The smell of damp earth and the rhythmic sound of the hammer against the anvil were the only constants in Kael's life. That morning, the air in Valeria seemed denser, saturated with the promise of a rain that stubbornly refused to fall. Kael wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, leaving a trail of soot that only accentuated the paleness of his tired skin. At seventeen, his shoulders already carried the weight of someone who knew the burden of manual labor, but his deep brown eyes held a restlessness that didn't fit within the narrow confines of the village.
"Kael! If you keep daydreaming, this horseshoe will get cold and old Bram will demand our souls for the wasted coal," shouted Master Horgar, a man whose beard looked like it was made of barbed wire and smoke.
The young man blinked, returning to the immediate reality of the workshop. The reddish glow of the incandescent metal was the closest thing to magic he had ever seen. In Lumenis, magic belonged to the legends of the Ancients or to the locked vaults of the nobility in the capital, far from the calloused hands of the frontier settlers. Kael nodded, lowering the hammer with precision, but his thoughts soon escaped again through the open window, toward the mountains surrounding the valley.
"I was just wondering if tomorrow's market will be productive," Kael lied, feeling the weight of the hammer vibrate on his wrist.
Horgar snorted, a cloud of ashes leaping from his lungs.
"The market will be as it always has been, lad. Peasants trading what they don't have for what they desperately need. Don't waste your time on what's beyond the horizon. The horizon doesn't put bread on the table."
That was Valeria's philosophy. A village built on resignation, where success was measured by surviving the winter and the greatest ambition allowed was to inherit one's father's occupation. Kael, however, felt an itch beneath his skin, a strange sensation as if the world were holding its breath. It was as if reality were a worn tapestry and he was pulling on a loose thread, waiting for everything to unravel to reveal what lay beneath.
At the end of his shift, Kael left the forge and walked through the dirt streets. The village was at its peak of daily life. Children scurried between the feet of weary merchants, and the smell of cabbage stew began to emanate from the stone chimneys. He passed the tavern "The Cracked Barrel," where the hoarse laughter of the woodcutters battled with the sound of a discordant lute. In the center of the square, a decrepit statue of a forgotten hero served as a perch for pigeons.
"Kael! This way!"
He turned and saw Lyra waving near the fountain. She carried a basket full of aromatic herbs and had a trail of dirt on her moss-green dress. Lyra had been his childhood companion, the only person who seemed to understand the silence he often imposed on himself.
"Another long day with Master Horgar?" she asked, approaching. The scent of lavender and earth emanating from her brought momentary relief to the smell of sulfur that Kael carried.
"The usual. He thinks I overthink things. And you? How's the healer's harvest going?"
Lyra sighed, looking at the plants in her basket.
" Scarce. The forest is... strange, Kael. The animals are returning to the depths, and the roots that used to grow abundantly on the eastern slope have dried up overnight. My mistress says the earth is nervous."
Kael felt a chill run down his spine, despite the lingering heat of the forge.
"Do you feel it too? As if something is about to happen?" he inquired, lowering his voice.
" I feel as if we're waiting for a knock on the door that never comes" she replied, her green eyes meeting his with unusual seriousness. "But what can change in a place like this? We're just the Nameless Ones, Kael. The world outside doesn't even know we exist."
They walked together to the outskirts of the village, where the houses gave way to the wheat fields. Kael lived in a small cabin with his mother, a woman whose face was a map of worries and hard work. Since Kael's father had disappeared on one of the many lordly summons to distant wars, their life had become a balancing act between debt and subsistence.
"Mother, I'm home," he announced as he entered.
She was bent over a seam, the light of a single candle battling the shadows that advanced in the twilight. She looked up and smiled, a visible effort that always broke Kael's heart.
"There's bread in the oven and some cheese the neighbor brought. Eat, my son. You look like you've carried the world on your shoulders today."
"Only Horgar's hammer, Mother. It's getting heavier every day," he joked, trying to mask the emptiness he felt.
Kael took the bread, sitting down at the rustic wooden table. He looked at his hands: his knuckles were stiff, his nails dirty with soot impossible to wash away. He looked at the small iron dagger his father had left behind, hanging on the wall like a relic of an unfulfilled promise. It was a simple, unadorned weapon, meant more for cutting ropes than winning battles. Little did he know that this common piece of metal was a reflection of his own life: functional, yet devoid of greater purpose.
After the meal, Kael went up to the small attic he called his room. He opened the window and looked at the sky. The stars were exceptionally bright that night, points of icy light that seemed to observe Lumenis with indifference. He lay down, feeling physical exhaustion fight against mental agitation.
Why couldn't he just be Kael, the blacksmith? Why this constant hunger for something he couldn't name? He thought of Gareth, the ex-soldier who occasionally passed through Valeria telling stories of castles that touched the clouds and warriors who could split rocks with the strength of their will. To most, they were drunken lies. For Kael, these were fragments of a reality he feared he would never reach.
Slowly, Valeria's silence enveloped him. It was an absolute silence, devoid of the sound of crickets or the wind in the trees. It was the silence that precedes the collapse of a mountain, or the moment a predator stops breathing before leaping. Kael closed his eyes, his last consciousness being the image of the dying embers in the fireplace below.
The medieval world continued its slow and predictable rotation, ignorant that the foundations of existence were being recalibrated in dimensions beyond human comprehension. In Valeria, people slept the sleep of the just and the exhausted, unaware that this would be the last night of their lives as purely ordinary beings. Kael, immersed in dreams of shadows and blue lights, felt a sudden warmth in his chest, a pulse that did not beat to the rhythm of his human heart, but at a new, vibrant, and dangerously unknown frequency.