They talked until the night had quietly become morning — neither of them noticing the exact moment the darkness softened, only that at some point the sky had turned pale and the sun had begun to climb through the trees, catching the edges of everything in early gold.
Lilith shook his head, still processing something Aron had said. "Farming," he repeated, looking Aron up and down with open disbelief. "Farming did *that* to you?"
Aron almost smiled. "We never used animals. Every bit of it was done by hand — just us and the land. It took days sometimes to clear one side. Weeks for the harder ground." He exhaled, leaning back. "Mr. Wood was a good teacher. He didn't believe in shortcuts."
Lilith laughed quietly. "I believe it." Then something shifted in his expression — lighter, warmer. "You know, whenever I was back at Mr. Wood's village, Lily talked about you constantly."
Aron looked up. "Really?"
"Constantly," Lilith confirmed.
"Well — she was around a lot, back when Carlos and I used to work. We played together plenty. Used to race each other across the field." He paused, the memory arriving with a small smile. "She always came first."
"I know," Lilith said. "She's always been fast."
Something passed across Lilith's face then — a flicker of something heavier, something he wasn't ready to say. He pulled it back before it could surface fully, tucking it away behind an easy expression. There was something Aron needed to know. But not yet. The moment wasn't right, and Lilith had learned well enough that some things, said at the wrong time, land like stones instead of words.
---------------
"Come with me," Aron said, standing. "I want to show you something."
They walked together to the blacksmith chamber. On the workbench, wrapped in what had once been Aron's shirt — now stiff with dried sweat — lay the death blade. Aron picked it up carefully and began to unwrap it, peeling the cloth back slowly until the blade was revealed.
Lilith leaned in. The metal had changed — something in its surface shifting, almost like a wound in the process of closing. A blade healing itself.
"That's the death blade," Lilith said quietly. Then his eyes found the markings carved along its length. "What kind of writing is that?"
"The old language," Aron said. "Nordic, from what I can tell."
Lilith straightened. "So it predates the norms."
Aron nodded. "You're right. And the blade isn't like anything I've worked with before. It doesn't respond to a furnace. It doesn't respond to a hammer." He paused. "It responds to me. My blood heats it. My hands shape it. My sweat cools it down."
Lilith stared at him. "What?" He looked at the blade, then back at Aron. "You can't be serious. You can't heat and pound it the normal way at all?"
"I tried everything first. Nothing worked. The furnace did nothing. The hammer did nothing." Aron looked at his hands. "This was the only way."
Lilith followed his gaze to the bruised, split knuckles — raw and swollen, the wrapped cloth barely doing enough. "Balrad told me you never let yourself heal properly," he said, his voice quieter now. "I didn't fully believe him until right now."
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Aron was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he wasn't looking at Lilith — he was looking at the blade.
"I've decided to go," he said. "To face what's left waiting for me. I won't sit here like a coward and let death come looking for me on its own terms."
Lilith didn't respond immediately. He looked at his friend — the set of his shoulders, the steadiness in his voice — and recognized the particular quality of a decision that has already been fully made. There was nothing to argue with. There was only the truth of it.
"That's what I expected from you," he said at last, placing a hand on Aron's shoulder. "Once you've finished the blade — we go back. Back to where it all started."
Aron felt something shift in his chest. The village. The years he had spent there — more of his life than anywhere else. The graves of the people he had loved and lost, still waiting in that earth. He would need to go back one last time. Not to stay. Just to say goodbye properly, the way he never had.
"Lilith," he said. "Can you give me some time alone?"
Lilith studied him for a moment, then nodded once and stepped outside without another word.
-------------
Aron turned back to the blade.
He took hold of it, and the chamber came alive.
The heat came immediately — pouring through his hands and up his arms, filling the room with a pressure that felt less like temperature and more like intention, as if the blade itself understood what was being asked of it and was responding in kind. The metallic ring of it against the stone walls was tremendous — sharp and rhythmic, echoing through the small space like something vast had woken up inside it.
He folded a strip of cloth between his teeth to keep his jaw from locking under the strain. Then he started.
His knuckles made contact again and again, each strike precise and deliberate — shaping, urging the metal toward what it was supposed to become. His eyes burned, not from the heat, but from the will it took to keep going — that particular fire that lives behind a person's focus when they have committed to something completely. His sweat fell in a steady drip against the blade's surface, hissing softly each time, pulling the temperature back just enough for the next strike to hold. The strength required to carry this — to sustain it, to not flinch, to not stop — was enormous. But strength bends differently when the person wielding it genuinely cares about what they're protecting.
---
Outside, Lilith stood in the morning light.
The grass was deep green, the wildflowers catching the sun, the trees full and still. It was the kind of place a person could spend a whole life in and never feel cheated by the choice. He stood there breathing it in — until the sound from inside the chamber reached him. Metallic. Relentless. Wrong, somehow, in the way that made his instincts move before his thoughts could.
He crossed the yard and pushed open the door.
Aron was drenched. Sweat ran off him in sheets, his shirt dark and clinging, his knuckles bleeding freely where the skin had given way. He didn't look up.
"Aron — " Lilith stepped forward.
"Wait." Aron's voice was strained but controlled. "Don't come close. It's almost done. All of it — it's almost done."
"You're burning yourself alive," Lilith said, staying where he was but not looking away. "You know that. You can see what you're doing to yourself."
Aron heard him. He acknowledged every word and kept going — because he could feel it, the blade pulling toward completion the way a wound pulls toward closing. He drove the final strikes in, then submerged the blade into the bucket beside him — filled not with water, but with the sweat he had collected across hours of this — and pulled it back out again.
He repeated it. Again. And again.
Lilith watched from the doorway, unable to look away and unwilling to interfere. He had known Aron as a gentle person — patient, honest, someone who had never seemed built for cruelty. And what he was watching wasn't cruelty. But it wasn't easy to witness either. Carrying something like this blade — something that demanded this much — was a burden that would have broken most people before they got started.
Aron had not broken.
Not yet.