Covenant of Thalgrin and Ilmater

In the City of Or, where the clang of forge-hammers echoes like prayer, it was Thalgrin, the Heartbound Smith, who permitted the red thread of Ilmater to enter Iridia not as a flood of divine foreignness, but as a trickle of healing fire.

Thalgrin, god of craft and endurance, did not allow all of Ilmater's power. He is no martyr, no weeper of wounds. But when he saw Sylieth, a Tiefling whose hands stitched bodies as a smith would steel, he understood. The healing they offered—the slow mending of flesh and soul—was not weakness. It was forging.

Pain, Thalgrin said, is not to be wasted. It is to be tempered.

And so he allowed Ilmater’s mercy through the Binding Thread, likening the suffering it required to the pain of hammer striking metal—a cost for creation. In Thalgrin’s eyes, every wound Sylieth bore was a forge-spark. Every sorrow held was the ring of iron meeting flame. The Broken God could not claim Iridia, but he could lend his fire to one who forged through mercy.

And thus the red thread burns quietly still—not soft, but sacred, forged in pain, permitted by steel.