“You’re finally awake,” said a voice from the corner. It was Anara.

  He shook with a sudden, ungraspable anger. “Do you not think I see it?” spat Larkin explosively, his voice trembling, “You are using sorcery on me, aren’t you?”

  “What are you on about?” said Anara, rising quickly from the floor with a look of concern.

  Larkin raised his Hammer, which trembled in his grasp. “This,” he stuttered, “this is what you’re after, isn’t it?” The paranoia was so oppressive it ached his bones. Furthermore, the colour which is so characteristic of youth returned to his cheeks in a rush.

  Anara shook her head weakly, unable to bring herself to respond to these accusations.

  “Which one of you took my blade?” shouted Larkin.

  “None of us did!” cried Anara.

  “Oh yeah? Well then, where is it?... Mira?” Larkin quickly scanned the chamber. “Where is the damn thief?” he demanded. “It didn’t just disappear into thin air!”

  Anara saw the boy’s eyes burst with gold, and she became terrified. Falling into silence, she backed herself against the wall and watched him cautiously. She felt his large, oppressive eyes stare at her, and she looked away. It was as though his gaze sucked the heat out of her. “Larkin...” she muttered.

  Larkin saw that his tongues had been moved as well. “Someone’s trying to sabotage me!” he roared.

  “Just... Just calm down, Larkin,” urged Anara.

  “Calm down?” repeated the boy with a raised voice, and scanning the room once again. “Come out you thief! Quit using your stealth skill or I will Hammer the entirety of these walls to drive you out like a pest!”

  “Larkin!” gasped Anara, covering her mouth with her hand.

  He frothed at the mouth and gritted his teeth. His heart was in overdrive. Anxiety coursed through his veins. Although his eyes shone with light, his vision was tunneled: all he saw, and therefore all he thought about at that moment, was his missing craft. He wanted to pulverise the culprit with his Hammer. Even though his current skills pertained only to blacksmithing, he brimmed with confidence that in one-to-one combat he would prevail.

  Anara picked up on this quickly. She had little brothers of her own. But to this level of emotional velocity, she was not well-versed, nor equipped to deal with. She let her head drop.

  Larkin marched over and pointed his Hammer at her. Anara saw that he was more in the control of his Hammer than he was of himself. How much so, she could not guess. But being an older sister to a boy of similar age to Larkin, she felt a propensity to the former. Anara’s heart jumped in her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut. A shudder ran down her spine. What seemed to be a desire to run away was quickly supplanted with a stoicism unusual for those of the enchanting school. It was the blacksmiths who remained a tough exterior in times of oppression; and the enchanters, being a more profitable profession in the empire, were the ones known to live extravagantly. It was they who first proposed the artificial level cap on all crafters, after all.

  His left arm perched on her right shoulder as he stared into her eyes. Anara did not remember being the same height as him, nor had she seen the burn scar on his forearm before. For a long time they stood in silence.

  “Wh-what are you staring at?” stuttered Anara.

  “Since I was very young, I have held onto this idea that I was not where I was supposed to be,” he said breathlessly – with what, he did not know - “that I had a potential for greater things; that I was exceptional; that I was marked out from the rest of the orphans. It was only I who had this desire to get out of Backwater. Everyone else? They couldn’t even fathom it.” His face contorted violently as his heart jolted with the electricity of unbridled anger. He seized his chest and winced. “I...” he said, “I will reach my potential... I swear it. And if I should meet opposition,” he continued, raising his eyes, his face returning to that stoic feature it had previously maintained, “I will obliterate it.”

  Anara stood for a moment in a daze. No brother of hers spoke like that. No child for that matter. This boy had to be delusional. And now the woman, realising that she had promised the others to keep him contained until they had completed their mission, felt her terror multiply. The force of Larkin’s gaze proved too much for her to bear. To Larkin, it was obvious that she was hiding something. There was a strangeness to the air of the forge.

  “Larkin,” Anara said softly, “the Hammer is...”

  “Is what?” demanded Larkin.

  “Cursed!” she cried. “You’re being controlled by the Eternal Forge!”

  “Rubbish!” shouted Larkin.

  Tears started to roll down Anara’s cheeks.

  “This desire to be special, Larkin... it’s not healthy for a little boy like you.”

  “Stop calling me a little boy!”

  “But you are!” cried Anara, looking at him directly in the eyes with a warm, gentle smile. “This Hammer is too much for someone so young.”

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  “Where is the Stormshale?” demanded Larkin again, his voice scratching his throat dry.

  Anara struggled out of the space in which she had been cornered, and sobbed; Larkin let her go, refraining from the impulse to smash her head with his Hammer. In that instant, he wondered where all that anger came from, but he was too blinded by his obsession with his craft to think more than one or two consecutive thoughts at a time. All that raced in his head was vengeance. He recalled his dream and felt justified. Then, when the woman had moved away, and the dream had vanished into nothingness once again, the words scribbled on the wall in chalk pulled him back to reality:

  “Stop meddling with things that you don’t understand.”

  The hair on the young orphan’s neck stood up stiffly. Someone with skills had planned this. Who else, but a thief, could sneak in and write this warning without alarming him? And to top it all off they knew exactly what he had been working on. Immediately, his thoughts turned to the guild. Somehow, they had found out that he possessed a forbidden material. Utterly bewildered, he stared at the message in a daze, as though he had been impaled through the chest, brought aloft by the velocity of the spear, and forced to look into the eyes of his executioner.

  A white-hot rage consumed Larkin. This time, he kept it from revealing on his face. But the Hammer shook in his hands in time to the poundage of his heart. Cold. He suddenly felt so cold. And his stomach twisted. His mind worked several paths at once.

  “They want to keep me here,” he said.

  “Where?” Anara said quietly.

  Larkin looked angrily over his shoulder and saw the enchanteress sitting on a crate. “In Backwater,” he explained. Then, his face softened into a quiet panic as his eyes scanned the chamber, “Where’s Bram?”

  “You suddenly remember that you’ve hired two companions?” said Anara with a hint of annoyance in her voice. She fiddled with a silver ring on her finger. Then, she looked up and saw that he was staring at her with a self-destructive anger, a kind which would implode should it be left unchecked. With a sigh, she finished etching a rune into the shank of the ring and, after her tattoos had stopped glowing, gave him her full attention. “Larkin, I know we have only just met, and so you might not trust me. But this was Mira’s idea, and she’s trying to help you.”

  Larkin felt stabbed in the chest. A betrayal from his only friend. Anara saw the hesitation, and, as though she could read his thoughts, seemed to struggle to resist correcting his misinterpretation of the situation.

  “Can I trust anyone in this village anymore?” asked Larkin exasperatedly. “So, they’ve ran off with my craft; they’ve sold me out to the Iron Guild. Why are you still here? To babysit me so I don’t try and stop them?”

  “No, not at all,” replied Anara adamantly. “We’re trying to prevent you from being destroyed by the Iron Guild. You can still get out of Backwater-”

  “Get out?” cried Larkin, raising his voice in frustration, “I can’t do anything without money. My crafts were my ticket out of here.”

  “It will all be over soon,” reassured Anara.

  “What will?” snapped Larkin.

  Anara noticed at once that she had said too much; she gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “For your sake don’t attempt to follow them,” she cried.

  “Where?” demanded Larkin, stepping towards her threateningly. With the Hammer raised high above the woman, he repeated his request: “Where have they gone?”

  Anara paled, shrinking into herself. She did not want to use magic to sedate the boy. If she did that, her escape of the capital would have been for nothing. But at the same time, she could not allow him to go on shouldering the burden of the Eternal Forge. He was only a child. In the capital, no child picked up a hammer. No child worked. And no child placed their hopes in impossible dreams as this one...

  “I’m doing you a favour!” she cried.

  “Where are they?” he roared, his mouth and eyes exploding with light.

  Anara gasped for breath, utterly terrified. “The square,” she said, sobbing, “they’re at the square to meet Lucia Ironstrike.”

  “Why?”

  “To bargain for your life,” she said, wiping her tears. “Look...” she gestured to the wall.

  At once Larkin inspected the writing more carefully. There were scorches next to it. He moved closer to the wall, almost shaking with disbelief, and looked anxiously at them. It was inconceivable that he could have missed them earlier.

  “What am I looking at?” he demanded.

  “Pays to have an enchanteress on your team,” Anara said sharply and contemptuously as she got up to join him. She placed her hand slightly above the marks. "This right here is a sigil.”

  Larkin leaned in and gazed at the symbol. An uneasy feeling replaced his agitation, and he was left befuddled.

  “I’m guessing here... but I think that it is a destabalising curse,” Anara explained, noting the boy’s confused expression, “it is commonly used to weaken enchantments or cause explosions when mana is used. In a village of skilled artisans, there are bound to be some who resort to this kind of magic.”

  Larkin’s nervousness increased. His head began to whirl. “You don’t know?” he asked with terror.

  “It’s a foreign sigil. I can tell that it’s a curse, but I’m not exactly sure what it’s designed to do,” she said, her fingers tracing each line of the symbol; “It seems to belong to at least an Adept enchanter.”

  “Can you remove it?” he asked quickly.

  “It’s too late for that, don’t you think? If this was etched yesterday... then,” she squinted her eyes, looking at the sigil minutely, “I wonder why it hasn’t triggered yet.”

  “Lucia,” murmured Larkin with a scowl, his Hammer glowing at his hip.

  He then smashed the sigil, creating a hole in the cratered wall. The forest ahead was now visible. Anara stood in shock, gazing at the destruction of the sacred temple in disbelief. It did not seem real. If she was not gripped by fear, she would have been by anger.

  “W-what were you thinking!” she screamed.

  “This is a deliberate attempt on my life,” Larkin said icily. “The guild wants me dead.”

  “You could have just blown us up!”

  Larkin turned to her. “But I didn’t,” he said flatly.

  Anara saw that the boy was trembling. He swayed from time to time, strangling his Hammer and appearing lost in thought of a terrible future, as though suffering from a fever and a delirium. His face remained pale, but his golden eyes were burning.

  Inside, Larkin was struggling with his thoughts. He felt safe with the Hammer, but at the same time he was beginning to see how it was affecting his judgement. Up to now, he had not considered anything else but his craft. He would have easily thrown away his life for a smoother edge; moreover, as much as he would deny it, the same would be true for the life of those around him. The boy glanced into the fires of the forge. The longer he stared, the more the flames seemed to be all there was. He saw that there was no escape for as long as he held the Hammer. A determined expression passed over his face.

  “I trust you, Anara,” he said, his voice pressured and forced.

  “Going up against a guild means certain imprisonment... maybe even disembowelment...”

  A grin abruptly broke upon Larkin’s face, and he turned to her again. The colour had returned to his cheeks. “What? You can’t stomach it?”

  He crawled through the hole and left. Anara, inspired by his perseverance, followed him.

  “I won’t stop crafting... no matter what,” Larkin said, loud enough to be heard over the wind.