Merenin

Merenin is the first king to unite the dwarven realms, a runic warrior monk of Askenar's bloodline who dresses like an ascetic despite possessing a kingdom's wealth.

As the first son of the king of Kaz'Nakaram he expected to spend his life guarding a bloodline and a crown that had not governed anything for twelve centuries; the castes ran Askenon and the king presided. The best day of his life was the day he learned he would have a brother. Freed from succession, he withdrew to the forest. He spent thirty years at the forge, buried every piece he deemed unworthy of his ancestry, then trained for fifty years under Kalir, the mine's undefeated champion.

His father sent him away to become a monk. Merenin later took the initiative of joining a merchant ship bound for Brazzant, and everything else came out of that decision.

Disguised as a bodyguard, Merenin joined Valin and Portin on a trade mission to Cerberus. He knocked a vampire unconscious with one punch after three mages had failed, survived Vlad Varanov's massacre and dungeon, then carved the runes Portin forged into the equipment used to kill him. Merenin returned to Kaz'Nakaram during the Great War of the Mages and took the throne for real. The caste leaders had just spent a generation at war with the merchants and had very little authority left to spend on him; he beat them, kept what he took, and eased a few of the restrictions. The population was delighted, which says everything about the twelve centuries before.

He treats law as sacred, not merciful. When the supreme judge Yvin used his office to secure a false conviction, Merenin executed him in his own throne room without a trial. A man who uses the law while defiling it, he ruled, has forfeited both.

Forty-four years later, Merenin refused Cerberus's request for an army; he had no need for foreign territory or metal. Gérard Alois changed his mind with a vision of Archon murdering Askenar, followed by the return of Askenar's damaged hammer. Merenin committed one hundred thousand dwarves—half his army, but none of his Valerium—in exchange for colonies and mines in the Ark. He also opened Askenar's sealed workshop and gave its unfinished war-sword to Portin.

Merenin personally led the invasion of the Sylla Peninsula. When Total Destruction forced his army into the mountains, he admitted the human population only at Daviau Morin's insistence. On the island of the Cyclops, he fought Sylla hand to hand and was outmatched until Askenar's hammer awakened. It raised a stone column as a golem, covered Merenin in unknown runes, and returned him to the fight. Sylla gave him his glaive before dying in his own Divine Judgment.

The dying censor also told Merenin that Archon had not killed Askenar. Merenin cannot prove which account was true; he went to war on the first. He survived the destruction of the island and emerged carrying both Askenar's hammer and Sylla's weapon.

He came home from that war with Askenar's hammer in one hand and the glaive of a censor in the other, and the other kingdoms of Askenon read it the way he intended. He is of Askenar's bloodline and he carries the hammer recovered after seventeen centuries; no rival crown has an answer to that. The union was a religious fact before it was a political one, and the colonies in the Ark's mountains only paid for what the hammer had already settled.

In the Free Era, his united realm mines directly into the Ark and remains one of the four kingdoms holding the wartime alliance together. Valin serves him, Portin arms him, and both have learned how far the king will let necessity bend his principles.