Smytan is a dark-fantasy worldbuilding universe by The Wandering Blacksmith. It is a realm of forges, faeries, and fossils, explored through an interactive map at smytan.com, a growing body of lore called the Chronicles, and a small catalogue of keepsakes. This page gathers the world's places, creatures, and people as readable text.
Turmstet · Master Berton's forge
Before iron, he must know how you are made.
Master Berton takes a dozen apprentices at a time, and finishes perhaps one. Before he teaches you to strike iron, he wants to know how you are made.
Sit with him. Answer honestly. The forge sees through pretense, and so does he.
Settlement · The Order of Smiths
Smoke never fully leaves it.
The Order of Smiths keeps its forges here, and Master Berton keeps his apprentices, a dozen at a time, most of whom will never earn the hammer. The town grew around the heat the way moss grows around a stone.
Forty hammers, none of them in time with each other. Visitors call it noise. Anyone who has worked here calls it the only music that has ever told the truth.
Battlefield · Where the war turned
You already struck it. This is what you did.
The square where the Faerie Wars turned. The anvil at its centre was struck so hard it broke, and the sound of it breaking carried farther than any horn.
Humans still gather here, though no one has forged on it since. Iron does not break like this by accident. The night it happened is the night the war stopped being a war and started being a story.
Peak · Where steel was born
It has no summit. It was taken as payment.
Thrandhof, Karthan and Bärgoth walked up and did not come down for a season. What they carried back was steel, and Smytan, the first steel hammer.
No account of the forging survives. Only the hammer's name, and the fact that the mountain lost its head.
Landmark · Neutral ground
A forge inside a living thing.
Older than iron. The druids met faeries beneath it, and later, humans met druids beneath it, and no one has ever brought a blade within its shade, not from reverence, but because the last person who tried is still there.
There is fire in its trunk and it does not burn. Every smith who has seen it has come away with the same question, and none of them has written down an answer.
Frontier · Faerie territory
The only ground both sides can reach.
Bowmen scout it. Nobody garrisons it. The faeries are not evil, they are ancient, territorial, and in agony near the iron that humans will not stop making.
Their attacks are answers, not malice. They retreat exactly as far as the iron reaches, and not one step more.
near Turmstet · the working forge
Fire, iron, and a hammer you must earn.
This is a working forge, not a shrine: a hearth kept hot, an anvil worn to a shine, a rack of tools for hands that have paid for them. A journeyman is expected to arrive with nothing and leave able to make anything.
First you need a hammer. Then the fire will do what you ask of it, so long as you have the metal to ask with.
The Farrier · near Turmstet
He shoes what others fear to touch.
Knielhof is a farrier, a smith who works on the living. He has set iron to the hooves of warhorses mid-scream and drawn poison from a plough-ox with his bare hands. He does not flinch, and he does not charge much, which is why the guild pretends he is not very good.
He knows wounds the way other smiths know metal: by feel, by smell, by what they want.
Of the forge
A hammer worn where a heart would be.
Iron, hung on a cord, shaped like the thing that shaped it. Every wandering smith carries one, and no two are struck by the same hand.
It is not a charm. It does not protect anyone. It only says: this one was made, and made on purpose.
The Hillside · a cut in the rock
Iron, copper, gold, and older things.
Somebody opened this seam a long time ago and kept at it. The walls are veined with iron and copper, a little gold where the water once ran, and now and then something the old miners left well alone. You work the rock, it gives what it holds, and the mountain grows the seam back slower than you would like.
Take the gold to buy your way past the ones the gold already ruined. Keep the copper and iron; the forge will want them. And if the rock ever gives up a dragon shard, say nothing to anyone.
Bestiary of Smytan
His name is O'tten.
One of the biggest of his kind. Surrounded by shiny sprites that hover and tinkle around his shoulders and his head. When you get close enough, you can sometimes hear them, soothing whispers, or bitter songs, depending on the day.
During the Faerie Wars, he was used.
The faeries controlled him. Fairy leeches attached to his body, directing him the way you direct a weapon. His brute strength made him formidable. He did not choose the villages he attacked. He did not choose anything. He was a tool.
Then came the day they sent him to the last standing village.
The anvil was clanging.
The sound hit his fairy leeches and killed them. All of them. One by one they fell away, and O'tten stood in the middle of a battle he had been fighting without choosing it, and understood, slowly, the way very large things understand things, what had been done to him, and what he had done.
He did not fight that day.
He turned around and walked away.
He came back later. Grateful. He told the story of what had happened to anyone who would listen, how the humans had freed him without knowing they were freeing him. That story changed things. Not immediately. But over centuries, the ogres remembered it.
Some say the sprites around him now are the fairy leeches, still attached but no longer in control.
Others say they are something else entirely.
The Forest Edge
Deformed by gold.
Gold did this to them. Not a curse, not a spell, greed, worked into the body over generations until the body agreed.
The coins are not carried. They are grown. They are what wanting too much looks like when it is given enough time.
Lair · Among the Ogres
Tamed by ogres. Never by us.
A giant beast that lives among the Ogres, tamed by them, not by humans. Horned, furred, heavy through the loin, and calm in a way that large things are calm: because nothing has ever needed to be explained to them twice.
The armour it wears was not forged for it. It was forged around it, by hands that had already made their peace with the animal.
Keeper of the Wanderer's Book
He serves the law completely, and the law has never met you.
Every apprentice meets him, and none of them forget it. The Warden keeps the gate to the Wanderer's Book, and he believes, without a single crack of doubt, that the guild law is the one thing standing between the craft and ruin. So he does not bend it. Not once, not for anyone, not even for good reasons.
He is not cruel, though it will feel that way. When he calls your work rudimentary he is not mocking you; he is reading the ledger, and to him the ledger is a mercy, the one thing that keeps the unready from ruining a life their hands cannot yet carry. The forge answers to the metal. The Warden answers to the law. He has never once heard the difference.
Turmstet · The Order of Smiths
Iron, struck once, and held.