Agron's father Borin was kuldjargh. Not the kind who wandered, the kind who stayed. He took the oath young, wore the spikes for forty years in service of a small hold in the Small Teeth, and died in the front rank the way the oath promises. Borin was, by all accounts, an absolute menace in a fight and a perfectly reasonable dwarf the rest of the time, which is rarer in a battlerager than people think.
However, that part, the dying, was not the disgrace. The disgrace was Agron.
He was young, green, and standing in the second rank the day his father went down. An orc warband had pushed up through an old gallery the moot should have sealed years before, and the muster went in to throw them back out of it. Agron froze. He says now it was the smell, then the dark, then the noise they made coming through. He has a different reason every time it is told and is working his way toward a version where he simply tripped, which would be easier to live with. The truth is that he froze, and the dwarf beside him fell because Agron's axe was not where it should have been. It was his father who stepped across to cover the gap only to take a killing blow himself. Borin died on his feet, Agron did not. Instead that day, he witnessed the kind of death a kuldjargh lives for, the shame was that it was not his and as the dust settled, a very much alive Agron could be found afterwards distraught and puking into his boots, a detail he tends to leave out from this particular story.
Yet, a kuldjargh's son who breaks his first line is a particular kind of shame. Nobody struck him from any roll, nobody had to. He walked out of the hold on his own two feet the week of the funeral, with his father's spiked harness rolled in oilcloth on his back. His mother, unable to look at him, put it there as a reminder and whilst he thinks she meant it kindly, his judge of character is often lacking. When he left, he headed north, convinced that the work was thicker there and that it was as far away as he could put himself from anyone who had known his father. What he badly needed, was reinvention.
It was on the road, before arriving in Murann, that he took the name Skullcleaver. Borin never used a war-name, he didn't need one. Agron however, picked his over the course of an evening in a run down inn after bad ale and has had moments of regretting it since, particularly when introducing himself to clergy. It is a promise to himself as much as anything that when the songs in the holds finally name him, they will do so for what he did, not for what he did not.
Since arriving in Murann, he ensures to fight in the front rank, every time. He takes hits he does not need to take and he has, by his own count, been knocked unconscious eleven times, broken his nose on four separate occasions, and although he has not yet died, has come close enough to feel he has earned some credit. These days the harness is on his shoulder, not in a bundle, and he works to earn it every day, a left fisted salute reaching it when he greets, or leaves his kin. Within himself there is hope he will know when he has earnt his right to return home, but he suspects there is only one way, on the lips of those who speak stories of sacrifice, that may eventually find their way back to his family. On the better days, he convinces himself he may yet return in person, once his time of adventure and work is up, but in reality, he does not know what home awaits him and he fears to ask. A kuldjargh who asks careful questions is a kuldjargh who has lost the thread, and besides, he is not sure he wants that answer just yet.
Then there is the hat, the details of which he is hazy on. He is not precise about where or when he first acquired it, an odd looking skullcap of strange design, the mystery of which is half the point. He calls it the "scary hat" in conversation, in fights, and once at a customs post. Both entirely serious about it, and aware it is a joke, it is a balance that takes most people some time to work out, much like his personality. He firmly maintains that it makes him taller. It does not. It does however make people look at him for a moment longer than they otherwise would, which is sometimes the only beat that matters. It also protects his bald head from being used as a strange good luck superstition that has seemed to follow him around the city amongst some adventuers. Perhaps he cultivated this myth himself, perhaps it was a happy accident, but at all levels, he works hard to distance himself from the ghosts of disgrace, in whatever form possible.
In his years so far of enforced exile, he has found there is no shortage of front-rank work for a dwarf in spikes who walks toward trouble rather than away from it. When he first began his strikes were in defiance, but as he has grown and cemented his path as a kuldjargh, increasingly they are of redemption. The hat has been bloodied, his hands have become deeply calloused and whilst he does not talk about his father much sober, black out drunk, he talks about almost nothing else, usually to strangers and the occasional inanimate object. Perhaps these moments simply betray his method of unburdoning guilt, or reflect just how many times he's now been hit in the head. One thing however is for certain, if he had stepped across all of those years ago, he would have taken far more by now.
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