I had no map, no destination—just the mountains, the trees, and the sky above me. My pistol was heavy at my side, wrapped in oiled cloth to keep out the rain. My powder pouch stayed close to my chest, sealed with wax. Every handful of shot I’d made, every charge, every tool—I protected them like gold.

  I lived like a ghost.

  At first, it was pure survival. I snared rabbits and squirrels, skinned them with a sharpened flake of iron. I scraped hides with bone and fire-hardened sticks. I tanned leather using brain and smoke, just like my father taught me. I sewed with sinew and needles made from fishbone.

  I was hunter, tanner, and trapper all in one. And the wild didn’t care that I was Halforcen.

  But it wasn't long before I ran into other people.

  At first, just tracks—caravans, wagons, boot prints in mud. I avoided them. I had no coin. No name. And flintlock pistols were still rare enough to raise suspicion.

  Eventually, hunger drove me to trade.

  I waited until nightfall, crept near a small goblin-led caravan camped along a forest trail. Their guards were drunk, bellies full of salted meat and fermented pine drink. I left a skinned rabbit near their fire, then slipped back into the dark.

  The next night, I did it again—this time, a fox pelt.

  On the third night, they called out.

  “Whoever you are,” one of them said in the trade tongue, “you’ve got fine hands and a ghost’s feet. Come share our fire.”

  I didn’t answer. But I left a note carved in birch bark: Trade only. No questions.

  They honored it. For months afterward, I traded meat, pelts, and carved leather for salt, tools, twine, and iron scrap. Slowly, I began to build.

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  I found a ruined wagon along an old overgrown trail. The wheels were shattered, but the frame was intact. I repaired it with scavenged wood and leather lashings, fashioned a rough canvas roof from stitched-together hides. In its belly, I stored everything—tools, traps, meat, furs, powder, lead balls, even my failed gun parts.

  Then I found the forge.

  It was tucked beneath the roots of a stone outcrop—barely more than a ruin. A rusted anvil. A collapsed bellows. But it had a chimney and a basin, and more importantly—it had potential.

  I cleaned it. Repaired it. Refitted the bellows with hide and pine frame. Dug a clay hearth and used charcoal from my own fires. For the first time in my life, I lit a fire that was mine.

  The wilds had taken everything from me—but the forge gave something back.

  I began to smith.

  Crude at first—hooks, nails, rough knife blades. I practiced making springs, shaping barrels, filing sears and triggers from scrap. I melted lead from fishing weights and cast balls using horn molds. I fashioned a powder horn from a ram’s skull. My fingers remembered what they’d learned from Caveshield, but now the tools were my own.

  Over time, I made a second flintlock pistol. Then a short hunting knife. Then a hatchet.

  And every piece of gear was marked—not with a name, but with a simple glyph scratched into the metal: a split circle—half sun, half moon.

  Halforcen.

  It was during one of these trading runs that I met a dwarven tinker—old, blind in one eye, riding a goat-drawn cart full of clockwork junk and bad ale. He called himself Brogan. I traded him a tanned mountain lion pelt for a rusted but functional powder tester and a cracked spyglass.

  He asked me one question: “Did you make that pistol yourself, lad?”

  I paused too long before answering.

  He only chuckled. “I thought so. That’s dwarf work in half-orc hands. World’s changing, eh?”

  We drank by his fire that night. He taught me how to patch a cracked barrel, and how to measure powder grain by weight instead of volume. He didn’t ask my name. I didn’t offer it.

  Before we parted ways, he handed me a brass ring with a knurled edge.

  “Flick this on flint and steel,” he said, “and you’ll light any fuse, wet or dry. Made it myself. But these old fingers don’t have the spark anymore.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “You do.”

  By the time the snows fell, I had a working forge, a rolling wagon, and a name whispered by traders in three tongues.

  The dwarves called me the Forest Smith. Others, the Halforcen Hunter.

  But me?

  I was just Garrok.

  And I had only just begun.