The forge didn’t begin with fire.

It began with stone, clay, and patience.

I woke before dawn each day, long before the village stirred, and spent hours collecting materials in the forest’s edge. They still watched me. The guards didn’t follow anymore, but eyes followed me from windows, and from behind trees. I didn’t mind. Fear was better than rejection. Curiosity would follow.

By now, I understood half of their language. Enough to ask for tools. Enough to say "help me" when I needed an extra hand. Turo—the old scholar—was my bridge. He had patience and an instinct for teaching, though I often corrected him under my breath when he got a word wrong in my reconstructed lexicon. He was amused by that.

But it wasn’t the elders or Turo who came to help first.

It was the boy.

The same one who had thrown a rock at me.

---

His name was Erek.

He appeared one morning, arms crossed, standing just beyond the edge of my worksite near the stream. I ignored him at first. I was shaping bricks out of clay and straw—something I remembered from disaster-zone construction on Earth’s floodplains. Primitive, yes, but efficient for building a furnace shell.

When I looked up again, he was closer. Watching. Frowning.

I pointed at the stack of dry reeds next to me. “Nima,” I said—his word for bring.

He didn’t move.

I tried again, slower, more neutral. “Nima... those.”

He narrowed his eyes, then stomped over, grabbed a handful, and threw them into the mud next to me.

“Thanks,” I said with a grin.

He muttered something and sat down cross-legged, watching me work.

That was how it started.

---

By the end of the week, I had built a crude furnace from local brick and stone, lined with river clay and reinforced with hammered scrap from the village’s broken tools. I taught Erek how to operate the bellows—two stitched hides on a wooden frame. He was clumsy at first, but eager. I could see it in his eyes: not just curiosity, but hunger. Not for food.

For understanding.

When the furnace glowed for the first time, we both watched in silence.

Then I dropped in the salvaged metal fragments we had cleaned and sorted—iron, mostly, with bits of copper and something resembling nickel. It would take more testing to confirm their purity, but I didn’t need perfect alloying. Not yet.

What I needed was something simple.

A spring.

---

That night, the villagers gathered. Word had spread. Fires were lit around the central square. Erek had told someone—maybe Turo, maybe his friends. Now they came. Not close, not with welcome, but with the silent, tense curiosity people show a wolf wearing a cloak.

I stood before them, holding a device no bigger than my hand: a simple levered clamp made from reformed iron and bone, with a spring coil attached to the hinge.

I placed it on a table.

Then I demonstrated: I pressed it against a broken fence beam and squeezed.

The clamp bit into the wood and held tight.

Gasps. Quiet murmurs.

I rotated the device. Released. Applied again.

They leaned closer.

I looked at Turo. “Tool.”

He nodded. Repeated the word in their tongue: "Gavelin."

Then the village blacksmith approached. He was a massive man, arms like iron trees, his tools rusted and worn. He took the device with hesitation, then tested the grip. His brows lifted. He tested the spring. His mouth opened slightly, like a man who had seen something sacred.

He looked at the others. Then at me.

He said only one word: “More.”

---

Over the next few days, everything changed.

They still didn’t trust me. But they saw me.

Saw what I could build. Saw the burned hands of the blacksmith, now soothed by a clamp I forged for him. Saw a young girl who had walked with a cane now using a splinted brace I made from shaped wood and tension-bands—an adapted design from an old Earth medkit I remembered.

The elders watched silently.

Turo began writing again—scrolls filled with diagrams of the things I made.

And Erek… Erek followed me everywhere.

“Teach me,” he said, over and over.

And I did.

---

But not everyone welcomed the change.

One night, just before dawn, I found a torch left burning outside my hut. The wood was marked with a crude symbol: a spiral swallowed by black ink. A threat.

Erek saw it too. He grew quiet.

“They fear the fire,” he told me in broken speech. “Fire that… changes.”

I nodded. “Good. Change should be feared.”

He looked up at me. “But will it… save us?”

I didn’t answer. Because I wasn’t sure yet.

But I knew this: the Velkar empire was drawing closer. Patrols had been seen. Refugees whispered of new conquests. Whole towns burned.

And when they came here… they would find more than frightened villagers and wooden walls.

They would find resistance.

Built not with swords.

But with fire, steel, and knowledge.