King Beneath the Mountain

"Listen to me very carefully. That thing isn't your brother, it isn't a Dwarf and it is barely even alive as the natural world would perceive. It is a marred and burning husk trapped within molten elementium. It is an infection that hates".

―John Mead

Duncan Brightfist, later known as The King Beneath the Mountain, was once a male Dwarf Mage-turned-aberration, brother to Gladnar Brightfist and the main villain of The Hellrock Campaign.

A bright yet easily influenced young wizard, Duncan fell in with a criminal element which fuelled his fascination with forbidden and dangerous rituals for wealth and fame. After an attempted intervention by his parents and his brother, Duncan rejected them, cut all his previous ties and left with his cohorts in The Flying Gang to parts unknown. An unknown period of time after the Hour of Twilight, Duncan and The Flying Gang uncovered an enormous piece of corrupted Elementium that had fallen from the body of Deathwing the Destroyer during the Hour of Twilight. The Dwarf began work on a ritual to attain the great power untapped within the metal, infusing it with even further with his own Fel magics, and eventually fashioning the twisted alloy (dubbed Hellrock) into a suit of molten armour designed for him to wear.

The ritual was successful though not how Duncan had intended. Filled with incredible power but driven utterly insane by the pain and foul magics inherent to Hellrock, the aberration was transported south to Blackrock Mountain where a cult began to form around it. It ensnared Duncan's former associates both through fear and a lust for power or violence and the other denizens of Blackrock began to call the creature The King Beneath the Mountain. The King Beneath the Mountain enacted a plan to erupt Blackrock Mountain and bend two great cities of the Alliance to its ceaseless will.

Description
As a Dwarf, Duncan was grey haired with black streaks and possessed a short beard cut to just below his jawline. Bright blue eyes, a prominent nose, with thick brows and a notable scar across the side of his lips. He stood slightly taller than his older brother and had much lighter skin due to spending most of his time indoors and not on the open ocean.

With his transformation into The King Beneath the Mountain, Duncan's features were lost inside the aberration. The armour they forged never cooled which charred and burned away its flesh only for it to regenerate just as quickly. Its nose seared away entirely and the flesh that constantly bubbled beneath the metal was a deep purple colour; comprised entirely of scar tissue. Its eye sockets emitted a deep orange light and its teeth warped into mismatched fangs where they remained; many of them had fallen out entirely. The King did not appear to breathe, and did not require food, water or sleep.

Personality
Duncan was a variety of opposites when compared to his older sibling. A shy, slightly timid boy, he was rarely able to stick to a job for long, prone to flights of melancholy and dour moods most of his life. He looked up to Gladnar and often found himself envious with the ease that his brother had found his place in life. He never sought any companionship and was alone and friendless through most of his adult life. It is little surprise when Duncan gravitated towards the members of The Flying Gang; a criminal gang that became fast companions to the Mage.

All of this was burned away when he became The King Beneath the Mountain. Barely alive in the strictest sense, the aberration was cruel, vicious and held no regard for family, morality or the bonds it once held. It terrorised the people who once accepted Duncan as a friend and those who attempted to stop it were shown only brutality as their reward. Despite all of its plans and movements however, The King was in constant agony. Anyone attempting to read its thoughts would only receive the same thought repeated until they caused the listener to feel bouts of sickening nausea: "It burns."

Public History
Despite the information presented here in this article, there are no public records available anywhere concerning either Duncan Brightfist or the King Beneath the Mountain. Birth records, census data, memories containing either party, and even passing references do not exist. No information about Duncan can be sourced from anywhere save the several corresponding accounts from a handful of Lamplighter Agents.

However due to the Agent's accounts matching exacting details of both Duncan and The King Beneath, the emotional turmoil detected when the subject is broached with those who were involved, we can determine that this figure did indeed exist.

A high number of deaths and injuries were recorded to have happened at the same time period both outside and within Blackrock Mountain. These deaths come from a disparate number of factions that have little cause to work alongside one another (such as the Vrykul Fleet, Pandaren Monks, members of the House of Nobles among others) and each group's reasons for what happened juxtapose one another wildly.

We presuppose therefore that the cause of this lack of evidence is either due to magical interference, potentially timestream manipulation and a complete erasure of The King Beneath, or that The King Beneath was a memetic entity that was wiped from the memories of those involved at the moment of his downfall. Both theories would lead to a widespread memory lapse and revision of all documents regarding the subject, making these explanations the most plausible under the circumstances.