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"The forge cares not for the metal's past—only what it can bear. To remember is to risk distortion; to endure is to invite transformation."
—Keepers of Memories, Canticle of the Unbroken
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Kael didn't place the hammer in Hatim's hands. He released it. A deliberate, heavy drop.
It landed in Hatim's grip like a sentence passed. Not a tool. A verdict. Or perhaps, a generational curse – father to son, master to apprentice, survivor to survivor.
The hammer was a brute. Long-handled, its head forged from blackened steel that drank the forge light, cold as a grave-marker despite the surrounding inferno. Its surface was scarred, polished smooth not by care, but by generations of desperate grips – some that held, some that failed. No glyphs graced it. No intricate channels. Just mass. Relentless, unforgiving purpose. Its weight sank into Hatim's raw palms, dragged at his shoulders still aching from Kander's drills, lodged like a lodestone in his gut, pulling him towards the anvil's maw.
"This," Kael stated, the word flat and final, cutting through the furnace roar, "is where you begin."
No mercy. No preamble. Just the forge's breath.
The workshop lived. Bellows groaned, a subterranean lament that vibrated Hatim's teeth. Heat warped the air into liquid glass, making the soot-streaked walls ripple. Flames danced along smelter lips, casting frantic, gold-red shadows that licked like hungry tongues. Metal shrieked – not a protest, but a raw articulation of being reshaped under relentless force. The rhythmic CLANG-CLANG-CLANG wasn't mere noise. It was the district's heartbeat, a war drum, a sermon preached in sparks and strain. It echoed the rhythm Lugal had felt – the Verge's true song.
Hatim's gaze locked onto the billet resting on the anvil before him. A shard of captured sunset, glowing orange-white, radiating fury. Within its molten core, Hatim felt the Akar – not the clean, singing current he'd learned to coax for glyphs, but something dense, primal, animal. Ugly. Honest. It pulsed like a trapped beast, resonating with the furious thrum beneath the floor – the raging veins he'd felt on the approach.
"Hammer's song, boy," Kael's voice sliced through the din. "Ain't about muscle. Ain't about forcing. It's rhythm. Feel the iron breathe. Listen. You don't beat it into submission. You talk to it. Find its truth."
Then Kael moved. Not with Hatim's desperate tension, but with a coiled, fluid grace that seemed born of the forge itself. Shoulders rolled, wrists supple yet unyielding. His hammer rose – an extension of an exhale – and fell.
CLANG.
The sound wasn't just heard; it was felt. It shivered up Hatim's spine, rattled his bruised ribs. Sparks erupted in perfect, fleeting constellations – tiny supernovas fleeing the impact. The billet yielded, flattening obediently. Beneath Kael's sweat-slicked skin, a soft, controlled luminescence pulsed – veins of disciplined light, not blazing power, but focused endurance. The faded Sennari glyph on his shoulder flared faintly as he shifted, the swiftness not for evasion now, but for perfect economy of motion. Muscle, bone, and Akar blurred into a single, efficient instrument.
"Your body's the hammer," Kael stated, stepping back, leaving the space before the anvil yawning. "Your Akar's the flame. Shape reality with both—or shatter trying."
Hatim swallowed, ash gritting between his teeth. The borrowed hammer twitched in his grip – too long, unbalanced, its cold weight biting into blisters not yet healed from days of glyph-carving. His stance felt alien, rooted wrong in the trembling stone floor. His breath hitched, ragged against the searing air.
He raised it. The weight pulled treacherously, threatening to wrench his shoulder from its socket. His fingers, slick with sweat, slipped on the worn haft.
He brought it down.
THUNK.
Wrong. Utterly, devastatingly wrong.
A dull, dead sound. Sparks flinched, died unborn. The glowing iron barely dented, seeming to sneer at the weak impact. Pain, sharp and electric as snapped wire, jolted up Hatim's arms, exploding through his shoulder joint, down his spine. He gasped.
"Stop fighting it!" Kael snapped, no pity, only cold observation. "Iron doesn't yield to force. It yields to understanding. Feel it push back. Answer it. Lead it."
Hatim gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. Sweat stung his eyes, mixing with ash, tracing grey rivers down his face. He adjusted his grip, planting his feet wider, bracing against the tremor in his legs. He raised the hammer again, pouring desperate strength into the lift.
Harder.
CLANG!
The hammer screamed in his hands, rebounding with vicious force, twisting his wrists, threatening to tear free. The blow landed crooked, glancing off the billet's edge. White-hot agony detonated in his shoulder, radiating through bone and muscle, stealing his breath. He staggered.
Inside him, the golden channels of Akar, the pathways he'd painstakingly opened for shield-glyphs, remained stubbornly silent, dim. They recoiled from this crude demand. This wasn't elegant geometry speaking Akar's tongue. This was Flesh. Fire. Will. Kander's words echoed. Brutal. Unadorned. Real.
And it was dismantling him.
The forge absorbed his failure without comment. The indifferent roar continued. The other apprentices, bent over their own anvils, didn't glance up. Didn't mock. Worse – their focused silence expected his failure. It was the natural order.
Pressure built within Hatim – not the controlled flow of glyphs, but the raw, untamed Akar awakened by memory and pain. It surged, a wild stallion trapped in a burning barn, desperate to escape, to help.
He gave in. Pushed it outward, through his aching arms, into the hammer.
Too fast. Too much.
Heat exploded inside his chest, not around him. A forge-blast ignited in his meridians. Vision swam, the workshop walls melting and reforming like wax. His limbs trembled violently, uncontrollably. The hammer, suddenly monstrously heavy, slipped from nerveless fingers.
It hit the stone floor with a sound louder than any anvil strike – the clang of utter defeat.
Hatim stumbled back, gasping, the world tilting. He fumbled for the waterskin at his hip, fingers clumsy, tearing the stopper free. He gulped the tepid water, but it was like trying to quench a housefire with a thimble. The internal inferno chewed at his bones, a shame deeper than any Middens beating burning in his gut.
"Overheating already?" Kael's voice cut through his dizziness. Not angry. Not even disappointed. Just stating an inevitable fact, as one might note the weather. "That Akar of yours… raw. Wild. You don't channel it. You bleed it."
The words landed like hammer blows to his spirit. Harder than Masad's fists.
Hatim looked down at his hands. Cracked. Bleeding. Smeared black with soot and his own failure. Small. Useless. He remembered Kander's ancient, amber eyes watching him solidify his first true Veshan shield weeks ago. The flicker of something like pride. A belief that the hollowed vessel could hold something powerful.
Now… now he was just a Sinks rat, broken by a simple hammer, undone by honest iron before a wall of fire that mocked his aspirations. The Ironweavers' Forge, looming beyond the workshop walls, seemed to pulse in silent derision.
A sharp cry tore the air nearby. An apprentice reeled back from his anvil, clawing at his eyes. Above him, a Veil-Wasp droned, its iridescent wings humming at a frequency that warped perception. The glowing metal on the apprentice's anvil rippled, its surface momentarily flowing into a distorted, screaming face – hollow eyes, a mouth stretched in silent agony. Lyra's face, twisted by terror and the Unbinding's touch.
Kael moved like his own Sennari glyph – a blur of contained motion. His hand snapped out, crushing the wasp mid-air with a wet, decisive pop. The illusion dissolved, the metal snapping back to molten form.
"Focus," Kael snarled, wiping wasp ichor on his leather apron, his gaze sweeping the workshop before pinning Hatim again. "Illusions feast on distraction. On doubt. On fear."
He gestured back to the anvil, to the hammer lying like a discarded spine on the floor. To the billet, still glowing, still waiting, radiating its sullen, animal heat.
"Again."
Hatim stared. The internal fire still raged, a pyre of pain and humiliation. His shoulder screamed. His hands throbbed. The air scorched his lungs.
But beneath the ash, beneath the failure, beneath the terrifying image of Lyra's distorted face in the metal, something else stirred. Not the clean lines of Akar, but a deeper, rawer resonance. The echo of Kander's words: Flesh. Fire. Will.
His breath dragged in – a ragged, shuddering sound.
The pain didn't vanish.
The heat didn't abate.
The shame didn't dissolve.
But neither did he.
He bent. Not with grace, but with grim determination. His cracked, bleeding fingers closed around the cold, unforgiving haft of the hammer. It felt heavier than the world. Heavier than memory.
He stood. Muscles trembling, golden glyphs flickering erratically beneath his soot-streaked skin like trapped fireflies.
He raised it. An act of sheer defiance against gravity, against pain, against the forge's indifference.
He struck.
CLANG.
It wasn't Kael's perfect note. It wasn't even close to right. But it wasn't the dead THUNK of before. It held a fraction of rhythm. A spark flew true. The billet shifted, minutely, under the blow.
He stood, braced against the recoil, sweat and ash plastering his hair to his forehead, his breath roaring in his ears like the bellows. The forge watched. Kael watched. The song, brutal and demanding, continued.
He had answered. Crudely. Painfully. But he had answered. The lesson, written in fire and iron, had begun.