The Anvil's Promise

The smithy had been empty for two years when Cael Morrow woke up on its floor.

No one told him where he was. No System greeted him. No quest appeared. Just ash in his hair, a cold forge, and a town that needed a smith more than it needed another stranger.

Cael had never worked metal. He'd been a security guard — the kind of man who checked locks and walked hallways and made sure the building was safe. But the forge was here, and the tools were here, and the dead smith's notebooks were still on the shelf. And Cael's father had made him promise, before the cancer took him, that he would never quit anything.

His first nail was crooked. His second was worse. His thirty-sixth was almost straight.

In a world where the System speaks only in dreams and names grow longer the more they mean, one man picks up a hammer and refuses to put it down.