The forge was quiet when he stepped inside.
There was a bit of gloom in the atmosphere that could almost be felt.
Mark shut the door behind him, and the last light of the evening narrowed to a thin line at the threshold. The elder wood walls held the day's heat and the smell of iron, ash, and quench oil was thick in the air.
He did not bother with lamps.
He knew where everything was.
He crossed to the hearth, tossed in fresh charcoal with a bit of force, and set the bellows to work. The coals woke slow, then faster, red veins brightening under the black until they caught and spread.
He went to the rack and lifted his project sword.
It was a mess of broken and twisted metal in every color imaginable, but his previous careful work had managed to make it congruent throughout at least. This was supposed to be the careful and patient work. The long haul.
He looked at the warped blade for a long moment.
Careful had not saved anyone today.
He set the alloy in the heart of the coals.
The fire should have fought him. It usually did when he pushed this much material at once. Tonight, it did not argue. The flames flowed around the blade, brightened, and clung to it.
He pumped the bellows until his shoulders burned.
He thought of the East Gate shuddering in its frame.
He thought of wolves with sparks crawling along their fur.
He thought of the stupid bird that should not exist, swallowing lightning that should have killed him.
He thought of forty bodies laid out in rows.
The alloy went from red to yellow. From yellow toward white.
He pulled it free with the tongs and set it on the black iron anvil.
The anvil held the metal firm, like it always did.
Mark picked up his hammer.
He stared at the blade.
'All this strength,' he thought, 'and it is still not enough.'
His grip tightened.
He brought the hammer down.
The strike landed with a solid, satisfying ring.
Fire burst from the alloy.
Not the usual flare of hot scale or a spark knocked loose. A gout of flame, as if something inside the blade had decided it needed to get out. It spilled across the anvil and licked at his forearms.
He did not flinch.
He lifted the hammer and hit again.
Another answer of flame, hotter this time.
He set his teeth.
"Fury at the world," he muttered as his heart clenched.
He hit the steel.
"Fury at the mountain." his muttering through clenched teeth now sounded like an angry growl.
He hit it again.
"Fury at those damned beasts!"
The hammer fell, rose, fell. Each blow shaped the glowing metal and shook something loose inside his chest. Each time, the fire answered, spilling up the handle, boiling along his hands, washing his face.
His eyes burned. At first, he thought it was the heat, then he realized there were tears in there too, muddying the edge of his vision.
He did not wipe them away.
"All this strength and still not enough," he snarled, voice rough. "Still late. Still weak. Still watching people die because I was not there sooner."
He struck.
Flame belched from the steel, curling out across the anvil in a low wave.
The sword blank glowed brighter. Yellow pushed toward white. White edged toward a color that did not have a name, something between light and heat and anger, as if answering the call of the furious blacksmith.
Mark hammered harder.
Somewhere in there, the hammer took on a rhythm. Not the measured pattern a smith uses for long lessons and neat work, but a rougher one. Short bursts, then a heavy hit. Three quick taps to move the bulk, then a full swing to drive the change through the blade.
His breath fell in with it. In on the lift, out on the strike. Each exhale came out as a growl. But something more than heat started to be drawn into his lungs with each breath, causing a smile to form on a certain young man sitting in the elder tree. And looking up at that young man was a doopy-looking bird.
The heat climbed.
The air above the anvil warped, lines bending as if he were looking through water. Sweat ran down his back and soaked the band of his trousers. It did not evaporate. It cooked. His shirt stuck to his skin.
He smelled his own sweat go from sharp to acrid.
Steam hissed up from the floor.
It took a while for him to understand what that meant. The elder wood under his boots was sweating. Moisture trapped in the heavy old beams was forcing itself out, beading along the grain in little droplets that flashed into steam and vanished.
The walls joined in.
Damp bled through the dark planks, steaming in thin white sheets. The rafters above grew slick and started dripping, the forge suddenly a rainstorm made of its own stored water. But it became steam before it could quench the flames or quench the blade.
He hit the steel and the fire answered, shooting thunderstorms up over the smithy.
The villagers that could pay attention thought an angry god must be attacking the smithy.
But there was no god at that smithy, just an angry smith and his blade.
Every time the hammer came down, gouts of flame rolled off the blade and crawled along the anvil, licking the edges, spilling over and down. His hands felt the heat through the hammer's haft now. Not just warmth. Pain.
His skin was starting to burn.
That was new.
For as long as he could remember, the forge heat had been a friend. It wrapped around him and soaked into him like a warm bath. Tonight it bit, teeth in every uncovered patch of skin, scraping across his forearms and face.
What he didn't notice, though, was how his skin was fighting back. It was becoming tougher with every moment that the flames ate away at it.
He did not stop.
The alloy glowed. The edge was being reformed, long and straight, shoulders dropping as he stretched it. The spine took shape. The curve showed itself. The blade answered each rage-filled strike with a cleaner line, as if it understood what he wanted out of it and agreed.
Fury at the world.
Fury at the mountain that shook the ground whenever it pleased and knocked houses sideways, and spat monsters at the gates.
Fury at the beasts that crashed themselves against the walls with mindless hunger.
Fury at his own strength, so uselessly big inside him sometimes, so slow to be in the right place when it was needed.
The shack's air started to feel too thick to breathe. Every inhale felt like pulling coals into his lungs. But something in his solar plexus started to beat to the rhythm of every breath.
He didn't notice, though.
He kept going until the hammer started to feel wrong in his hand. Not heavy, exactly. Empty. Like he had poured everything he had into each blow and hit the bottom of the barrel.
The rage that had been standing behind his eyes since the first horn sounded finally ran out of new fuel.
He lifted the hammer once more, let it hover over the blade, then let it fall in a softer stroke. One last pass, a gentle touch compared to the rest.
The blade took it. But it finally sounded like a thunk instead of a clear ring.
He stepped back.
His arms were shaking. Sweat and steam ran together on his skin. His face felt raw. When he drew a breath through his nose, it felt like it scraped. I felt like he was trying to breathe something solid, but he pushed and finally forced a long, deep breath.
The beating of his solar plexus stopped as his rhythm died down, but there was a hint of power there, unbeknownst to Mark.
The young man in the elder tree nodded his head, as if he had expected something like this to happen before turning his attention back to the valley behind the village.
The forge was a mess.
The floor around the anvil was slick, not with water now but with condensed steam and smeared ash. The walls glistened. The rafters dripped. The elder wood that was supposed to be stubbornly dry looked like it had stood out in a rainstorm.
The iron tools on the racks nearest the hearth had a faint heat shimmer above them. A few wooden handles smoked, tiny threads of white rising before they went out again.
The forge itself roared quietly.
Mark looked around and felt the first thin thread of worry slip through the exhaustion.
He was pretty sure the place was not going to burst into flames.
Pretty sure.
His forearms were red. Not the usual forge flush, but deeper and angrier. A couple of small blisters had started to rise along the inside of his left wrist where a wayward spill of fire had crawled up the hammer haft and kissed bare skin.
'Wasn't my skin melting off earlier though . . .?'
He was too tired to realize that his severe injury was now just a minor burn.
His palms ached.
He drew a slow breath, coughed once when it scraped on the hot air, then set the hammer down.
The blade still lay on the black iron anvil.
He did not touch it.
Not yet.
He turned away from it and stumbled for the door.
The forge's heat followed him all the way to the threshold. Crossing it felt like stepping out of a fever dream. The night air hit his lungs like cold water.
The sky was full of stars. The moon had cleared the mountain's shoulder and poured silver light over the village. The elder tree's leaves moved in a breeze he had not felt inside.
Mark sucked in the cool air in long pulls, then started down the path to the creek.
He did not stop to think. His body knew the way. Barely any light reached down there, but he had walked that trail his whole life. Past the old storage shed, around the jut of rock, down the slope where the roots tried to catch ankles.
The creek was a soft, constant sound in the dark.
He jumped in with his clothes still on; they needed a wash from the fighting and the smithing.
The first touch of water was a shock so total that his breath left him. Steam burst up around his legs where the creek hit overheated skin. The cold climbed his calves, his thighs, wrapped his hips, and grabbed his ribs. He sank down into it until only his head stayed above the surface.
The world narrowed.
Cold water. Night air. The ache of his muscles was starting to show their fatigue now.
His skin sang, half from relief, half from scolding. The places that had gone too far into the heat throbbed in time with his heartbeat, but the worst of it bled out into the creek.
He closed his eyes.
For the first time since the wolves appeared at the edge of the monsters, his mind went mostly blank. No counting. No what-ifs. Just the push and pull of water across his shoulders and the slow easing of that iron knot in his chest.
He did not know how long he had stayed there before he heard footsteps on the path.
Not the clatter of armor nor the uneven stomp of someone dragging a load. Light steps, picking their way along the bank.
"Mark?"
Annabel's voice. Soft and alluring.
"I am here," he called back. "In the water."
She came into view a moment later, moonlight catching on her hair. She crouched at the edge of the creek, peering down.
"You look boiled," she said.
"I feel boiled," he answered. "The forge got hotter than it should have."
"I noticed," she said. "The smithy was steaming. The old wood was sweating like a drunk in summer and some of the villagers claimed to have seen a thunderstorm over it."
"Is it still standing?" he asked.
"It is." She glanced back the way she had come. "The walls look ugly, but they are not burning. The roof is still on. I think you scared it more than you hurt it."
"That makes two of us," he muttered.
She smiled in the dark.
"Cecil figured you would be hungry after such a day," she said. "He sent this."
She held up a bundle wrapped in cloth, tied with a bit of cord.
He slogged closer to the bank until he could reach her without leaving the water. His skin steamed again where the air hit it.
She passed him the bundle. Heat leaked through the cloth.
"He said it's fresh from the grill," she went on. "Monster meat from one of the big ones. He said you earned it more than anyone today and that if you don't eat, he will come yell at you himself."
"That sounds like him," Mark said with a bit of a chuckle.
His stomach chose that moment to remind him it was empty. He realized he had not eaten since before the Growth started shaking the ground.
He sat with the water at his waist and undid the cord.
Inside was a thick slab of meat, still hot, scented with smoke and some spice Cecil had gotten from the traders last month. The juices ran when he tore into it with his teeth.
He did not talk much while he ate.
Annabel did not press him. She just sat on the bank with her knees drawn up, arms round her legs, watching the creek slip past. The moon laid a white path on the water, broken into silver shards where it ran over stones.
By the time Mark finished, his hands were greasy, his belly felt less hollow, and the worst of the trembling in his arms had gone.
He wrapped the bones and leftover bits back in the cloth for Cecil's dogs and set the bundle aside.
"Thank you," he said.
"You can tell Cecil that, not me," she said. "I was just the delivery."
He sloshed closer, reached up, and caught her hand.
She leaned down, and he pulled himself up enough to hug her. He was still wet and too warm from the forge, even half-cooled, but she did not seem to care. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held on.
They stayed like that for a while. Long enough for his breath to even out and for the stinging at the edges of his eyes to fade without becoming anything else.
When he finally let go, she brushed a thumb across one forearm where the skin had reddened.
"You need salve on that," she said.
He looked down and raised an eyebrow.
"It was worse before the bath, if you can believe that."
She just rolled her eyes at him and looked at him expectantly.
"I will see what we have at the house," he said. "After I check on the forge."
"Of course," she said. "Go. Before it gets lonely without you."
He climbed out of the creek, water streaming off him, making his way to the forge.
Annabel picked up the bundle of bones and fell into step beside him as they walked back.
By the time they reached the smithy, the worst of the steam had bled off. The elder wood walls were still dark with moisture, but they no longer glistened. The air inside was hot, but not murderous. Tools hung crooked, and a few crates had shifted, but the structure held.
"It will live," Annabel said, leaning in the doorway and looking around.
"Good," Mark said.
His eyes went to the anvil.
The blade lay where he had left it, flat across the black iron.
He walked over, each step careful, as if a loud move might break whatever had happened.
Up close, the color of the sword did not look like any heat he knew. It was not glowing anymore, but it was not the usual dull gray of cooled metal either.
It was black.
Not the dark blue that came from tempering. Not the blotched black of scale and burned oil. A deep, even midnight black from spine to edge, as if someone had taken the idea of shadow and beaten it into the shape of a sword.
He reached out and brushed his fingers along the flat.
Warm. Not scorching or dead cold. It was like a stone that had sat in the sun all day; it felt comfortable.
He lifted it off the anvil.
The weight was right. The balance sat exactly where his hand wanted it. The line was straight. The edges, though still thick, were clean and even. He turned it, looking for warps, for hairline cracks, for any of the little indicators that metal showed when you pushed it this hard.
There were none.
Not a single ripple. Not a twist. No sign of the abuse he had just put it through, or of the normal appearance he was getting used to after forging this particular weapon.
"Should it look like that?" Annabel asked quietly.
"No," Mark said.
He could not stop staring at it.
"It should not look like this at all."
He held the midnight blade, feeling its steady weight in his palm, and for the first time that day, the anger in his chest shifted into something else.
He was not feeling at peace.
It felt like a raging fire, but one that could be reasoned with. One that you would make in the dead of winter, when you needed it to survive.
It felt like tempered fury, and it resonated with the black blade that was giving off a similar feeling within his hands.