Dwarven Two-Handed Axe

The Double Labor

The dwarven two-handed axe draws no line between work and war: the same bite opens a vein of rock and an armored man, and all its force gathers onto a single edge. What it asks in return: it has little reach, demands the whole body, and a missed blow is paid for in the time it takes to raise so heavy a head again.

It all begins underground. At adolescence, every dwarf must discharge the Dürnskild, the rock-debt: ten years in the mines, pick in hand, at the end of which alone the mountain grants him a name and a place among his own. His first weapon is therefore a tool, wielded so long it has become part of his body. The axe itself is poured in rock-iron, struck with the workshop mark and the rune reddened each winter, and sharpened on the mine's grindstone, like a pick: an edge made to last, chipped by neither iron nor stone.

This is why the two-handed axe is, by far, the most taught of dwarven weapons: of them all, its balance comes closest to the pick. A dwarf out of the Dürnskild finds in it a motion he already owns, repeated a thousand times against the rock. No dancing: he plants his feet and lets the mass fall, in short, low arcs that split a shield in one blow. And he strikes the way he once cut, where the material has a flaw, the shoulder, the knee, the joint of a harness, the way one looks for the cleavage plane in a stone. Between the vein he opens and the enemy he fells, there is no border: same arm, same blow, same labor.