Chapter 14

It was easy to find a blacksmith to look at repairing the chain. The clanging of hammers was a dead giveaway. Marion knew she could fix the chain herself, but she didn’t have the supplies at her forge back in Ironhaven.

The forge was modest but alive.

It sat at the edge of the market district, its stone walls stained with years of smoke and grit. Practical. A blackened anvil dominated the space, flanked by racks of tools that bore signs of frequent use. The air smelled of iron, charcoal, and something earthy—like crushed stone and oil.

Marion stepped through the threshold just as a burst of sparks shot out from behind the anvil.

“Door,” came a voice, low and clipped. “Unless you're planning to fund my next coal shipment.”

She shut it without a word.

Behind the anvil stood a woman with shoulders as broad as a smith’s bench and arms like coiled cables. Her hair was pulled back into a tight braid, streaked with silver and soot, and a heavy apron shielded her from the worst of the heat. She was pounding a thick length of iron with a sledge, each strike measured and deliberate. It was only after the iron cooled and hissed in a nearby trough that the woman turned to face her.

“Help you?” she asked, wiping her brow.

Marion stepped forward and unhooked the kusarigama from her belt. “I need a chain repaired. Custom links. I can sketch the geometry if you need it.”

The smith took the weapon with a grunt, rolling the length of chain between her calloused fingers. She held it up to the light with a professional squint.

“This isn’t scrap work,” she muttered. “You make this?”

Marion nodded. “Back home. Don’t have the alloys I need out here.”

“Hm.” The woman turned and laid the chain gently on the workbench. “You’ll find most smiths in this city deal in bulk orders, horseshoes, hinges, cart repairs. You want precision work? That costs extra.”

“I’m not asking for charity.”

“No,” the smith said, casting her a sharper glance. “You don’t move like someone who does.”

A silence settled between them, heavy but not hostile. Just the pause of two craftspeople taking each other’s measure.

“I’m Marion,” she said eventually.

The smith gave a curt nod. “Della.”

“Just Della?”

“For now.”

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Marion smirked faintly and stepped closer to the bench, eyes scanning the forge. It was well kept, despite its age. The tools were oiled; the work surfaces clean. This was the space of someone who cared.

“You’ve been smithing long?”

“Long enough,” Della said. “Started with barrel hoops and plowshares. Then swords. Then things I’d rather forget.”

Marion tilted her head. “Ever build anything bigger than a blade?”

Della paused. Her fingers brushed a set of chisels she wasn’t using. “You mean like siegeworks?”

“Like a village,” Marion said. “Walls. Gates. Frameworks that won’t collapse in the first storm.”

That got a real reaction. Not a big one—just a flick of the eye, a slight stillness in the air.

“You planning a village?”

“I’ve started one. Out in the valleys near the forest edge. Right now, it’s just a handful of buildings and a stubborn wall made of mismatched stones. But it’s growing. People are coming. They need shelter. Safety. Tools.”

Della leaned against the bench. “Sounds like a headache.”

“It is.”

“Why do it?”

Marion’s fingers brushed the hilt of her kusarigama. “Because someone has to. And because people deserve safety.”

That silence returned—weightier this time. Della turned her attention back to the chain.

“I’ll fix this,” she said at last. “Can’t promise miracles, but it’ll hold better than it did before.”

“I’ll pay fair,” Marion said. “Materials, time, labor.”

“You’d better.”

Marion turned to leave but paused at the door.

“If you ever get tired of pounding out hinges for people who don't say thank you, come find me.”

Della didn’t look up. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Neither am I,” Marion replied. “That’s the point.”

Marion stepped out of Della’s forge just as the sun began its descent, painting the cobbled streets of the city in amber and rust. She tucked the repaired kusarigama and chain back into its sheath.

The map.

She pulled it free and unfolded it again. Achimodes hadn’t been exactly forthcoming when he handed it to her. One moment, he was rambling about etheric anomalies and steam-infused alchemical gradients, the next, he'd slipped the parchment across the counter with a wink and whispered, “For when your heart itches with curiosity and your feet don’t mind a bit of danger.”

At first glance, it had seemed like a joke: a hand-drawn grid scrawled in violet ink, annotated with constellations that didn’t belong to this part of the world—or any world she knew. But the terrain was familiar. Hills west of the city. A stream. And the stylized spiral symbol he’d drawn just beneath the sketched rock formations? She’d seen it before.

Marion’s boots found their own path through the city’s western gate. She walked fast, wind pulling at her coat, the steady rhythm of her footfalls a counterpoint to her racing thoughts. As she left the last rooftops behind, the land opened into scrub-covered hills and quiet ravines. The map guided her to a ridge she wouldn’t have noticed otherwise — low and sharp, like a half-buried blade.

There, at the base of a slope, she saw them.

Jagged stone outcroppings—crooked and weathered—jutting from the earth like broken teeth. The spiral was carved into one, faint but deliberate.

She crouched beside it, brushing away moss and dirt. Beneath the spiral were more marks—mechanical, almost like diagrams—but worn to near-oblivion by wind and rain.

Between two stones, half-hidden by dangling vines, yawned a dark crevice.

A cave.

The map shimmered faintly in her hand. Not from any light—just memory. She remembered Achimodes leaning over the counter, eyes too bright, fingers twitching with restrained glee.

“If you do go, bring a light. Not for what’s ahead. For what follows you.”

Marion exhaled and slid the map back into her pack. Then she lit a small lantern, unhooked her kusarigama, and ducked inside.

The air changed the moment she crossed the threshold—thicker, charged, like stepping through an invisible veil. Somewhere deep within, metal clinked against stone, far too rhythmic to be natural.

She wasn’t alone.

And she was exactly where the map wanted her to be.