The world reassembled with the violence of a slap.
Arteo blinked, blinded not by light, but by the absence of the monumental darkness of the Library. The air was no longer still and ozonic, but alive, heavy with earthy smells that assaulted him like an army: resinous wood smoke, hot metal, cabbage broth, and the omnipresent stench of manure and mud. A damp, penetrating cold seeped through his clothes, which were no longer his own, but a rough wool tunic, worn at the elbows, and coarse linen trousers, both saturated with a mix of sour sweat and ash.
He found himself kneeling in a slimy puddle, his heart pounding in his temples. The Library was gone. He was now in an unevenly cobbled courtyard, surrounded by buildings of blackened wood and gray stone, with tired-looking thatched roofs. The sky above him was a uniform gray, promising rain that never came. From a larger building, marked by a faded wooden sign shaped like a chipped mug, came voices altered by too much ale and the greasy smell of stew.
The Drunken Boar's Lodging, he read in his mind, as if someone had whispered the information directly into his consciousness. Graystone Village. Kingdom of Eldoria.
Then, as if a veil had been torn, the memory of the book rushed back: The Song of the Blacksmith and the Swift Lad. The blacksmith. The little girl. The explosion. The sabotage. The names, however, were elusive, like they were written in faded ink.
He had to move. He had to understand. But first, he had to breathe without feeling like he was drinking the anguish of a thousand lost stories.
He stood up, his legs unsteady. He had no weapons, no allies. He had only the knowledge of an ending he couldn't allow to happen. The Voice had said "rewrite." But how the hell did one rewrite a story? With a scalpel? With fish glue?
"Hmph. New face. The wheel of fate turns, and today it squashed another poor soul right here."
The voice was raspy, coming from the Lodging's entrance. An elderly man, skin and bones wrapped in a layer of grease and a stained apron that told of decades of cooking splatters, watched from the doorframe, smoking a root pipe. His eyes, small and shiny like a crow's, scrutinized him without haste. But what struck Arteo were his hands: long, gnarled fingers, full of small white scars, holding not only the pipe but a tiny, very thin chisel, which he spun with unconscious skill.
Arteo nodded, unable to find words. His mind, accustomed to cataloging threads and glues, froze at the need to invent a believable lie.
"I'm looking for work," he managed to stammer, his voice hoarse from disuse and emotion. "I'm a... repairman."
The man, whom Arteo deduced was the innkeeper, puffed out a smoke ring. "Repairman? Of what? Of promises? Of hopes? Only objects break here, stranger. And the blacksmith takes care of those." He made a vague gesture with the chisel. "I mend the holes in people's stories. Costs more."
The blacksmith. Arteo's heart leaped. He was already on the right track.
"Not metalwork," he quickly corrected himself, his mind finally starting to work, trying to adapt his old life to this new, desperate pretense. "Of... items. Tools. Things that break and don't require the forge." He recalled the patience he used in restoration, in giving life back to what had been forgotten. "I can make things last longer. Patch, fix."
The innkeeper, a certain Borgo according to the sign, studied him for a long moment, his eyes scanning from his worn tunic to his hands, which Arteo deliberately kept open, showing his calluses from using a pen.
"Fine," he finally grumbled. "There's a wobbly chair in the common room. You fix it, and you'll have a bowl of soup and permission to sleep in the stable. Tomorrow, if you haven't found anything else, you leave. Patience is a virtue, but my pigsty is not a monastery. Understand?"
Arteo nodded, too relieved to speak. The story's narrative immune system had accepted him, sewing an approximate but credible identity onto him: the penniless stranger, harmless enough to be tolerated. He felt a small weight at his belt. A worn leather pouch. He opened it. Inside, a few copper coins and, to his astonishment, his silver thimble and a sturdy needle. The Library, or the Voice, had provided him with the tools of his fictitious trade. An echo of his old life, transformed into survival.
As he followed Borgo into the inn, a movement at the edge of his vision made him jump. In a corner of the courtyard, where the shadow of a skeletal tree stretched against a wall, he briefly saw the silhouette of a tall, thin man, framed within a border of dusty shelves. He held not a sword, but a long bone pen, and his face was a featureless white oval. A cold that had nothing to do with Graystone's climate gripped his stomach. The Proofreader.
The figure vanished the moment Arteo blinked, leaving only the normal shadow of the tree and an unease that had settled in his bones. How much time do you have? the vision seemed to have whispered to him. Time, he understood, was not his ally.
The chair was a job of a few minutes. A loose joint. He used some glue he found in a jar in the kitchen and a small piece of wood to make a wedge. Borgo, observing the clean and methodical work, nodded, almost satisfied. "I see your hands know how to listen to the wood. Not like that madman the blacksmith, who only thinks of hammering."
The soup was more water than anything else, but it was warm. Sitting in a corner of the smoky room, he listened. The village gossip was a surging river, and all the streams converged toward two main topics.
"...they say his cough sounds like a broken cowbell..."
"...the Young Blacksmith never stops, day and night. Obsession is a cage without a key..."
"...that silver could buy medicine from a city healer, but no, he wants his cursed bell. Torvin, on the other hand, wants to melt the silver down to make a pot for his concoctions..."
"...Little Lyn is always there with him, poor star. Like a nightingale singing on a rotten branch..."
The Young Blacksmith. Little Lyn. The names, finally, took shape. And with them, the shadow of a third: Lord Torvin, in bed with a cough that, according to gossip, sounded like precious metal being smashed and thrown into the mud. An illness that was the exact opposite of the purity Roric sought to forge.
After finishing the soup, following Borgo's hurried directions, he headed toward the forge. It was on the outskirts of the village, a low stone building blackened by smoke, with a tall chimney from which a constant gray plume emerged. The smell of charcoal and glowing iron was so intense it stung his nostrils.
He crossed the open threshold and the heat hit him like a physical wall, a brutal contrast to the outside's damp cold. The forge was a pulsating, hellish eye in the workshop's semi-darkness. Beside it, a powerfully built young man, sweating and with black, sooty hair, hammered heavily on a piece of glowing metal. His muscles, taut as bowstrings, twitched with every blow. The Young Blacksmith. But his name, he knew, was Roric. And what struck Arteo was not his strength, but the obsession burning in his gray eyes. It wasn't just determination; it was a fever equal to the one keeping Torvin in bed, a sickness of the spirit.
And then, he saw her. Perched on a pile of empty sacks in a corner, a girl perhaps ten years old, thin as a stick and with a cascade of reddish hair tied up haphazardly. Little Lyn. She was rubbing an old brass pendant, but her eyes, a striking green, never left Roric for a second. An expression that mixed absolute admiration with a deep, almost maternal anxiety.
"Blacksmith Roric?" Arteo said, trying to give his voice a respectful tone, above the hammer's clangor.
Roric stopped his work and turned. His gaze, charged with that feverish light, rested on Arteo without true interest. "Yes? If it's for a repair, leave the object and come back tomorrow. I have important work to finish." His voice was hoarse, tired.
The bell. It must be the silver bell.
"My name is Arteo," he said, feeling the weakness of his position. "I'm a repairman. New in town. I heard about your work. I wanted to... offer to lend a hand, if needed." He felt the weight of the thimble in his pocket. A miniaturist's tool in a world of metal giants.
Roric shook his head, a mechanical gesture, as if it were a tic. "Thank you, but no. This is work I have to do alone." His gaze wandered for a moment toward a covered crucible. "It's important. For the village. For everyone."
Lyn slid down from the sacks and approached silently. "His hands are clean," she observed, her sharp gaze studying Arteo's fingers. "Too clean to be a laborer. They are scribbler's hands."
Arteo drew his hands back, suddenly aware of the pen calluses that marked his fingers, so different from the scars and hammer calluses that marked Roric's. The girl was a ruthless observer.
Roric ignored the exchange, already turning back to observe the metal in the forge. "I have to get back to work, stranger. Good luck with your... patching."
The hostility was not open, but it was there, tangible as the forge's heat. Arteo had been rejected. He walked out, the feeling of failure already bitter in his mouth. How could he save them if he couldn't even get close? The book's knowledge was useless without context, without trust. And the memory of the Proofreader's shadow reminded him that time was a luxury he did not have.
He spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the village, offering his services. He patched a sack for a merchant, fixed a shovel handle for a farmer. Every job gave him an excuse to listen, to gather fragments of the story he had fallen into.
In the evening, he returned to the stable behind the Lodging, his "lodging" for the night. The hay was damp and smelly, but it was a refuge. As he tried to settle down, he heard light footsteps. It was Lyn, peering timidly from the entrance.
"Hey, Scribbler," she said, without preamble. She held a small copper pot with a dented bottom. "Can you fix this too? Roric says it's not worth the trouble, but... it's all I have to heat milk."
Arteo looked at the pot, then the girl. It wasn't just a request for help. It was a test, a thread thrown across the river of mistrust. He took the pot, examined the dent. It was a simple job. But for the first time since arriving in this world, he felt a thread of connection, a possibility.
"Maybe," he said, trying to keep a neutral tone. "But I'll need better tools. And some light."
Lyn studied him for a moment, then nodded. "Tomorrow. After Roric goes to the river for water. He doesn't like having strangers in the forge." She smiled, a fleeting flash that lit up her face. "Maybe you can patch up his stubborn head too."
Arteo nodded, his heart quickening slightly. It wasn't much, but it was a start. A small, fragile foothold in the story he had to rewrite. As Lyn disappeared into the twilight, Arteo remained sitting on the hay, clutching the dented pot. Maybe grand heroism wasn't necessary. Perhaps to change an ending, all it took was patching a small, insignificant pot, and with it, the trust of a little girl with eyes too smart for her age. And perhaps, that very night, he dreamed not of the Library, but of the silent shadow of a man with a bone pen watching from the threshold of his sleep, awaiting his first, inevitable mistake.