The snow had stopped falling, but the world remained silent, sheathed in thick frost. In the northern edge of Dernholt, the pines stood rigid as spears, their limbs bowed under weight. Wind whispered through their branches, too frail to be heard, only felt against the neck like a forgotten warning. Beneath their watch, the stranger's forge burned.
Not furiously, but with the dull patience of something ancient and breathing. It pulsed with a deep, slow rhythm, iron bellows heaving once every few moments, as if the building itself was inhaling memory. The soot-streaked windows glowed faintly amber, like eyelids closed over a restless dream. From the road, it looked like a lantern left for the dead. Bram had returned.
He didn't know why, only that his feet had led him there. He was too young to understand the weight of things, but not too young to feel when something in the earth had shifted. The village had changed. People whispered in smaller clusters. They no longer laughed with their mouths open. And the men who had once stood tall in the square now leaned in close when they spoke, as though their shadows might be listening.
He crouched behind a low stone fence across from the forge, peering between tufts of hoarfrost. The hammer hadn't rung all morning, and the quiet unnerved him more than its sound ever had. The stranger was still inside he'd seen the movement of his shadow once, earlier but the silence stretched.
Bram shifted his feet and winced as frost bit through his shoes. He wrapped his arms tighter around himself and told no one he was there.
Across the road, a crow landed atop the forge chimney. It opened its beak but made no sound. Only smoke billowed upward, curling past its feathers like incense rising around an altar.
Inside, Thorne Caelen stood motionless at the anvil, staring down at a blade that had not yet decided what it was.
The sword lay flat across the stone, still unpolished, its edge unsharpened. Yet it vibrated faintly, humming at a frequency only the broken could hear. Calen's truth still clung to it not just the words he spoke, but the weight beneath them: betrayal, confusion, the ache of having done what had to be done. Thorne could feel the residue in the tang of the steel. It stung, like hot wine on a cracked lip.
He ran his gloved thumb along the fuller of the blade. The metal pulsed. Not with light, or with heat, with grief.
He turned away and walked to the workbench, where a dozen other weapons rested in cloth, waiting for their wielders to return or never come back at all. He didn't know what the boy had done with the bladeif he had survived, if the brother he feared had truly changed, or if it was all a wound too deep to ever measure in facts. Thorne no longer asked questions. He forged, and he waited. That morning, something else lingered with him an itch along the spine of his thoughts. The forge's rhythm felt off. The coals consumed more than they should. And when he closed his eyes, he saw not the glow of fire behind his lids, but a cold, flickering blue. The same color the forge had taken the night Calen touched the blade.
He pushed the sensation aside too much lingered in the forge already.
He reached for the iron ring that hung at his chest and gripped it tight until the metal bit into his palm. It was the only piece of himself he still allowed into the process, the last fragment of a name he no longer spoke aloud. Behind him, the wind shifted. He paused. Not outside but inside the forge, the air changed. Subtly. A shift in pressure, a minute trembling along the stone floor. Thorne turned slowly, hand still on the ring, eyes narrowing. The sword was gone from the anvil standing in its place was a man with no shadow. Thorne didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't need to.
The figure was lean, wrapped in traveling robes that shimmered faintly like beetle shells in firelight. His face was not hidden, only plain so forgettable it seemed impossible to focus on. The only thing of note was his smile. It was small, but it had the weight of certainty behind it.
"You've been busy," the man said. His voice was pleasant. Almost kind.
Thorne said nothing.
"I watched the boy take your blade. I watched what he did with it. I think you knew how that would end."
Silence.
The man walked slowly, boots whispering over the stone, not echoing. "You craft things that should not be shaped. You give people the pieces they can't carry. You're not saving anyone."
"I'm not here to save," Thorne said at last.
"No," the man said, nodding thoughtfully. "You're here to bleed."
Thorne took a step forward. "What do you want."
The man's smile widened barely. "Only to watch, for now and to offer you a truth, since you're so fond of them."
He reached into his robe and drew something out small, sharp, metallic. He flicked it toward the anvil and it landed with a soft tink. A shard Thorne stared at it. Inside the shard, something moved. Not light. Not liquid. Memory. The stranger turned to leave.
"When you're ready to remember what you forged in Greystone," he said, "I'll be waiting where it ended."
Then he was gone.
Thorne stood for a long time, staring at the shard. The forge flickered. The sword that had been on the anvil now rested in the corner, unchanged but different.
Outside, Bram finally turned and ran home. Across the village, a woman with a scar along her jaw awoke from a dream she did not remember having, with blood on her hands and the taste of steel on her tongue.
Thorne stood motionless long after the man had disappeared. The forge's heat ebbed and swirled, but it no longer comforted him. It licked at his back like a warning. He approached the anvil again, eyes fixed on the shard. It pulsed softly, not with magic, but with something deeper. Something buried.
When he reached out to touch it, the air turned bitter. His breath caught. A vision pierced his mind: a battlefield of white ash, bodies strewn like seeds after fire, and a single sword driven into the ground, humming with the memory of its final swing.
He pulled his hand back, the shard stopped glowing.
Thorne turned and moved to the forge's back room a cold, stone-lined chamber where his tools were kept. He stood before a heavy chest, unlocked it, and retrieved a worn cloth wrap. Inside, layers of metal gleamed dully in the half-light: ingots not of iron, but of memory-forged steel. There were few left. He set one on the table and exhaled.
If the past was returning, he would meet it as he always had with steel. First, he would need to temper it with purpose. The bell above the forge door chimed.
A figure stepped inside a man in faded military greys, his arm bound in a sling, eyes sharp and sunken. He bore the mark of a deserter, and something worse: the quiet of someone who had watched loyalty die.
He said nothing, Only held out a piece of paper.
It read:
"Forge me silence."
Thorne didn't take the paper. He studied the man's face. There were bruises beneath the cheekbones, layered not just from fists but from weeks without sleep. A scar bisected one eyebrow, puckered as if the wound had never closed right. He smelled faintly of river water and ash.
"Silence for what?" Thorne asked.
The man didn't blink. "So I don't scream when I sleep."
Something in Thorne's jaw tightened. Not at the request but at how ordinary it had become.
"This won't mute you," Thorne said. "It won't wipe the memory. The silence you ask for will surround you, not spare you. It will press in. It will listen. It will grow louder the more you try to fill it."
"Good," the man replied.
Thorne nodded once. "Payment?"
The man reached into his coat and withdrew a small satchel. He opened it and poured the contents onto the bench. Six blackened teeth. Human.
"From the ones who didn't deserve forgiveness."
Thorne didn't react. He swept them into a copper bowl, turned, and reached for the iron. The forge behind him flared to life without his hand touching it.
As he heated the metal, he whispered something under his breath. Not a prayer. A memory.
"I remember what silence cost the first time."
He struck the iron, and it sang hollow.
Outside, the crow on the chimney finally cawed. Not once. But thrice. From the edge of the woods, something watched the glow through narrowed eyes. It would not wait much longer.
The eyes belonged to something not yet given form. A listener. An echo of creation once discarded. It moved not with limbs but suggestion, sliding through frostbitten pine and soil like a forgotten oath. It remembered the old forge.
Not this one, the first. The one beneath the mountain, where weapons weren't shaped but named, and every name was a sin. Where Thorne had once knelt, young and trembling, and sworn never to make what he made again. It stirred, smelled him on the wind. Soon, it would arrive, not to speak. But to be forged. This time, there would be no mercy hammered into the steel.