You were raised within the timber walls of an Orc stronghold, where every life had a place and every pair of hands owed something to the clan. Yours belonged at the forge. You learned to work the bellows before you were strong enough to lift a warhammer, and by the time you came of age you could judge a blade by its ring against the anvil.
Skill alone did not make you welcome. You questioned methods your elders considered settled and saved foreign weapons from the smelter so you could study their balance, rivets, and temper. Dwarven joins, Imperial plate, and the fine edges carried by travelling Redguards fascinated you. To the stronghold smith, your curiosity looked less like ambition than contempt for the craft you had inherited.
The quarrel that ended your old life began over a commission for the chief. You refused to copy the same heavy weapon his household had carried for generations, insisting you could make something stronger by combining what you had learned from outsiders. The chief called the work an insult. When you would not break it and begin again, he cast you from the stronghold and forbade you the forge.
You left with an apron, a hammer, and whatever tools you could carry. In the years that followed, you earned meals repairing farm tools, shod horses for soldiers, worked dangerous mines for a share of their ore, and slept beside unfamiliar anvils. Every master taught you something: new ways to fold steel, fit plate, shape a crossbow, or coax value from metal another smith would discard. Each lesson hardened your belief that no single clan could claim the whole truth of craftsmanship.
Word eventually reached you of Skyrim’s strongholds, their rich orichalcum seams, and the smiths who still worked beneath Malacath’s gaze. You turned north determined to earn a place among them—not by birthright, but by making yourself too useful to dismiss. You would master every material Skyrim could yield, forge arms worthy of its greatest warriors, and one day return to your old clan carrying proof that exile had made you greater.
You never reached the first forge. While crossing the border into Skyrim, an Imperial patrol mistook you for one of the fugitives moving through the pass. Your tools were taken, your hands were bound, and you were thrown onto a prison cart bound for Helgen.
