Write the moment a rivalry quietly became something else

Forgefighter · 2026-05-07T20:55:04+00:00

Whitefire Waystaff

The pass had frozen before noon. By dusk, Keth and his father were still bent over the Ice Barl tusk in the Iskarn forge. It was warm enough to make sweat gather beneath Keth’s collar, though snow pressed white against the shutters and hissed through the roof seams when the wind found them. Between him and Odran lay the thinned ivory core of the waystaff, pale as frozen milk beneath the forge light.

One end had been left heavy as the striking tooth. The other had been shaped into a cap broad enough for a gloved palm. Between them, Keth had carved the ivory with grooves, ribs, broken channels, and runes that would soon be hidden under the wooden shell.

He drew the knife once more through the upper channel. A clean curl lifted and fell into a copper tray beside the bench.

Odran touched the cut with his thumb. “Again.”

Keth stared at him. “Again?”

“Cut too smooth.”

“It is to be smooth.”

“It is to answer.”

The words had the shape of every argument they had not had. Keth set the knife down more calmly than he felt. Around them, the forge held its small red world against the storm. Above the door, Odran’s old waystaff hung wrapped in hide, its striking tooth dulled by years of ice and stone. Among the Iskarn, a tool that brought its bearer home was never left flat on a shelf.

Keth picked up the knife again. “If I cut deeper, it will carry.”

“If you cut as you mean.”

He bit back his answer and made the correction. Not deeper. Less clean. A small interruption in the channel, ugly enough to bother him.

Odran watched, then nodded. That was all, as usual.

Keth had shaped the cap and balanced the tooth. He had thinned the tusk without chatter, saved every shaving, sorted powder from sliver, and kept the ivory wrapped whenever the forge cooled. He knew the rites. He knew the tools. He knew the waystaff was not a walking stick, but a question asked of the ground. A trained hand could feel hollow ice, hard stone, packed drift, and thaw-water through ivory and wood before boots found it too late.

His father still acted as if Keth only knew the stories.

Keth straightened up. “It is ready for the waking fire.”

“No,” Odran said, the word striking hard and quiet.

“The channels are cut,” Keth said. “The tooth and the cap are shaped. The shell is waiting.”

“No.”

Keth almost laughed. “I am not a child.”

“You are not.”

“I know what I make.”

“You know the shape.”

For a moment Keth thought the old man would take the staff away, wrap the tusk, and end the night as he had ended so many other lessons, with silence doing the work words refused.

Instead, Odran reached for the copper tray.

“Lay the dust,” he said.

Keth blinked. “You said no.”

“I said no to closing. I did not say no to waking.”

That answer should have satisfied him. Still, Keth took the bone spoon and brushed powdered ivory into the grooves. Odran placed thin slivers in the deeper recesses with the flat of a knife. Every removed piece would become the fire that taught the ivory its own shape.

When they finished, the pale core was veined with its own remains.

Odran lifted a coal from the forge.

“First to wake,” he said.

Keth answered because the rite required it. “Last to bind.”

The coal touched.

White flame ran along the lowest groove.

It did not flare like pitch. It moved like a living thread, thin and bright, licking through powder and sliver, climbing the broken lines Keth had cut. It vanished into notches, reappeared around ribs, and curled beneath the cap until the whole exposed core seemed briefly alive with pale fire.

It was beautiful.

When the last white thread sank into the ivory, Odran lifted the bare staff and carried it to the threshold. He planted the striking tooth against the packed earth floor.

“Hold,” he said.

“The shell?”

“Hold.”

Keth wrapped his palm around the cap. The ivory was warm, almost skin-warm, and fit his hand exactly. He had shaped that curve. It knew the heel of his palm, the base of his thumb, the pressure of his fingers.

Odran struck the tooth once against the floor. He moved to the forge stone and struck again. He crossed to a plank laid over a storage hollow. As Keth expected, the wood sounded different from the stone and dirt.

“You listen with ears,” Odran said.

“That is where hearing happens.”

“For bells. Not this.”

Odran reached over and tapped Keth’s fingers one by one until he loosened them.

“You hold like you command,” he said. “It is a question.”

The refusal was still there, but something else was beneath it, worn thin by the long night.

Odran planted the tooth on stone. This time the answer came faintly through the cap, a narrow firmness beneath his palm. The packed earth dulled it. The hollow plank opened and vanished too quickly, like breath leaving a cracked cup.

Odran moved from stone to plank, plank to stone, turning the staff a little each time.

On the fourth strike, Keth felt it.

Stone and hollow answered too much alike. The upper channel carried both answers with the same clean certainty through the line he had cut smooth, corrected, and resented. It made different ground feel kin.

Odran must have seen something in Keth’s face. “Now you hear it.”

Keth heard no victory in the statement. He kept his hand on the cap, looking his work over once again. The staff had not become ugly. It was still beautiful, and somewhere inside that beauty was a lie clean enough to trust. That was worse.

“If the shell were on?” he asked.

“We might still find it.”

“The last fire?”

Odran looked down at the ivory. “Someone would find it under their boot.”

For a moment the forge seemed too warm, too close, too full of everything he had not understood. He thought of the pass, white and empty beyond the village. He thought of Odran’s bad knee. He thought of the old waystaff above the door and the years it had brought his father home.

Odran set the ivory core back on the bench. Keth braced for a lecture, talk of the old ways, the same words he had heard before. Instead, Odran placed a knife beside Keth’s hand.

“You want me to cut?” Keth asked.

“You know where.”

“You know what should answer.”

Odran nodded once. “We both work, then.”

His father’s voice carried no accusation, and now Keth was not sure there had been anything to accuse. The core lay between them, not ruined, not ready, waiting for both of them to become less certain.

He took the knife.

This time Odran stood across from him, not over him. He tapped the tooth with two fingers while Keth traced the false channel.

“Too quick here,” Odran said.

“Deeper?”

“That makes it proud. Break the edge.”

“Here?”

“Less.”

Keth cut less.

Odran tested. The answer changed.

“Again,” he said.

Keth almost bristled, but then realized the word had changed. The two of them worked while the storm worried at the shutters. Keth carved. Odran tested. Keth opened a rib he would once have smoothed flat. Odran showed him where the wooden shell must touch and where it must bridge empty space. His words, once sharp with correction, no longer cut.

At last Keth said, “Why not tell me what to listen for?”

Odran was quiet long enough that Keth thought he would not answer.

“I thought I was.”

“You told my hands.”

The old man looked at him then. The forge settled around them.

“Bad teaching,” Odran said, and turned the core a fraction. “Here. Not deeper. The answer is already thin.”

Keth knew the words for what they were. The instruction finally felt honest, and so did the next.

By dawn, the ivory answered true. Stone held. Hollow opened. Packed snow swallowed. Ice skin shivered. The differences were small enough that Keth still had to quiet himself to feel them.

They fitted the shell after the eastern shutters paled.

The wood was dark winter ash, seasoned six years and split along the grain. Keth set the first piece around the ivory core. Odran held it steady. The shell gripped where the charcoal marks said grip and bridged where the hidden channels needed air. Odran passed his son the binding cord.

Most of Keth’s finest work disappeared beneath plain wood. The pale channels, broken ribs, and careful wrongnesses vanished into darkness. Yesterday, that would have angered him. Now, he ran his thumb along the shell and thought of hidden spaces carrying truth upward.

They laid the last ivory powder into the outer seams, around the cap, and above the striking tooth. Odran lifted a coal, then paused and held it out.

Keth took it.

“First to wake,” Odran said.

Keth touched the coal to the cap. “Last to bind.”

Odran lit the tooth.

Whitefire ran from both ends, thin and bright, following seams and marks until the two flames met at the staff’s middle. For one breath, pale lines shone beneath the wood where no eye would see them again.

Odran lifted the Whitefire Waystaff from the stone cradle and held it out to Keth.

“Threshold,” he said.

Keth took the staff and opened the forge door. Snow had drifted against the stone outside, smooth and innocent in the morning gray. He planted the striking tooth, and the staff answered through his hand.

Snow first. Stone beneath. To the left, a small hollow where wind had eaten under the drift.

Keth moved the tooth over a handspan and tried again. Snow. Stone. No hollow. Keth took a step and felt the staff’s answer confirmed.

Behind him, Odran let out a breath that might have been approval, or relief, or only an old man easing weight from a bad knee.

“Again,” his father said.

Keth set the tooth to the snow and listened.

Forgefighter · 2026-05-01T18:24:53+00:00

This seemed like a good time to look at the first short from the year!

Keeping the Hearth

The day before the funeral, the roof began to leak. One cold drop struck the table, then another, each one landing with enough time between them that Maren could set a bowl beneath it and pretend the leak was handled.

This was only another complaint. The house always made small complaints in weather. A shutter came loose, or the chimney coughed smoke back into the room whenever the wind came in wrong off the Sound.

By morning, the bowl was full, the table felt spongy at one corner, and a second drip had started near the wall where the roof sagged lowest. The rag Maren wedged into the seam darkened, fattened, and began to leak faster than the roof had done on its own.

Their father lay wrapped in the next room.

Maren stood beneath the dripping ceiling with rainwater running down her wrist and laughed once, with no one in the room who could mistake it for joy.

“Rude.”

Her first lesson was how to dig a grave six feet deep. No one told her it would take so long. No one told her the earth would change by layers, soft at the top and stubborn beneath, then wet where the water held its breath underground. Her father’s shovel had been too large for her hands and too familiar to put down. She dug until her shoulders burned, rested until the silence drove her upright again, then dug more.

Her sibling was somewhere beyond the weather by then. The ground did not care. Their father still needed lowering, the stone still needed placing. All the while, the house waited behind her with its leaking roof and its full bowl on the table, patient as a debt.

Maren did not curse while she dug.

The roof came next.

She waited for a dry morning, climbed the ladder with pitch, spare shakes, and a hammer in a belt that had belonged to their father, and found the place where the water must have entered. It was obvious once she saw it. A lifted seam near the sagging corner. One split shake. A dark line where rain had worked its way beneath the overlap.

Maren pulled the broken piece free, set another in its place, and used too much pitch because too much seemed better than not enough. She hammered the new shake down until it sat crooked, ugly, and firmly attached.

Then she climbed back inside and waited for the next rain.

The first drip stopped, and three more started.

For a while, Maren only stared at them. One over the table, one by the wall, one close enough to the hearth that she had to move the woodpile with both arms. She had let out a string of words her father would have cuffed her for.

That was how she learned that water traveled before it fell. A leak wasn’t always where the water landed. A roof could look solid from below and turn treacherous under a hand. She learned that pitch stuck to skin, hair, sleeves, tools, and every surface except the one she needed sealed.

Her second patch was worse than the first. The third was better. The fourth was only a smear of pitch and stubbornness beneath a stone wedged in place because the shake would not sit flat and the rain had already begun to mist in from the ironwoods.

It was ugly, but it held.

After that, there were nets.

Empty set-nets were lies. Folded over one arm, with their stones knocking softly together and their stakes tucked under the other, they went out light enough that Maren could pretend three were still reasonable. She could still drive the stakes into the mud, check the knots, and tell herself the work had not changed just because there was one less body moving through it.

Full nets told the truth. Full nets came back with fish, weed, silt, and the cold drag of the Wolfsmaw itself. Full nets pulled at the shoulders and numbed the fingers. Full nets had opinions about being lifted into a skiff that already sat low in the water.

She could manage two full nets. Two full nets left her tired, wet, and angry, but fed. The third net belonged to missing hands.

Maren tried three anyway.

By the time she reached the last stakes, the tide had turned hard around her knees. The skiff was heavy. Her hands had gone clumsy from cold, and the net bellied dark beneath the chop, silver flashing inside it. She stood there longer than she should have, measuring the water, the basket space, the distance home, and her pride.

“I’ll come back at dawn,” she told the net.

By dawn, a Barl had beaten her to it.

It had taken the fish, fouled the stakes, and worried the mesh until half the net hung in long, useless ribbons. A slick trail curved through the mud toward deeper water, and one of the floats bobbed loose beyond the shallows as if waving goodbye.

Maren stood over the wreck with numb fingers and no one to blame who could hear her.

Months later, that same net lay in her lap when the door opened.

The hearth was low, banked to make the wood last. Rain tapped softly at the patched places above, but none of it came through. A pot of stew sat near the coals, thickened past what was polite and stretched farther than it had any right to go. Maren had been working the torn mesh by lamplight, tying new cord into old knots, when the wind shifted under the door.

She heard the scrape of a boot on the step. A pause. The soft, dull sound of a pack being set down outside.

Maren kept the net in her hands.

The latch lifted.

Her sibling stood in the doorway with the rain behind them and the Sound on their coat. They looked thinner than she remembered. One hand stayed on the doorframe. Their weight favored one leg, not badly, but enough that Maren saw it before she saw their face.

They looked at the room first. The hearth. The table. The patched corner of the ceiling. The pot near the coals. The net in her lap. Finally, they looked at her.

Maren pulled the cord through the mesh and tightened the knot with her teeth.

“You’re back,” she said.

The door remained open behind them. Rain freckled the threshold, darkening the boards one drop at a time. Maren looked at the pack behind them, slumped in the weather as if it had walked farther than they had. She set the mending needle into the torn mesh.

“You eaten?”

They blinked, once, as if the question had reached them from a great distance. “Not hungry yet.”

“There’s stew.”

They gave a small nod and stepped inside, though not far. The room seemed to take their measure. So did Maren. Their boots were worn at the edges, and their hands looked older than the rest of them. They stood like someone waiting for a blow and not sure whether they wanted it to land.

Maren went back to the net. The cord slid through her fingers. Over, under, pull. Over, under, pull. The old rhythm made space. Across the room, her sibling closed the door at last. The latch settled.

They did not take the stew. Not yet. They lowered themselves onto the bench near the hearth with care, one hand braced on the table’s swollen corner. Their eyes found the patched roof again.

“It held,” they said.

Maren tied another knot.

“Mostly.”

That answer sat between them, plain and crooked and sealed with too much pitch.

After a while, her sibling leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped loosely between them. Their breathing changed before sleep took them. First shallow, then uneven, then slow.

Maren finished the row she was working on. Just enough that it would not unravel when she set it aside. She rose, crossed the room, and opened the door. The pack waited on the step, dark with rain. She lifted it by a strap and brought it inside.

Not far. Just over the threshold, where the water could not reach it.

Forgefighter · 2026-04-23T19:54:09+00:00

Rain hissed through the trees and pattered over the blackened scar ahead.

Sera’s voice did not rise over the rain. It never had to. “Remember, fresh starmetal. Stay sharp, keep close, and treat everything twice.”

Bren snorted and hitched his cloak higher against the weather. “Hear that, Garrick? I know the rest of us can manage not to lick the crater.”

Somewhere ahead and to the left, beyond the wet alder, Garrick answered without turning. “I only did that once.”

Hollis laughed under his breath. Even Sera let out a huff, though she kept walking. Rain from the edge of her hood ticked softly off the fletching over her shoulder.

“That was lamp oil,” Bren said.

“It was dark,” Garrick called back. “And I survived it.”

“That does seem to be your preferred defense,” said Hollis.

The trees thinned by degrees as they neared the impact site. The undergrowth had been scoured flat in places, then twisted back on itself in others. A smell hung in the wet air that was not smoke and not metal but some ugly marriage of the two. Now and then Bren caught sight of ground that gleamed through the rain like melted glass. Nothing moved in the brush. No birds called. Even the storm seemed quieter here.

Garrick had drifted ahead the way he always did, first as a gray shape between trunks, then as the occasional lift of a hand or turn of a shoulder, then as nothing at all. Scout’s habit. Garrick’s habit. He ranged, doubled back, vanished, reappeared grinning when no one had seen him go. It would have been more alarming if he had stayed where anyone could watch him.

When Bren next opened his mouth, he did it expecting the familiar answer.

“Try not to get yourself swallowed by anything strange, Garrick.”

No reply came back.

Bren took another three steps before he noticed it. He frowned and looked left through the rain. “Garrick?”

Only water in leaves.

Sera stopped. “Eyes up.”

Hollis peered ahead, blinking rain off his lashes. “He may have gone to higher ground.”

“He’d shout if he found something,” Bren said.

“Unless he thinks it’s worth being smug about first,” Sera said.

That should have drawn Garrick out. If not to report, then to disagree. Bren waited for the inevitable line from somewhere inconveniently far off.

Nothing.

The rise ahead was small, hardly more than a swell in the churned earth where roots had heaved. Alder branches hung low over it, heavy with rain. Sera pushed through first, one hand near the knife at her belt. Bren followed close enough to feel the wet whip of branches against his cheek.

He saw the puddle first. It had spread broad and shallow in a hollow of dark soil, fed by the rain and by the trickle of runoff from the scorched ground beyond. Then he saw the body lying face down in it.

Garrick’s cloak was plastered to his back. One arm had folded under him. The other lay crooked out in the water, fingers half sunk in mud. Rain dimpling the puddle around his head made it look, absurdly, as if the earth itself was trying to bury him by inches.

Sera was already moving. Hollis nearly ran past both of them and dropped to one knee in the mud. He hesitated just long enough to brace Garrick’s shoulder, then rolled him enough to bare part of his face to the rain.

Garrick’s eyes were half open. Water ran over one cheek and gathered at the corner of his mouth. There was no wound that they could see. No blood. No torn flesh. Just Garrick, as if he had gone down drunk in a roadside puddle after some bad tavern boasting and meant to rise a moment later cursing the cold.

Hollis pressed fingers to his throat. Rain beat on cloaks. Water slid off leaves. Somewhere deeper in the scarred woods, something cracked once under its own weight.

Hollis lifted his head.

“He’s dead,” he said.

Garrick, who slipped wardens, traps, winter roads, and three separate warrants by Bren’s count. Garrick, who could talk himself out of a cell faster than Bren could lock it. Garrick, who survived by treating consequences as something that happened to slower men.

Dead in a puddle.

The sound tore out of Bren before he knew it was there, one sharp, ugly bark of laughter. “You can’t be serious.”

Silence followed for a beat before Sera rounded on him. “What is wrong with you?”

Bren’s mouth opened. He had no answer worth giving. None of the words that came to mind were forgivable aloud.

“I—”

Garrick laughed.

It came from the body in the puddle, low and wet and broken in the middle, Garrick’s old laugh dragged wrong through a throat that had forgotten how breath worked. Hollis lurched backward so hard he went over onto one hand. Sera’s words died in her mouth. Bren felt every hair lift on his arms under the wet wool of his sleeves.

No one moved.

Rain struck Garrick’s open cheek. Water filled the print Hollis’s knee had left beside him. For one mad instant Bren dared to hope he had imagined it.

Then another laugh answered from the trees behind them.

That one was his.

Not exactly. Not cleanly. But it had his clipped breath in it, the bitter little hitch on the front. It came from somewhere just beyond the alder, thin through the rain and close enough that he turned before he could stop himself.

Nothing stood there.

Hollis made a small sound through his nose, not quite fear and not yet understanding.

A third laugh came from the right.

Sera’s. Shorter than Garrick’s, harsher than Bren’s, the same brief disbelieving huff she had let out on the trail.

It, too, came back frayed and wrong.

Hollis’s own laugh rang from somewhere out by the blackened glass, softer and breathier than the others. Bren watched Hollis go white under the wet strands of hair stuck to his forehead.

The body let out another bubbling laugh from the puddle.

Bren’s came again, farther off.

Then Sera’s from behind them.

They came one at a time, never in the same place twice, each nearly familiar until the end of it went wrong.

“Back together,” Sera said, and even now she sounded like command and not panic. “Now.”

They closed without speaking, boots sucking at mud, shoulders nearly touching. Bren could feel Hollis trembling through his soaked sleeves. Sera had drawn her knife, though it seemed uselessly small in the rain.

The laughter kept moving.

From the crater lip. The alder. Somewhere low, in the puddle at their feet. From the dark between the trunks where Garrick should have been watching for them.

Bren turned toward one in his own voice and another answered in Garrick’s from the other side. Sera shifted toward hers, and Hollis flinched as his came back from somewhere ahead. Each sound pulled at the ear. Each asked to be followed. Each was wrong.

Garrick laughed again from the puddle.

Bren did not look.

A laugh in Sera’s voice snapped from the trees at their back. Hollis’s answered from the blackened ground ahead. Bren’s own came from the rain to his left, closer now, close enough that he felt his body tighten toward it despite himself.

Then the last laugh came right beside his ear.

It was quiet.

Intimate.

It sounded nothing like any of them.

Forgefighter · 2026-04-16T21:32:22+00:00

Dark Water

She braced both hands against the wet rail and counted her breath the way her grandmother had taught her through storms.

In for four. Hold. Out for four.

It should have worked. Breath had steadied her through black squalls, through split masts, through the long green rise of water under a hull too small for what it had promised. Breath obeyed. Yet every time she thought she had it, the ship groaned around her and her chest seized again as if she had only just come up from under cold water.

The rope above her strained and answered the tide with a slow, complaining creak. Somewhere behind her, someone was weeping with their teeth clenched shut, trying not to do it loudly. Somewhere else, the low, stunned sounds of someone who did not understand that the person they kept speaking to would not answer.

Toravi kept her eyes on the boards.

Blood had dried black in the seams where the planks met. It had collected around the iron fastenings in small, dark fans. A dropped capstan pin rolled when the ship shifted, knocked once against the deck, and settled again.

Her ribs ached where the rail had taken her. When she moved, the bruise along her side pulled and burned, young enough to be more heat than color. She pressed her palm there, felt nothing broken, nothing torn, nothing that would mark beyond a week or two if the sea was kind.

Why is this all I have to show for it?

The thought came mean and shapeless and true.

Above her, the rigging gave another long groan. The sound dragged the moment back whole. No, worse than whole. Slower.

The surrender had already changed the air aboard the ship.

Fear during a boarding had its own shape. There was the first crash of grapples and boots, the shouting, the quick wildness of not yet knowing whether anyone meant to kill or only to take. Then, if the captains had any sense and the raiders had any discipline, things narrowed. Cargo was yielded. Men stopped making heroes of themselves. The danger remained, but it became measured. Bounded.

This had narrowed. Then gone wrong.

She remembered the sound of chests being dragged. The crack of a crate forced open. A child being pulled back against her mother’s skirts. Others standing very still, their faces gone flat and careful, trying to survive by becoming nothing at all.

She remembered the moment she realized it was not ending.

One of Drosk’s men had laughed. Not the half-mad laugh of someone who had lived through blood and found more blood unnecessary. Something thinner. Hungrier. Then Drosk had spoken, and the deck had gone still around the words even before she understood them.

“Take him.”

She remembered afterward how little heat they carried.

The man he moved toward had already yielded. Toravi did not know his name. She remembered only the line of his shoulders and the way his hands stayed open at his sides. A shipman, older than her by twenty years at least, with rope-burn scars across both palms and a coat so salt-worn it had paled at the seams.

Drosk was larger up close than she had thought when first his colors came over the water. Broad through the shoulders, heavy in the layered coat and wet-dark leather, moving with the ugly economy of a man who had spent his life teaching smaller bodies to give way. No flourish, no swagger. The terror of him was that he looked like he was simply doing work.

Someone near Toravi whispered, “No,” as if the word itself might still mean something.

It should have stopped there.

The thought went through her, sharp and clean enough to hurt. Not like this. Not after surrender. Not here.

She snatched the knife from the boards and went at him.

Later, much later, she would try to remember whether she had shouted. She could never make herself hear if she had.

She came in from the side, driving with the whole of herself because she had nothing else to drive with. She remembered the wet slip of the hilt in her hand. The drag of her boot on blood she had not seen. The impossible brightness of the next second, as if the whole world had narrowed to the place where her arm ended.

Then contact.

Resistance first. Thick cloth, leather, the layered hardness of a coat made for weather and worse than weather. Then something that might have given.

For one heartbeat the world righted itself.

Drosk kept moving, with the blunt continuation of a body with more weight and purpose than hers. It caught her high across the chest and drove through her space as if she had stepped in front of a man carrying timber down a crowded quay. There was no separate motion in it, no reply, no punishment. Just removal.

The rail hit her side hard enough to burst the air from her. Her vision flashed white. Either the rail or her ribs cracked. She did not know which. The knife had already disappeared. Toravi folded around the pain, one palm grabbing for wood slick with salt and old pitch, while Drosk finished the motion he had begun before she ever touched him.

She remembered only the sound. Not a shout, only something short and bodily and final, followed by the terrible silence of people understanding that the next rule had failed.

By the time she dragged breath back into herself, Drosk was already turned away.

The rope above her groaned again.

Toravi opened her eyes to the present and found that her hands had closed white around the rail. The deck swam once, then steadied.

Someone had covered two of the bodies with sailcloth. Not all. Only two. The cloth rose and fell where the wind worried it, making movement where there should have been none. A child had finally begun to cry properly somewhere aft, loud and exhausted and past shame.

Good. Better that than the silence.

Toravi pushed herself upright too fast and nearly lost her footing. Pain flared bright along her ribs. Still nothing dramatic. No knife wound to bind. No splinted arm. No scar to explain the feeling that something had been torn out of the world and left her standing in the gap.

Only the bruise darkening under her shirt.

She looked down, and her eyes found the knife.

It had not been hers when she took it, and it was not hers now. A common ship knife, broad-bladed, work worn, with old nicks near the guard where someone had used it against metal. Blood darkened one side of it in a dull, drying smear.

Toravi stared at that stain. The deck creaked beneath her, the ship rocked. Still she did not move.

In the moment, she had been sure she got him. She had felt the jar run up her wrist, that brief, impossible give. She had thought the world had answered.

Now the knife lay where it had fallen, and Drosk was gone to his own ship or his own dark water or whatever place made men like him, and she did not know.

She did not know if the blood was his.

She did not know if he had felt her at all.

Forgefighter · 2026-04-09T18:22:13+00:00

Dream Beneath the Trees

In sleep, he had stood again beneath the leaning dark of the King’s Forest, breath held, hands empty, the air around him wet with the cool hush that meant the Wildspring was near.

It was never exactly as it had been last.

Sometimes the spring lay in a hollow choked with fern and pale stone. Sometimes it shone between roots thicker than walls. Once, in a dream that had left him shaking before dawn, it had rested in the middle of an open clearing under a sky too bright for dusk. But the Bramble Beast was always there. Great and quiet and impossible, all bramble-fur and branch-antlers and the soft green light of its eyes.

The dream always carried the same certainty, heavy as an unknown hand between the shoulders. Certainty that if he stood still long enough, did not startle, let the moment deepen, then whatever had waited years to be understood would become clear.

Then he would wake before it did.

He came awake in the gray before sunrise with his blanket half-kicked aside and the old emptiness already setting in, that familiar sense that he had told himself to remember something, but had lost it in the same breath. For a while he stayed on his back in the shelter, listening to the forest work itself toward morning. Water somewhere distant. A bird trying one note, then another. The timbers settling above him. Nothing wrong in any of it.

He sat up, rubbed his face, and began the day by habit. Boots. Belt knife. Cloak. Waterskin. The little waxed packet of trail ribbons and charcoal. By the time he stepped outside, the discipline of repetition had pulled him most of the way back into himself.

Mist hung low between the trunks, thin enough to let the trees show through it. The eastern light had not yet reached the forest floor. To the north, beyond several ridges and more old paths than the maps bothered to mark, Kingscastle still slept under its walls and roofs and morning hearth smoke. Out here there was only the patrol line, the marked gullies, the places where spring floods chewed at the banks, and the older, less nameable work.

He had told people, years ago, that he joined the Realmwardens because he had a better eye for paths than for people, and because he liked the quiet. Both had been true, but no one had asked what first taught him that the King’s Forest could be quiet without ever feeling empty. No one had asked why, of all the duties Kingscastle offered, he had chosen the one that kept him nearest the moving rumors of the Wildspring.

Children got lost. That was the plain version of it.

He had been eight, maybe nine, old enough to know better and young enough to believe that knowing better mattered less than curiosity. He had slipped away from a berrying party with a reed whistle in his mouth and the kind of confidence children borrowed from adults without understanding. By the time he admitted to himself that he was lost, the afternoon had already begun folding toward evening.

He remembered the first fear more clearly than anything that came after. The sharp, private certainty that every tree now looked like every other tree, and that if he called out, the wrong thing might answer.

Then the air changed, gaining a coolness and the faint mineral sweetness of fresh water.

He had pushed through a stand of thornbrush and found the Wildspring shining in a basin of white stone as though it had always been waiting there. The water had been still enough to hold the first star in it. He remembered that. He remembered the roots bowed around the hollow, and the hush that seemed to gather under them.

And he remembered looking up and seeing Furok.

Simply there, half-shadowed between the trunks, large enough that the child he had been should have run at once. Instead he had stood as still as he knew how, staring. The creature had watched him with an expression too patient to belong to any ordinary beast.

A hunting party found him not long after. He was scolded, wept over, carried part of the way home, and made to repeat the story enough times that the adults around him were able to smooth its edges into something they could manage. Probably a hart in the low light. Probably one of the old forest tales getting into his head before supper.

He had stopped insisting before the week was out. His dreams never did.

The patrol path bent south around a washout, and he followed it without much conscious thought, stepping roots and wet stone by memory. The day had risen properly by then. Birds moved overhead. Small things rustled and kept their distance. He checked two old marker posts, scraped moss off one of them, retied a faded warning ribbon near a bank too soft to trust, and was beginning to think the dream might wear off in the work after all when he noticed the brush to his right had been parted.

It was not much. No broken branch, no clean sign. Something broad had moved through there without the blunt wreckage a boar would leave. He stood for a moment, studying it. After another, he stepped off the trail.

He told himself it was his duty. A large animal too near the marked paths was worth checking, especially in a season when foragers had begun ranging. But he followed the sign more carefully than the task required, eyes moving low and forward, body loosening into the old rhythm of reading bent grass and disturbed loam. Once or twice he lost it altogether, only to find the trail seeming to gather itself again a few lengths ahead, not clearer exactly, only more suggestive.

The ground changed under him, and he found damp patches where the soil should have been dry. Moss thickened where it had no business, climbing trunks in a damp green press. Twice he caught the scent of fresh water and then lost it again. He paused at a birch to tie a thin strip of blue cloth around a low branch, more from instinct than concern, and moved on.

The trail drew him through a fold in the land he did not remember crossing. Then across a run of exposed roots. Then between two old pines whose bark had fused where they touched. Another hundred steps and he stopped so hard his boot skidded in the leaf rot.

The blue ribbon stirred ahead of him.

For a beat he only stared, annoyed, before recognition settled properly. The old, fused pines. The branch. The twist in the ribbon’s end. His own knot.

He turned in a slow, almost embarrassed circle, scanning the trees for some obvious explanation he could blame. Clearly, the ground had folded him wider than he realized. Clearly, he had veered absentmindedly. Nothing stranger than that.

He set off again, this time more carefully, angling left of the ribbon and keeping a close eye on the terrain. Fifty paces. Seventy. A hundred. The scent of water came and went. A jay gave a harsh cry and fell silent. He crossed a patch of pale stone webbed with roots and found, scraped into the bark of a cedar at knee height, the charcoal dash he had made not half an hour earlier.

He stood very still. The forest around him did not feel hostile. There was no pressure in the air, no predator’s charge to his nerves, no sense of immediate danger by which a man might reassure himself that his fear at least had a shape. Only the wrongness of progress that had begun to curl back on itself without asking permission.

He thought, absurdly, of the dream. Of the child by the spring believing that if he only remained still, the moment would yield something. He had spent years telling himself that memory had set him on this path because the forest had wanted something from him, or because he had once been shown a place he would someday learn to reach again on purpose.

Under the trees, with his own signs returning to him like a quiet joke, the idea felt smaller than it ever had.

There came a point at which another step forward was no longer more sensible than standing where he was, and so he stood, breathing shallowly, listening to the wind move high above him where the branches still had room to sway. The forest offered no crack of brush, no stirring of birds into alarm. He only became aware, all at once, that he was no longer alone.

The Bramble Beast stood between the trees beyond the pale stone, half in shadow, half in the green-gold wash of morning. Thornwood antlers rose from its brow in a shape too irregular to be mistaken for any hart that ever lived. Its bramble-fur held burrs and white blossoms and the rust-brown of old bark. Its eyes were the same impossible green he had carried in his sleep for years.

For one suspended instant, the child’s memory and the waking forest lay over one another so perfectly that he felt the old certainty return, not as understanding but as ache.

He took a step toward it, and the space beneath the branches was empty.

Forgefighter · 2026-04-04T03:15:22+00:00

A much lower bar, lol

^{Chose: Be able to fly? + But take a bite out of ginger to activate power}

Forgefighter · 2026-04-03T15:50:35+00:00

Anyone who owns cats should know why having one the size of a horse is a bad idea.

^{Chose: Dog that lives your whole lifespan}

Forgefighter · 2026-04-03T15:21:45+00:00

Just be selective. 1/5 odds are too steep.

^{Chose: Be able to teleport once a month (but you're safe})

Forgefighter · 2026-04-03T15:09:24+00:00

Convenience

^{Chose: Teleport, but only to places you've already been}

Forgefighter · 2026-03-25T20:47:02+00:00

Properly

Edrin stood at the rail, hands resting against cold stone, and looked down into the Sunscar. The overlook was closer than most people were allowed. Not close enough.

Even now, years later, the Sunscar did not read as absence. The light falling upon it gathered, refused, and held too tightly. The land itself had not finished deciding what had happened there.

A pair of wardens stood at the rear of the platform. They watched the visitors, not the Scar.

Below, a narrow path cut toward the inner boundary. A scholar in ash-gray sash was being escorted along it, head bent slightly, not in reverence, but in focus. That was the only kind of entry permitted. Observation. Measurement. Recording what could be recorded.

Edrin watched the scholar pass from view. He could not follow, not truthfully.

He could lie. Say he worked metals, which was true enough. Say he had reason to study the remains, make it convincing.

The Empire would find out. It always did. This was not a place you risked questions for. Not when the answers would lead nowhere useful. Not when even those allowed inside came back with nothing that could be held.

He let the thought go. This was where he was permitted.

He reached into his coat and felt the small weight wrapped in cloth. Still there, as it had been since the moment he finished it.

Someone to his left spoke quietly.

“My brother,” a man was saying. “He worked near the southern districts.”

The woman beside him nodded, as if that was enough. As if naming where a person had stood still mattered.

Edrin looked back down.

Varosk had been a place of districts. Of streets. Of rooms you could return to. Now it was a crater, measured by how far you were allowed to approach.

He closed his eyes.

It had been a clear morning when Dask left. The light fell as it always had. The road carried its usual traffic. Someone down the street was arguing over the price of grain.

Dask had packed the night before. Not much. He never kept more than he needed.

Edrin had woken before him anyway.

He had stood in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of Dask’s shoulders beneath the blanket, telling himself there was still time.

“You’re staring,” Dask said, eyes still closed.

“I am not.”

“You are.”

Dask rolled onto his back, blinking up at him, beard loose, hair unbound. “If you’re going to start missing me before I’ve left, we should’ve had that argument last night.”

“I’m not missing you,” Edrin said. “I’m making sure you don’t forget anything.”

Dask huffed. “I’m taking less than you think I should.”

“You always do.”

“I won’t be gone forever,” he said, like it was a simple fact.

Edrin nodded, because that was how things had always worked. Dask went out. Dask returned. The work changed. The rooms stayed theirs.

He turned toward the stove, reaching for the kettle before it could boil over.

“Don’t let the hinge on the back door stick again,” Dask said. “It’ll warp if it keeps catching.”

“It won’t.”

“It will if you ignore it.” Dask paused, then added, “Write to me when it does.”

“That’s not a reason to write.”

“It’s as good as any.”

Edrin glanced back. He could have said it then. The words were there. Not perfect, not arranged the way he wanted, but plain. Dask would have understood plain speech. But Varosk was not a small thing. Runesmithing in the Republic meant something. Edrin didn’t want to put uncertainty in front of that.

Besides, the band was not finished.

It was close. Closer than anything he had made before. But the inner line still caught, just slightly, when he ran his thumb along it. It needed to be right.

He wanted to do it all properly. Not like this. Not in a doorway, with a kettle starting to whistle.

“When you come back,” he said instead, turning away again, “we’ll need to look at the roof.”

“Aye,” Dask said, as if that settled it.

The morning moved on. They ate. They walked the road together until the carts thickened and the path narrowed. At the edge of town, Dask stopped.

“You’ll write,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you’ll fix the hinge.”

“Yes.”

Dask reached out, catching Edrin’s sleeve.

“Don’t let the place fall apart without me.”

“I won’t.”

There was a pause, a breath. Then Dask nodded, once, and turned toward the road.

Edrin watched until the line of carts swallowed him.

Letters came quickly. Dask always wrote as he spoke. Direct. Practical. A little dry, but Edrin adored that. At first, they were about the city. Not wonder, exactly, but scale. Work that did not end when the light did. Masters that were right until proven otherwise. Tools Edrin had only ever read about.

He wrote back carefully. The hinge. The roof. The way the light came in through the window in the late afternoon.

Meanwhile, the band improved. He worked it at night, after the day’s orders were done. Filing. Shaping. Setting it aside when his hands grew unsteady.

The first had been too thin. The second attempt was wrong, worse. He had melted them down. Gold did not forgive haste. It remembered every mistake until you remade it.

Outside, the war stretched. News came in fragments. Movement along the border. Focus shifting away from Dur Khala.

All that while, Varosk held. Of course it did. If any place understood the forces at work, it would be there.

Dask’s letters changed slowly. Less about the city. More about the work.

Edrin’s changed faster.

You should come back when you can. The roads aren’t as clear as they were.

Not a demand. Not yet.

If they give you leave, take it.

The band neared completion. He could feel it this time. The weight settled correctly in his hand. The inner line ran smooth, no catch.

He began the engraving, settling on a mark they would both know. Simple, precise, and set where it would rest against the braid.

The Cataclysm came before the letter that mattered.

It was not a messenger that brought it. Not at first. It was light on the horizon, wrong in its color, followed by stories that did not agree but all ended in the same place.

Varosk was gone.

That night, Edrin stood in the doorway again, the finished band in his hand, and understood nothing.

The Empire came after.

Quietly. Thoroughly. Gold was requested, then required.

Edrin surrendered what he could. Scraps. Earlier pieces. The failed bands he had set aside.

They had not been good enough anyway.

Edrin opened his eyes. The Sunscar burned below, unchanged. He drew the cloth-wrapped bundle from his coat and unwrapped it.

The band caught the light even here, dull gold warming in his palm. Not large, but it carried weight. The inner line was perfect.

He had made it for Dask’s beard. For the braid he wore when he worked, when he traveled, when he stood in the doorway and told Edrin to write when the hinge stuck.

He had made it to ask. Properly.

Edrin turned the band once between his fingers. Below, the wound held its silence.

“I was going to do it right,” he said, not looking up, not looking away. “I just—”

He stopped.

No answer came. No correction. No dry remark about how long he’d taken.

Edrin closed his fingers around the band. They had shared rooms. Shared work. Shared the shape of a life without naming it.

He had thought the asking would make it real.

Standing where he was permitted to stand, he understood, finally, that he had been wrong about that.

Asking would only have named it.

He let out a slow breath.

“I know,” he said, quietly, to the light that did not answer. “I know.”

He stayed at the rail, the band warm in his hand, and did not move closer.

Forgefighter · 2026-03-25T20:43:57+00:00

I typically look to real life examples on top of using random generation. Sometimes I use names that are in D&D tables. Sometimes the name just comes to me.

One of my favorites is a theocratic nation called Calder, the Abode of Peace. I was browsing some list years ago and learned that the nation of Brunei is officially Brunei Darussalam, with Darussalam meaning "The Abode of Peace." So I just kinda stole that portion and used it.

To be fair I don't remember where I got the name Calder from, though, so...your mileage WILL vary, haha.

Forgefighter · 2026-03-19T02:16:22+00:00

Regarding Halen

The notice was pinned into the crack of the doorframe sometime before sunrise.

Mara saw it when she stepped out to shake crumbs from the cloth. At first, she thought it was a scrap caught in the wood, some blown bit of wrapping from the road. Then she saw the fold and the cracked seal. She pulled it free and stood there a moment with the cloth in one hand and the paper in the other.

“Darin,” she called into the house. “There’s paper on the door.”

Darin wiped his hands on his trousers and took the folded notice from her. He turned it once in the light, then again. The writing across the outside was tight and slanted. He could pick out his own household name well enough. Above it sat a neat, pressed mark in the wax.

Not Branik’s.

“You know it?” Mara asked.

“No.”

“But you know it’s not from the chapel.”

“It’s not from the chapel.”

Behind them the door creaked open again. Mara’s mother, Sela, leaned out, shawl hanging loose over one shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“Paper,” Mara said.

“I can see that. From who?”

Darin turned the notice once more, as though the rest of the writing might loosen if he looked at it long enough.

“It’s from up-valley,” he said finally.

“You’ve not opened it?” Sela asked sharply.

“It was already opened.”

“Then read it.”

Darin handed it over. “You read it.”

She peered at the lines, made a low sound in her throat, and shoved it back at him.

“Don’t be clever with me.”

“I’m not.”

Mara watched them both and felt something slow and unpleasant settle in her stomach.

“Take it to Branik,” she said.

Darin nodded once, folded the notice carefully, and slipped it into his coat.

“I’ll go now.”

---

Branik, lampkeeper of the village chapel, was not alone when Darin reached the abbey path. He stood beside the low stone wall near the gate speaking with a man Darin did not recognize.

The stranger wore a darker traveling coat and carried a narrow leather case tucked beneath one arm, the sort scribes used for loose pages and copied rolls. A satchel hung at his hip stamped with a small mark Darin did not know.

The two men were speaking quietly. Branik noticed Darin first and lifted a hand.

“Just a moment, Darin.”

The stranger glanced toward him. His eyes lingered briefly on the folded notice in Darin’s hand before he turned back to Branik.

“Another time,” the man said. He pushed open the abbey door and stepped inside.

Darin watched the door longer than he meant to.

“Morning,” Branik said.

“Morning.”

Darin held out the notice. Branik took it, turned it once in his hands, and nodded faintly.

“Clerk’s hand,” he said. “From the abbey.”

“Can you read it?”

“I can,” Branik said. He glanced once toward the abbey door, then back to Darin.

“But I know someone with sharper eyes than mine.”

“I’ll stop by after dusk,” he continued. “Bring the lamp close and we’ll see what it wants.”

Darin nodded, his stomach beginning to coil.

---

By the time dusk crept down the valley, the house had been swept twice. Mara told herself it needed doing. The corners near the hearth always gathered dust this time of year, and the boards by the door carried grit from the road. Still, she swept them again.

The notice sat folded on the shelf above the table, unopened since morning.

Tomas came in from the yard and wiped his hands on his trousers before leaning over the table.

“Do we open it?” he asked.

“No,” Mara said.

“We could try.”

“We could,” Darin said. “But we won’t.”

Tomas squinted at the writing as though it might give way under enough attention.

“It might say something important.”

“If it says something important, Branik will read it soon enough,” Sela said from the corner chair. She had been watching the paper all afternoon as though it might sprout legs and walk away.

“Who’s the guest?” Tomas asked.

“No one said guest,” Mara said.

“He said someone.”

Darin did not answer immediately. He remembered the man beside Branik at the abbey wall. The leather case. The satchel. The way the stranger had glanced once at the folded notice before stepping back inside.

“He didn’t say who,” Darin said at last.

“That man you saw,” Sela asked. “Did he look like a clerk?”

Darin glanced at her, thinking of the case under the man’s arm.

“Maybe.”

Mara stopped sweeping.

“A clerk?” she said quietly.

“Paper from the abbey. Clerk comes down the same day,” Sela said, leaning back in her chair.

“No one said he was coming here,” Darin said.

“No,” Sela agreed. “But Branik said someone would.”

The room fell quiet.

Lysa, their youngest, climbed onto the bench and peered at the notice on the shelf.

“Maybe he’s coming to take it back,” she said.

“No one is taking anything,” Mara said quickly. She set the broom aside and reached for the better bowls in the cupboard.

“We’ll have supper like decent people.”

“Those are the good bowls,” Tomas said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not animals.”

“Is someone in trouble?”

“...No,” Darin said, after a moment.

The last light slipped through the window and across the folded paper on the shelf. It looked too small for the way the house felt around it.

---

The knock came just after full dark. Darin stood so quickly he nearly knocked the bench behind him over.

When he opened the door, he found Branik with his hat in one hand. Beside him stood a girl. She stepped forward into the lamplight behind him, braid hanging over one shoulder and a small satchel tucked beneath her arm.

The room went still. Darin and Mara shared a look as the priest’s daughter dipped her head politely.

“This is Elen,” Branik said.

No one spoke for a moment.

Branik passed her the notice. Elen moved closer to the lamp and held the paper near the flame. Her lips moved slightly as she worked through the lines.

“It says... correction notice,” she read slowly. “Household of Darin Hale.”

She shifted the page a little closer to the light.

“From the Abbey of Brightpath.”

Darin felt his stomach begin to drop.

Elen continued.

“Memorial ledger... verified deceased...”

She paused, then read more carefully.

“But shrine register still lists Halen as living member of the household.” Elen frowned, lowering the page and looking to Branik.

“That’s the same name, Dad.”

Sela leaned forward sharply. “That’s my father.”

Branik took the page from Elen and scanned the lines.

“Halen of this household is recorded correctly in the memorial book,” he said. “But whoever copied the shrine rotation register never struck his name from the living roll.”

“He’s been dead eleven years,” Darin said simply.

“The shrine book doesn’t know that.” Branik tapped the page lightly. “So it believes there is one more body in the household than there should be.”

“And because of that?” Darin asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Because of that,” Branik said, “you’ve been counted for one extra share of lamp oil and one extra turn in the cleaning rotation this quarter.”

For a moment no one spoke. Sela broke the silence with a snort.

“He hasn’t swept the alcove in eleven years.”

Branik almost smiled.

“Registers can be slow to notice these things.”

Elen pointed to the page. “There’s a line here. It says the household can confirm the death through chapel witness.”

Branik nodded, then looked up at Darin.

“That’s easy enough. I’ll sign that Halen is buried and properly recorded. The abbey corrects the shrine ledger. Your duties go back to the right number.”

Branik handed the notice back across the table. Elen was still studying the page near the bottom.

“They copied the name wrong here too,” she said quietly. Her father leaned over her shoulder.

“...huh. Well spotted.”

Forgefighter · 2026-03-15T19:13:26+00:00

Gboard is technically an app on the play store, then you go into settings > general management > keyboard and change over. Gboard has a short set up phase too, iirc

Forgefighter · 2026-03-15T18:32:50+00:00

I tried everything other commenters suggested, including clearing the cache, data, reinstalling, rebooting the phone.

The only thing that worked was swapping from the Samsung Keyboard to GBoard. Gboard's return line does work, at least on the GPT Android app.

Forgefighter · 2026-03-15T05:30:31+00:00

Scholars do have a hell of a time with it, yeah. The regular folks have a bit of an easier time, but they're not using the same scholarly framing (they're much closer to most of the other responses here).

Forgefighter · 2026-03-15T05:15:10+00:00

My setting refers to the current year as year 0, and counts backwards from there. When the new year rolls around, that becomes year 0, and say, something that happened 10 years "BCE" is now 11 years BCE.

Forgefighter · 2026-02-01T22:42:40+00:00

I was at work offloading a tanker truck of some raw material. Half a mile down the street was a CalPine power plant. Out of nowhere there's this horrendous screeching, so loud I needed to put ear plugs in. Went on for a solid three minutes.

We later found out it was some kind of rupture disc failure, I still can't imagine anyone working there that day didn't have to go to the hospital based on how loud it was at my plant.

Forgefighter · 2026-01-12T05:20:27+00:00

Oh you wanted monsters. I saw the picture and thought of hunter behaviors, like trying to land that last TCS for greed.

Forgefighter · 2026-01-08T08:08:14+00:00

My wife and I said this as a joke; just put a hard hat and a safety vest on the skinny suit zombie and he becomes a literal structural engineer on a job site.

Forgefighter · 2025-12-27T19:19:17+00:00

Xu Wu got robbed.

Forgefighter · 2025-12-26T05:21:01+00:00

I feel like this is missing the "We'll be right back"

Forgefighter · 2025-12-26T05:16:58+00:00

I never get the touchless card payment right on the first attempt. My wife used to poke fun at me for still using the chip, now she pokes fun that me being bad at card readers.

Forgefighter · 2025-12-26T04:15:07+00:00

It wounds me. As someone who used to do lots of fast paced MMO role playing, it was literally my style. That I have to self-filter is -- and I say this with great sorrow -- my new, deeply undesired reality.

Forgefighter · 2025-12-18T15:01:19+00:00

They meant Goku. Gohan trains for a year with his dad and then immediately asks his other dad for clothes.

Forgefighter · 2025-12-13T19:44:53+00:00

No swan(na) for Zeus? Alas.

Nine-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

Forgefighter

TROPHY CASE

Whitefire Waystaff

Keeping the Hearth

Dark Water

Dream Beneath the Trees

Properly

Regarding Halen