The Sky-Stone Sickness

The fallen sky-stone northeast of Þýdal was first a promise. In the days after the Stonehome warning, a party went north through danger and returned with enough star-metal for the village smiths to forge weapons before the horde arrived. From that metal came Thordak's warhammer and Starspike, weapons remembered long after Þýdal's palisade burned.

But the crater was more than a source of metal. The sky-stone carried draugrveiki, an undead sickness that twisted flesh and drew scavengers into worse shapes. Wolves near the site became corrupted. Goblins later came to study the crater, not to cleanse it, but to see whether its disease could be weaponized.

When rumors reached Niðaróss, the crater became a threat that could not be left behind the lines. The later expedition found a hunter's camp marked by blood, fought wolves in different stages of corruption, and encountered a diseased hunter whose warning came too late to save him. Near the crater itself, goblin artificers and specialists had already begun their work among the rocks.

The danger ended only after the second expedition defeated the immediate threats and Wavesia Fjordmist used the cleansing force of her water powers to purify the site. The sky-stone's metal had already changed the course of the war. Its sickness, once cleansed, became part of the campaign's darker history rather than an active plague.

The crater is no longer a living danger, and its recoverable metal has been claimed. What remains is memory: the bright gift of star-iron, and the cost of touching a thing that fell burning from the sky.