'Empty ashes of war, devoid of any memories of battle. Unable to apply any kind of affinity in their current state, but can be used by Smithing Master Hewg of the Roundtable Hold to recreate other ashes.' Hewg sits chained in the Roundtable's smithy, an old creature of indeterminate species. His captivity, he eventually admits, is a fearsome curse put on him by Queen Marika herself, and his task is precise: to forge a weapon capable of slaying a god. Until it is done he cannot leave. He polishes the Tarnished's weapons, copies Ashes of War onto blank vessels, and hammers, endlessly, at the commission of the very goddess whose order the Tarnished is dismantling.

Hewg's slow self-revelation is the canon's second great quiet tragedy: who he was before the chains, the game never says. What it shows is a prisoner who has made the burden his own, 'It is what I wish,' he says of the god-slaying work. When the Roundtable burns and his chains no longer hold anything, he stays at the anvil anyway; freedom changes nothing for a smith whose task is unfinished. Roderika the spirit-tuner, whose chrysalis he carried and whose gift he nurtured, keeps him company to the end, and by the end, the weapon in the Tarnished's hands is exactly what Marika ordered: sharp enough to slay a god.

◆ Sources

ItemLost Ashes of War

Empty ashes of war, devoid of any memories of battle. Unable to apply any kind of affinity in their current state, but can be used by Smithing Master Hewg of the Roundtable Hold to recreate other ashes.