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Forger of the 100 Swords of Sepathok (at the time referred to as the 100 Swords of Selent), Gragnakas struck a bargain with King Selent to forge him the swords in exchange for the release of his family. Exactly how Selent came into possession of Gragnakas' family has never fully been disclosed, but it appears that a night of heavy drinking and high-stakes poker was involved.
Gragnakas was the legendary Forge-King of the Dwarves, gifted with the ability to forge weapons of incredible power and beauty. Until the loss of his family, Gragnakas had never actually used that ability. He preferred to spend his time drinking, womanizing, and randomly smashing things and people with a large hammer. Because he'd never actually bothered to make any legendary weapons before, his first attempt, The Gripless Sword, was somewhat less than successful. It was not until he entered the Legendary School of Forgeness under the tutelage of Jingrobad Thingmaker that his art truly came into its own.
Of course, Gragnakas was not always completely successful. Besides the Gripless Sword, another blade he created was not as Epic as Gragnakas wished it to be -- in fact, the sword, the Mute Blade of Non-Life, was an incredibly dull, mundane, and stupid-looking sword. Gragnakas threw it away -- but did not realize that the sword would become a great terror in the world millenia later.
While Gragnakas labored, the Dwarves who owed him allegience entered a golden era of peace and prosperity, free from his rather balatantly incompetent rule. In fact, they liked it so much that the Forge-Kings never really completely regained their power. Still, most of that prosperity immediately collapsed when Gragnakas returned to ruling after the completion of the forging, and the Dwarves returned to life as normal.
Gragnakas could not actually finish all the swords in the time he was given, so he hid a normal blade among the 99 legendary ones. After delivering the blades, Gragnakas continued to forge the 100th sword, Undarhwhom, of pure Irony. His intent was to use this blade to defeat Selent when he discovered the false weapon in the set, but the King never noticed the forgery among his collection.
Gragnakas was slain in the end by Sepathok, and Undarhwhom, the blade he had forged of Irony to save his life, turned out to be the reason for his death. Sepathok claimed Undarhwhom and with it completed the collection that would be known as the 100 Swords of Sepathok.
Gragnakas is usually depicted in art has having a massive amount of burnt beard and a slightly manic smile that says "I just spent 5 days without sleep making a sword out of frozen pee."
It should be noted that although most of the weapons Gragnakas made were extremely powerful and high in stature, there was one among them all that was far from perfect. The Mute Blade of Non-Life, sometimes compared to the Shimmering Sword of Life, was a blade that even Granakas was ashamed of. The blade eventually was sealed away by the Elemenstors when it showed power far beyond what a mortal thought an object could do, and is known as the only object in existence that came out of its Non-Life to Life all by its own doing.
In his brief periods of not forging swords he wrote the Wangese style word-picture-scroll Ultrawang.
| Gragnakas is actually based off of me, when I met Tycho at a con back in '96. I still had a pretty heavy Inuit accent, so I pronounced by name (Greg Nachez) as Gragnakas. -Luggage |