Night fell over Forgehome like a wound stitched shut too tightly.
There was no wind to carry the mountain cold. No insects cried from the fields beyond the stone walls. Even the Iron Mountains—eternal, groaning things—fell unnaturally still, as though the land itself feared to move.
Elara Ironhand felt it before she saw it.
The absence.
She sat on the edge of her narrow bed, boots already laced, travel cloak folded with careful precision beside her. Dawn would mark her exile. At first light, she would leave Forgehome behind—her home, her forge, her grandfather's grave—carrying only what she could not abandon.
The reforged sword rested against the wall.
Wrapped in cloth. Sheathed in leather.
Silent.
Too silent.
Her fingers flexed in her lap, faintly trembling. Her hands still ached—not from burns or cuts, but from strain deep beneath the skin. The kind that came from forcing the impossible into shape.
Creation demanded sacrifice.
She closed her eyes, breathing slowly, the way her grandfather had taught her when molten steel threatened to spill.
Control the heat. Respect the rhythm.
A distant creak rolled through the village.
Elara's eyes snapped open.
Not the familiar sound of wood settling or stone shifting under centuries of weight. This was slower. Deeper. As if something vast had pressed against the world… and found it fragile.
The sword vibrated.
Once.
Elara stood.
The vibration came again—harder this time, rattling the leather sheath. Cold surged up her arm as she reached for it, chased instantly by a sharp pulse of heat that flared beneath her skin.
Her pendant turned ice-cold.
She gasped as pain bloomed against her chest—not burning, but crushing inward, like a warning pressed directly against her heart.
"No," she whispered.
Outside, darkness moved.
Shadows stretched along stone paths and walls despite the absence of moonlight, bleeding into places they should not reach. Torches guttered and dimmed, their flames shrinking as if starved of air.
Then a scream cut through the silence.
High. Desperate.
Another followed.
The village bells rang—not the steady toll of fire or storm, but a frantic, clashing alarm that shattered the night.
Elara flung open her door.
Villagers poured into the streets, faces pale, eyes wide and unfocused with terror. Guards ran past her, shouting warnings that tangled into incoherent fragments.
"From the forest—!"
"No, the mountain paths—!"
"They're not—gods, they're not things—!"
Elara's gaze locked onto the tree line beyond the outer fields.
The darkness there was wrong.
It did not part.
It leaked.
Figures dragged themselves into the world as if reality itself had been torn and forgotten how to heal. Their bodies were incomplete—elongated limbs bending at impossible angles, joints forming where none should exist. Portions of them simply… weren't there.
Gaps of absolute darkness replaced flesh, swallowing torchlight whole.
Their surfaces shifted constantly, unable to settle into a single shape. One moment vaguely humanoid, the next stretched thin like smoke pulled by unseen hands. Where faces should have been, there were hollows—voids that drank in sound. Screams near them seemed to die before fully forming.
Each step they took poisoned the land.
Frost evaporated into nothing. Crops blackened and collapsed inward, turning brittle and gray. The ground beneath their feet did not crack—it forgot itself.
They were not beasts.
They were absence given hunger.
Void-touched.
Elara's breath came shallow.
Her instincts screamed at her to run.
Instead, she stepped forward.
The reforged sword slid free of its sheath with a sound like distant chimes, faint and wrong against the night. Its presence pressed against her senses, warm and urgent.
A guard spotted her. "Smith Ironhand! Stay back—the elders—"
The nearest creature lunged.
It moved too fast.
Its form unraveled and reformed mid-stride, claws of shadow tearing through the air where Elara's head had been a heartbeat earlier.
She raised the sword—
Too late.
The impact struck her like a falling wall.
Elara flew backward, hitting the stone hard. Pain exploded through her ribs as the breath was ripped from her lungs. The sword tore from her grip, skidding across the ground with a metallic shriek.
Gasps rippled through the watching villagers.
For a terrible moment, Elara lay stunned, staring up at a sky that felt impossibly distant. Fear rushed in—raw and suffocating.
I don't know how to fight like this.
The creature loomed over her, its hollow "face" bending closer. Cold pressed against her skin, seeping through cloth and bone, numbing her arm where its shadow brushed her sleeve.
"No—" she whispered, scrambling backward.
Claws struck stone where her head had been.
Elara rolled, fingers closing around the hilt just as the sword vibrated violently in her grip.
Not anger.
Urgency.
She staggered to her feet and swung.
The blade missed.
The creature twisted unnaturally, her strike slicing only empty air. The imbalance nearly tore the sword from her hands, and she stumbled, boots slipping on frost-slick stone.
The thing hissed—a sound like air collapsing.
Another form emerged behind it.
Elara's heart pounded.
She wasn't a warrior.
She had never trained for this. Never learned footwork or formations or how to kill.
She was a smith.
The realization struck like a hammer finding its mark.
Elara planted her feet.
Not in a fighter's stance—but in the grounded, unyielding posture she used before a stubborn ingot. She stopped trying to overpower the blade.
She listened.
The sword answered.
Warmth surged through the hilt—not heat, but intention. The balance shifted subtly in her hands. The edge thinned. The core reinforced.
She struck again.
Starlight followed the blade.
The cut did not cleave flesh.
It unraveled it.
The creature shrieked as light burned through absence, tearing its unstable form apart thread by thread until nothing remained but drifting ash that refused to settle.
Elara staggered, chest heaving.
Another creature slammed into her from the side.
She barely raised the sword in time. The impact rattled her arms, pain shooting up her shoulders. Her hands burned—not with fire, but with strain so deep it felt etched into her bones.
Thin lines of light flared briefly across her skin.
Forging scars.
She was reforging the blade as she fought.
Without tools.
Without permission.
Fear sharpened her focus instead of breaking it.
She moved on instinct now—turning blows aside, adjusting the weapon between heartbeats. Each strike left faint trails of starlight hanging in the air like broken constellations.
The creatures recoiled from her forging.
Where her blade passed, the void screamed.
But the cost mounted quickly.
Her breath shortened. Her vision blurred at the edges. The pressure in her chest grew heavier with each change she forced into the steel.
By the final creature, her legs trembled.
It lunged.
Elara poured everything she had left into one final strike.
Resolve.
Loss.
The fierce, unyielding need to protect what remained.
The blade sang.
The creature collapsed inward without a sound, unraveling into nothingness. Cold ash drifted through the air, settling over scorched stone and withered ground.
Silence reclaimed Forgehome.
Heavier than before.
Elara dropped to one knee, the sword's glow fading to a dull ember. Her hands shook uncontrollably now, forging scars faint but unmistakable beneath the soot.
Smoke rose from the village outskirts.
Walls were cracked. Stone blackened. Void residue clung to the ground like a sickness, refusing to fade.
Villagers stared at her from a distance.
Not with relief.
With terror.
Elder Bram stepped forward slowly, his gaze fixed on the glowing lines burned into her hands.
"This confirms it," he said hoarsely. "They came because of you."
Elara looked around at the damage she had failed to prevent.
Her chest ached.
"No," she whispered. "They came because something has awakened. Something older than me."
But the elders were already turning away.
Orders were shouted. Defenses hastily reinforced. Prayers muttered through clenched teeth.
No one thanked her.
No one approached.
Elara stood alone amid ash and broken stone, blade dim, strength nearly gone.
Exile would not save Forgehome.
It would only delay the inevitable.
And somewhere far beyond the Iron Mountains, the Darkness had learned her name.