Brunna Frost-Braid

Brunna Frost-Braid runs the forge at Pass-Forge, and she wears her whole career in her mane — scar-braids knotted in a veteran's shorthand, each one a bout survived, a soldier saved, a piece of plate that held when it had to. She's eight and a half feet of weathered silver, one eye milked pale by a melt-hall flash forty years gone, hands like a pair of gauntlets. She came out to this cold rock because the ore was good and the arena money couldn't reach her here, and she has made, on the worst world in the frost republic, some of the best armor in the arm.

She meets your hull at the intake desk and reads your writ before she reads your face, because that's the trade. She'll take honest metal all day and thank you with a grip that leaves a mark. What she will not abide is a lie about it. Ask her people and they'll tell you the forge-master's rule is older than the outpost: you do not put a false mark on plate, ever, because somewhere down the line a soldier bets their life on that mark being true. Brunna has buried people who bet wrong on someone else's lie. It did not make her softer.

So hand her a writ with her own name forged on an order she never placed, and watch the temperature in the room drop. She'll go still, check her book twice, and then she'll want to know everything — who signed it, who's really waiting for the crates, which smooth-talking fixer keeps steering the paperwork to the side dock. She is not a mark and she is not the villain. She's the honest smith whose good name got stolen to sell killer plate, and if the crew helps her prove it, they'll have earned something rarer out here than credits: a Karthunai forge-master's oath.