The Fate of the Stone Summit Dwarves (Or: How I realised Primordus was in Forging Steel after doing it 9 times)
It took 9 repeats of the Forging Steel strike for me to notice the real reason the Steel warband goes through the forgotten dwarven ruins. But let me back up and add context.
The dwarves in GW1 were a hardy, friendly race with whom you ally multiple times, usually while crossing the Shiverpeaks, taking their enemies as your enemies. This includes the dwarven faction called Stone Summit, a xenophobic group who resent anything but total dwarven dominion of the world. The storyline of the GW1 expansion, Eye of the North, involves Primordus as the first elder dragon to awaken for the consumption part of its 10,000 year cycle. (The death of Abaddon and the magic upheaval following is noted as the bump that started the dragons’ hunger.)
Destroyers built up in the depths and caused the asura to emerge and meet surface races for the first time. The asura, dwarves, norn and humans banded together to push them back and Primordus’s champion is defeated, which saps Primordus of enough energy to delay it awakening fully for about 40 years. To do this the dwarves used the Rite of the Great Dwarf, a sacrificial ritual that immediately rendered dwarves functionally extinct. Their bodies turned to stone to allow them to fight Destroyers endlessly, with no personal or individual concerns. The spread of the Rite could be resisted for a time but not forever. One dwarf remained on the surface as a last point of contact with the rest of the world, the others sank into the depths to live their newly petrified eternity. It was assumed that the Stone Summit, as the Rite took them, gave up on their ideals and joined their brethren.
But some didn’t.
The hardest boss in GW1, Duncan the Black, last leader of the Stone Summit, hides in Slaver’s Exile attempting to create a ritual that will channel the power of Primordus’s defeated champion. His quest involves defeating him before he can succeed. Duncan was resisting the Rite and the slow transformation into stone to attempt this. But why? We didn’t find out until…
Enter the Steel warband, Ryland’s most trusted friends on a mission to deliver a modified charr tank to the war effort under Bangar Ruinbringer. As they travel the pass, Jormag’s champion rains ice down on them and they opt to break through a set of gigantic dwarven doors to shortcut through the ruins. They’re met by rank upon rank of feral, howling dwarves that have been holed up here for centuries - and didn’t turn to stone.
And after a few waves of these burning-eyed, voiceless armoured shells, who throw fireballs and make lava erupt from the ground, they throw in some Destroyer minions too. It was on the 9th run that I realised that dragon minions do not ever ally with members of other groups; they lack the capacity. Minions serve their dragon and that dragon only. Destroyers being summoned alongside dwarves this way means one thing: the Stone Summit are now in the control of Primordus.
Primordus itself had been rather conspicuously absent from the Icebrood Saga. Why, if it’s a chapter about Jormag? It’s well established that Jormag and Primordus are linked as mirrored opposites, opposite elements and each being the weakness of the other - and their link meant they were both ensleepened again by Taimi’s machine just before Path of Fire. In Icebrood Saga, Jormag is up again. So in accordance with that, shouldn’t Primordus be up as well?
There’s an optional collection inside Forging Steel and the following mission in Darkrime Delves where you can find the journals of Forgemender Arngirn, a Stone Summit dwarf making notes on the process of the ritual they undertook.
This would appear to be the final result of Duncan the Black’s ‘profane ritual’, as Vishen calls it. While most of the Stone Summit gave in to the Rite of the Great Dwarf and joined the others of their kind, one last group resisted it as long as possible. Their bodies started changing into rock but they clung to their beliefs of being above all others, and Arngirn writes that he would rather die outright than have his mind taken from him. Duncan the Black is named in the journals as the author of scrolls they are following to attempt to change their forms into anything other than stone.
They watch each other’s consciousnesses ebb away, lock the doors to seal themselves in, and succeed. Connecting to the magic of Primordus allowed it to overwhelm their minds. If they survived their insides being consumed by fire they became minions of Primordus, recorded only in a hidden book collection that concludes a mystery left hanging in Guild Wars 1, 13 years ago.
I knew you’d do it! I love all your GW1/GW2 posts, I was going to make one for those journal entires but you did it best! I’ll just post the entires in order (they’re from the Fallen from the Summit achievement!)
That other side of the story was super interesting!
