The Edge of Creation

The moonfang daggers were still warm, purring along his palms like animals that remembered the hunt. Ren turned them so that forgefire slid across their edges, kissed the silver-blue curve, and ran along the hollowed groove Ferrin had called a songline. Satisfaction hummed in his bones, a bright note that wanted to sing.

Then the note collapsed into something sterner.

"If I'm going to survive what's coming," he said, the words dousing his pride like a plunge into quenching oil, "I'll need more than these." He slid the daggers into the leather cross-sheath across his back. The wolf pelt over his shoulders—Varyth's skull resting like a crown of a vow—suddenly felt like a trophy and not armor. "Chest, arms, greaves. Something sturdy."

Ferrin didn't look up. He was a shape in smoke and emberlight, the thick span of his shoulders thrown into relief by the furnace. Coal spat. The dwarf nudged it with a rake as if speaking to an old friend who never argued. "Then find a proper smith," he said, voice low, roughened by a forge's eternity. "I've got three commissions waiting, a noble's orders backed up, and a student who still hasn't returned with my black-steel shipment. I'm not making a full set of gear for some pup with fancy knives and fire in his eyes."

Ren smiled without humor. "I'll pay. I've got—"

"You could wave gold in my face and I'd still say no." The rake clanged against the grate. Ferrin turned then, cigar ember an angry star at the corner of his mouth. "Coin doesn't buy me time. And it sure as hell doesn't inspire me."

The forge breathed. Heat rolled over Ren's face, carrying notes of slag and ash and a metallic sweetness that lived inside molten iron. For a second he felt twelve again, standing behind a fence and watching a traveling smith draw sparks out of steel as if pulling light from the sky. The fence boards had been rough beneath his hands. The smith had hummed. Creation had looked like magic even before he knew magic existed.

He could have let the moment close, could have bowed and left and bought something standard in the market. Instead, his gaze caught on the back corner of the smithy—on a squat, iron-rimmed barrel half-swallowed by shadow. It bulged with ruin: bent plates, dulled rivets, buckles snapped like brittle bones, chain links scabbed with rust, pauldrons split along their seam. A grave. Or a field. It depended on the angle of your heart.

Potential, he thought, and felt the click of a gear somewhere behind his sternum.

"I don't need new material," he murmured, more to the forge than to Ferrin. "I need to reshape what's been forgotten." He turned. "What about the scrap?"

Ferrin blinked, then snorted. "What about it?"

"I want to buy it. The whole barrel." Ren drew in breath: leap or don't. "And I want to use your forge."

Ferrin's brows climbed under their soot. "You're serious."

"I'll pay. For the scraps, for forge time. Let me try."

"Boy, you're either mad or desperate."

"Both," Ren said, a grin splitting the heat-dry of his lips. "But I'm also serious. Those daggers? You said they were alive. I helped bring them into being. I learned from you. Let me see what I can make."

The dwarf's silence dragged, heavy as an anvil. Maybe Ferrin was measuring him against the barrel. Maybe against the night. He crossed his arms. "You want to melt down twisted plate and broken guard rings and turn it into battle-ready gear? That's not forging, boy. That's praying for miracles."

"I'm not praying," Ren said, and the wolf-skull shadowed his eyes like a vow. "I'm experimenting."

The forge hissed. Outside, night shifted the city's breath. Ferrin looked at the barrel, at Ren, at the waiting fire that had never learned to be patient. He grunted. "Ten gold. For the whole pile. You warp my hearth, burn down the shop, or crack one of my rune anvils, I'll throw you into the cooling pit myself."

"Deal."

Ren counted coins in the furnace glow, each clink swallowed by the room as if the forge were eating them for breakfast. Ferrin's hand closed over the last piece. He jerked his chin at the banked embers. "The forge is yours until dawn." A pause. A sideways grudgingness. "Let's see if the fire teaches you something… or eats you alive."

Ren stood alone when Ferrin left through the rear door, the smith's silhouette swallowed by the orange breath. Alone with a barrel of failure and a hunger that had stopped being about food a long time ago. He set his hands on the rim and peered down at the wreckage—old blades with edges chewed blunt, scorched mail stiff with memory, half-rings like moons caught in eclipse.

He smiled.

"This is my grind now."

He rolled his sleeves. The air prickled across his forearms, hot with promise. He called up the skill like a word he'd learned to love.

"Mana Imprint," he whispered.

Light lifted in his palm—the pale silver thread of a mark, the ghost of a future diagram—and he reached into the barrel to start.

Night stretched its canvas over Newvale; in Ferrin's smithy, it wore the color of embers. Ren sorted, chose, rejected, chose again. Pauldron plates with unbroken centers. Bracer bands warped but not cracked. A breastplate whose heart hadn't split, only remembered too many blows.

The first hour was fumbling. He heated pieces too fast and watched them blister, then cursed, then slowed, learning the patience in the way metal breathed. He separated alloys—copper edge into salvage bins, iron bone into the melting crucible, steel back to the heat. He sang to himself under his breath, a rhythm to pace his hammer, and when he forgot the words, the hammer sang for him.

Elemental Thread came like a second breath. He coaxed it, long and fine as spider silk, into channels along a piece still glowing like a sunset's bruise. Runic whispers fell out of his mouth clumsy and off-key, then truer, then almost right. He missed the cadence and the metal protested, wrinkling like an offended brow. He tried again, and the glow smoothed.

The forge kept score.

[Skill Rank Up: Mana Imprint – Lv2 → Lv3]

[Skill Rank Up: Forge-Lore – Lv1 → Lv2]

A laugh bubbled up at the first chime. He swung the hammer with new greed and hit too hard; the bracer shivered a wrong note under the blow. He adjusted. The hammer's head met steel like two old enemies who had decided to be cousins. Sparks shot up, struck his forearms, nipped.

He breathed smoke. He breathed effort. Time started losing its shape.

When his shoulders trembled, when the ache in his back ripened from complaint to sermon, when the edges of things fuzzed and the world narrowed to the hammer, the heat, the wet glow of iron wanting to be something else—

[New Skill Acquired: Scrap Tempering – Lv1]

You've learned to refine damaged or discarded equipment into usable gear. Forged armor made this way retains unpredictable traits but gains resilience through creative reinforcement.

He whooped. The sound bounced off rafters black as old tongue and came back smaller but real. He quenched a strip, watched steam billow, felt the little shock of the metal relaxing into shape. It wasn't pretty. It was honest.

He chased honesty through the night.

By the time dawn prodded the shutters and made a meager silver of the smoke, Ren stood before the anvil, sweat lacquered to his skin, hands buzzing from a thousand small wars. He looked down at what the night had given him.

A chest plate that could hold a punch and maybe a prayer. Bracers that fit like a compromise. Shoulder guards that were nearly a mirror of each other if you squinted and were kind. He lifted one greave, flexed it, and a seam split with a sound like a breath breaking.

He stared at the crack as if it might apologize. Then he laughed, helpless, a tired sound turned fond against his will. "Fair enough."

[Skill Rank Up: Mana Imprint – Lv3 → Lv4]

[Skill Rank Up: Forge-Lore – Lv2 → Lv3]

[Scrap Tempering – Lv1 → Lv2]

The system had seen him. It wasn't much, but it was north; it was a compass; it was a path.

He was packing the best of it—the chest plate that wouldn't embarrass him in daylight—when boots scuffed the threshold. Ferrin stepped into the forge's quiet, eyes taking in ruin and result with equal appetite.

"Disaster," the smith muttered. Then his beard twitched. "But educational."

Ren wiped his face with the back of his wrist, leaving a black smear that turned his cheek into war paint. "Worth the ten gold."

Ferrin grunted, walked to the chest plate, thumped it with a knuckle. The sound held. He didn't say "good." He let the silence say it for him. "You learned something, which is more than most." He hooked a thumb at the barrel. "You want more scrap, you pay the same way."

"I'll be back," Ren said. "I want to keep leveling. Take anything you'd toss."

"Don't clog my hearth when I've real orders." The dwarf turned toward his tools and paused. "And sleep, boy. You look like a bell that's been rung all night."

Ren slung his satchel, the wolf pelt settling around his shoulders as if to say you did not come this far to be gentle. He stepped into the morning: chill air, a sky pale as hammered tin, roofs smoking like thoughts.

He found an inn that smelled of bread and kindness. He remembered to eat only because the innkeeper insisted with a plate between her hands. The soup tasted like someone had boiled patience down into comfort. He slept like an anvil dropped into a lake.

When moonlight woke him—a hand of silver laid lightly across the floorboards—he lay and watched it breathe. Seraphina's voice came soft and close as a blanket.

"I'm here."

"That armor," he said to the ceiling. "I failed."

"Both true and false," she said gently. "Your skills are young. And forging is more than technique. You lack rune harmonization, alloy theory, magical stabilization—fields taught in schools, guarded in books."

"Books," he said, and sat up. The fatigue in his bones had weight, but the idea had wings. "There's more."

"There's always more."

He dressed. He went hunting—not for beasts, but for words.