THE BLACKSMITH WHO FORGED A NATION
In the war-torn kingdom of Valdris, where kings are crowned and deposed by the sword, where poets sing of brave knights and dashing generals, the story of Hannah would never be told. She is a blacksmith's widow in the forgotten village of Ironvale, a woman doing a "man's job" just to keep her two young children from starving. When her husband is conscripted and killed in the first battle of a pointless war, Hannah is left with nothing but her grief, her hammer, and a forge that is slowly going cold.
She wants nothing from this world except to be left alone.
But the world has other plans.
A routed army detachment staggers into Ironvale, hunted by an enemy noble's elite cavalry. Their captain is dying, their weapons are shattered, and their cause is lost. Hannah, with no love for the king who took her husband, wants to turn them away. But the enemy doesn't ask whose side you're on. They only ask if you're in their way.
Forced to repair the soldiers' equipment to save her village from being caught in the crossfire, Hannah does more than just fix broken swords. She improves them. Her husband's death taught her something the royal armories never learned: the difference between a weapon that looks glorious on a parade ground and a weapon that keeps a man alive in a real fight. She reforges their blades with a hidden strength, reinforces their armor with a practical flexibility, and designs a new type of horseshoe that won't crack on rough terrain.
When the cavalry arrives, the king's men—with Hannah's humble work in their hands—win against impossible odds. The enemy captain, dying in the mud of her village, sees her at her forge. His last words are a curse that will follow her forever:
"The king has a new witch. A smith witch."
Word spreads like wildfire. The Smith Witch of the North becomes a whisper on the wind—a tale of a woman who can make a farmer's scythe cut through steel, who can turn scrap into salvation. Hannah wants none of it. She wants to raise her children, tend her forge, and live in peace.
But war is a tide, and her village is built on sand.
As the kingdom crumbles around her, as refugees flood her valley and deserters seek her out, Hannah discovers that peace is not something you can hide from. It's something you have to build. With her hammer as her only weapon, her forge as her fortress, and her children as her reason to fight, she will do what no general, no king, no hero has ever done:
She will forge a nation from the ashes.
This is not a story about a woman who learned to fight. It's a story about a woman who learned that the sharpest sword in the world is useless without someone to forge it, someone to sharpen it, and someone to believe in the hand that wields it.
