One morning, a song echoed in the hearts of adventurous dwarves. They came up from their delves, leaving behind smith’s hammers in the caverns of Lord’s Hall and runes in the workshops of Hammerknell, and abandoned their posts in the highlands, leaving axes and shields on the foothpaths of Moonshade. This was a song of action. This was a song of adventure. This was a song from the first of the bards, Karine, and it called those dwarves to a distant island called Ember Isle.

On this isle, they found Kelari, a breed of elves they’d had little dealings with in more than a thousand years. They expected to be met with suspicion, perhaps even hostility, but though the Kelari as a whole did not welcome them, representatives of a group known as the Keepers of the Flame were at the shore to meet their boats. They too had heard the song, but instead of calling them, it told them to be ready to welcome newcomers.

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As it turned out, this order had a dwarf among its founders. This was Karine, the first of the bards. She had been one of the heroes to imprison the dragon Maelforge and then remained on Ember Isle to help begin the order that would see he remained locked up. All agreed, it had to have been her song that brought them together. Despite the importance of their task, the Keepers’ numbers had been falling in recent years, as many Kelari found their ways too old and restrictive. Karine drew the dwarven heroes to the island to embolden and revitalize the order.

But it did not seem that every dwarf called was meant to join the Keepers. They had no skill in magic or in battle. They were craftsmen, through and through, the greatest of their generation. It seemed that they were brought for another purpose. They named themselves the Farclan and set out to build a settlement called Farhall, content to wait for when their purpose on the island would be revealed.

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Though the sun scorched skin built to sleep deep beneath the ground in hidden delves, they set about using the wood of their boats as a basis for the new structures, adding to it with what they could scavenge from the island. The Kelari, outside of the Keepers, were not welcoming to these newcomer or their attempts to pull stone and wood from the jungle, however, and so their hunts turned up few additional materials. For that fact, Farhall continued to look much like a ship tossed to shore. Still, it grew and thrived, as the creativity and industriousness of the dwarves pushed it forward.

On the discovery of the Forge of Creation, the purpose of Farclan was revealed, but that is a story for another day.