Karak Kadrin is the iron sentinel of Peak Pass, one of the great gates of the mountains, and no hold guards a grimmer threshold or bars it more stubbornly. But it is by another name that the world knows it, the Slayer Keep, for within its walls stands the great Shrine of Grimnir, holiest ground of the Slayer cult, to which broken and shamed dwarfs come from every hold to swear the Slayer Oath and go seeking the honourable death that will cleanse them. Its ruler, the Slayer King Ungrim Ironfist, bears the whole paradox in his own person: a monarch and a Slayer at once, wearing a crown above a crest of dyed and spiked orange hair.
No other hold turns away the doomed, and so no other hold fields an army quite like Karak Kadrin's. When its throng musters, the shield-lines of clan warriors march flanked by orange-crested Slayers beyond counting: pilgrims of Grimnir who have surrendered home, kin, and hope, and who ask of the coming battle only that it prove terrible enough to kill them. It makes for a host of appalling ferocity and no thought whatever of retreat, for one cannot rout soldiers who marched to the field intending to die upon it. Karak Kadrin goes to war meaning, quietly and to a dwarf, to die well; and its enemies have rarely disappointed the intention in full.
Order of battle
The Karak Kadrin field the units of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds, a detachment from the roster:
Other Dwarfen Mountain Holds formations
Barak VarrThe Sea Hold, carved into the cliffs above the Black Gulf: the only dwarf hold with a harbour, and the gate through which the Karaz Ankor trades with the wider world. Its steam-driven ironclads rule the gulf, and its merchant clans are counted worldly, even dangerously broad-minded, by their mountain kin.
Karaz-a-KarakEverpeak, eldest and mightiest of the holds and capital of the Karaz Ankor, where the High King keeps the Great Book of Grudges beneath the tallest mountain in the world. It has never fallen to any foe, and its halls hold the accumulated treasure, law, and memory of the entire dwarf race.
ZhufbarThe great engineering hold, built into the walls of a chasm where falling meltwater turns ten thousand wheels day and night. Zhufbar's workshops arm the Karaz Ankor with cannon, handguns, and gyrocopters, and the Engineers Guild counts its forges the finest in the world. Its soot-stained clans are the closest thing dwarfkind has to radicals, which is to say, more conservative than any other race's priests.
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