can aid the Smith in Their battle against the dragons.