✦ The Lost Heir ✦
King Reinfred had died with no heir—or so everyone thought.
The bells began at dawn.
They tolled first in the capital, heavy and deliberate, their iron voices rolling outward like a tide. By midday the sound had reached the valleys. By nightfall, even the far villages near the borderlands felt the echo in their bones, as if the land itself had taken a breath and failed to release it.
Black cloth appeared in windows. Candles burned low in chapels already thick with prayer. Messengers rode hard and silent, carrying sealed letters no one wanted to open.
A crown without a bearer was a dangerous thing.
In the capital, the court gathered in mourning silk and polite restraint. The king’s body lay in state beneath vaulted ceilings, his hands folded around a symbol of rule that would soon belong to no one. Lords spoke softly of alliances. Advisors whispered of contingency. Everyone watched everyone else.
And all the while, the throne sat empty.
Far from the marble halls and silk-draped grief, a hammer struck an anvil in a small village where the air smelled of pine resin and coal smoke.
The sound rang clean and sure.
Caldric stood at the forge with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dusted with ash, heat shimmering around him like breath. The forge glowed white-hot, alive with promise. Each strike of the hammer landed true, shaping iron not with force alone, but with patience—tiny corrections made instinctively, as if the steel itself were speaking and he was merely listening.
The world here was simpler.
Fire. Metal. Work that answered honestly.
Outside the open doors, villagers passed in low-voiced knots. News had arrived before sunrise. Everyone knew. Everyone felt it. A king dead meant borders tested, taxes raised, sons taken. It meant uncertainty pressing in from every direction.
Caldric did not join the talk.
He never had.
He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist, leaving a streak of soot across freckles scattered like constellations over sun-warmed skin. The blade before him was nearly finished—nothing ornamental, nothing meant to impress. A tool. Balanced. Useful. Honest.
“Easy,” he murmured, adjusting the angle of the steel.
He always spoke to his work that way.
The old smith who had raised him watched from the doorway, arms crossed, saying nothing. He had taught Caldric the forge as a man teaches weather—by example, by patience, by letting mistakes burn themselves out.
“You’ve heard?” the old man asked finally.
Caldric nodded once. “The bells make it hard not to.”
“No heir,” the smith said, as if testing the words for weight.
“So they say.”
The old man studied him a moment longer than necessary, eyes lingering on the set of his shoulders, the calm certainty of his movements. Then he turned away.
Steel rang again. Sparks leapt like brief stars.
Caldric felt it then—not fear, not wonder, but a strange pressure beneath his ribs, as if something in the world had shifted slightly off balance.
He struck the anvil harder than intended.
The blade sang.
