By the time Eli and Sera made it back to Tomas’ place, the ringing of hammer on steel had already settled over the yard in steady intervals. The old forge was alive now. Coal glowed under the grate, bellows breathed, and orange light flickered up over black stone.
Tomas stood over the anvil with his leather apron on and his sleeves rolled past the elbows. Sweat darkened the collar of his shirt despite the mountain chill. The stiffness of a farmer was gone from him and what remained was a master smith.
Sera’s repaired blade sat off to the side already done. Tomas had only needed to set the break right, rework the damaged section, then secure the tang back into the black hilt. Compared to what he was doing now, it looked almost basic.
Mira sat nearby on an overturned crate wrapped in a shawl, healthy enough to look impatient instead of dying. She brightened the moment she saw them, “They’re back!” she called.
Tomas glanced over his shoulder, then nodded toward the workbench, “Good timing.”
He turned back to the sword one last time, pressed the tang fully home into the hilt, then checked the balance with a practiced movement of his wrist. Seemingly satisfied, Tomas crossed the yard and held the weapon out to Eli, “Well then lad,” he said, offering up the sword, “See if it feels right.”
Eli took the newly forged weapon with both hands at first, then only one. It felt light, but not flimsy. Just light in the way a proper weapon should when it truly belonged in the hand that held it. The blade was shorter than what he had carried as an adult, shaped for his smaller frame, but that did not make it any less lethal. It was straight and narrow, a clean blue steel with a faint inner sheen that looked too deep to be ordinary metal as the edge caught the forge light in a cold bright line. The hilt was black, simple, and well-wrapped, with fittings just understated enough not to feel decorative. The whole thing looked elegant without being fancy, and dangerous without trying too hard.
Eli turned it once in his hand and the sword moved with him as if it had been waiting for that exact grip.
He gave it a small practice swing through the air. It cut with a soft hiss.
His eyes widened a little despite himself.
“Well?” Tomas asked.
Eli looked down the length of the blade again, then back up, “It’s… perfect.”
That got the smallest smile out of Tomas, the kind men only allowed themselves when they knew they had done something worth doing.
Sera stepped closer and peered over Eli’s shoulder, “She is a pretty one.”
“It’s just a weapon,” Tomas replied dryly.
“It can be both.”
Mira nodded hard from her crate, “It’s both.”
Eli kept staring at the blade. His sword. He couldn't hide his grin. That excitement inside of wanting to use it immediately.
Tomas peeled one glove off and rubbed at the back of his neck, looking from Eli’s weapon to Sera’s repaired one and then toward the forge behind him, “Maybe,” he started, then stopped to think, “Maybe I should get back to smithing.”
Mira sat up straighter at once, “You should!”
Tomas let out a quiet breath through his nose, “I missed it more than I let myself say.”
“You like it more than farming.”
“I do not know if that’s true.”
“It is.”
Tomas chuckled under his breath at that and Mira pressed on before he could escape her logic, “I can help with the farm now that I’m better,” she crossed her arms in demand of what she really wanted, “Like real help! Not pretend help. And maybe! Maybe you could open a little store too. Not just repairs for neighbors. You could make simple things and sell them!”
“Simple things?”
“Tools. Kitchen knives. Hooks. Nails. Shovels. Good things people always need.”
Tomas looked toward the forge again, this time not like it was a memory, but like it was a possibility, “A small store wouldn’t be impossible.”
Mira smiled in triumph, “See?”
Tomas shook his head, though he was smiling too now, “Maybe, lass. Just maybe.”
Sera crossed her arms and leaned back against one of the yard posts, openly pleased, “Look at that. Whole family, planning their future.”
Eli didn’t say anything. He was still holding the sword, still turning over the weight of it, the feel, the balance, the fact it existed because he had chosen to act.
Sera’s eyes slid toward him, reading that silence too easily, “You know that was you, right?”
Eli glanced at her as she continued, “You did that,” she repeated, nodding once toward Tomas and Mira, “You made it possible for them to stop drowning long enough to think about what comes next.”
He looked away from her and back to the yard. Tomas was already shifting tools around, clearing space, moving with a kind of purpose or rather, hope, that had not been there yesterday. Mira was talking again, too fast and too bright, already fitting plans into days that had only just been returned to her.
Little steps. That was the phrase that came back to him. Eli had said it to a dragon of all things after all. Build something one step at a time. Make things better one step at a time. The idea had sounded neat in a cavern. Here, in a yard with coal smoke and hammer marks and a family no longer breaking apart, it felt heavier. Tangible.
Eli adjusted his grip on the sword and gave a small nod, mostly to himself. He had to do the same thing himself. Start a new chapter with his new life.
Tomas looked up from the forge and pointed at the blade, “You keep that dry when you can. Clean it after blood.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Eli quickly as though he wasn't familiar with standard weapon upkeep.
“That is not always reassuring.”
“It is from him,” Sera jumped in.
Tomas snorted at that and Mira came over to admire the sword up close, careful not to touch it without permission. The goodbyes followed soon after.
Tomas thanked them both again, but when he thanked Eli this time, it sounded even simpler than before. Like thanks between equals. Mira hugged Eli around the middle before he could react and told him he had better come back one day so she could see whether he grew into the sword or the sword stayed better-looking.
Sera laughed loudly enough for all three of them. Eli muttered something about that being rude, which only made Mira grin. Then it was time to leave.
── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──
The road south started cold and stayed that way longer than Eli liked. Draemharrow’s walls fell behind Sera and him with the mountain air thinning into wider country. She walked with long easy strides, and as Eli quickly noticed, absolutely no sympathy for anyone built smaller than herself.
“Do you walk everywhere?” he asked after the better part of an hour.
“Yes.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Like what?”
“Your legs. Your patience. The fact you think throwing people under one arm and sprinting through a forest and up a wall is… normal.”
“My legs?” Sera said, giving a side-eye look before chuckling, “It is normal. For me.”
Eli looked ahead at the road, then at the hills, then at Sera, then back to the road, “I do not look forward to this.”
“Good.”
“How is that good?”
“Because you’re training.”
Eli would quickly learn that that was her answer to too many things. Sera did explain more once the road stretched on and the day had worn into them. They were heading south, toward Selvyre Coast. Warmer roads. Better weather. More work. More travelers. More guild branches with smaller jobs that at least paid.
During the journey, Sera said she would train him in her way of fighting to stop him from getting himself killed. She taught speed first because that was what she valued most.
Eli learned how to carry his weight. How to shift through the hips before the shoulders. How to stop telegraphing exactly where he intended to go with his whole body. She taught him to run until his lungs burned, then taught him to keep moving anyway.
Sera taught him to use heat not only as force, but as momentum. Fire at the feet. Fire through the blade. Fire as pressure. However, Eli’s version never came out like hers. Sera’s flames were orange and wild as they coiled around her, but Eli’s fire was always blue.
The first time Eli formed his fire, Sera took one look at it and laughed, “That’s unsettling or interesting. I haven't decided.”
“I was hoping for impressive.”
“Maybe that too.”
Sera told him more than once that he had greater potential than she did, which Eli considered an irritating thing to say to someone while also making them run uphill. But she meant it. He could tell it in the way she kept adjusting the training. In the way she stopped trying to force him into her exact shape of magic and instead used her style as a frame for him to work inside. But she also made it clear she would not be his only teacher.
“You’ll want other people later,” Sera said one evening while they sat outside a roadside inn, him cleaning his sword and her cleaning hers after a small troll brawl, “Other mages. Other fighters. Any lunatic with ideas worth stealing.”
“That is a strange way to describe learning.”
“But it's the best way.”
“And you’re alright with that?”
Sera looked over at him then, chin in one hand, the firelight catching red in her hair, “Eli, if I do my job right, you’ll outgrow what I can teach you. That’s how this works.”
That stuck with him more than he let show. He had basic teachers before in the past. Where he was a part of a group where no one person really excelled. They all just remained average. Eli's had come around on the fact that he no longer was average.
He was already doing things he had never done before as a month passed with Sera through roads, sweat, simple guild work, and a hundred little lessons Eli would not have gotten on his own. Even on small simple things like escort jobs, herb gathering, and culling river vermin for farmers.
The two would also run messages from one little town to the next because one courier quit and the guild was in a mood to pay. Just small things. But small things became habits, and habits became new competence Eli never expected.
By the time they reached the Selvyre Coast, Eli was still very much a child, still very much too small, but he no longer moved like someone trapped in the wrong body. He had finally become acclimated with who he now was.
But Sera had her own business to tend to and Eli did not pry. She was the sort of woman who clearly had things going on before he existed in her life and would continue having them afterward. He had what he needed now anyway. A registered name, a sword, training, and enough of a reputation in a handful of southern guild branch logs to stop being laughed at on sight.
So when they finally parted, he thanked her awkwardly, because he was still not good at gratitude, “Thank you… for… everything, S-Sera.”
Sera only smirked and tapped two fingers against his forehead, “Try not to die before I hear something interesting about you kid.”
From then on, in Eli’s head, she was not simply Sera anymore. She was his teacher, or rather his master, if he was being honest with himself in the privacy of his own thoughts.
Until we meet again Master.
── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──
The month after that, Eli spent on his own. Learning the area and the people as he remained on the coast, doing random jobs. That part taught him something fast at least. Random jobs paid. But they did not pay enough.
Eli started making coin. Small coin. Enough for meals, a rented room some nights, a fresh whetstone, a mended boot strap, laundry he did not want to think about doing himself. Enough to feel better than nothing, but not enough to call it ‘progress’. That was the problem.
The old version of him had wanted a name, a retirement, maybe even a family if life had gone soft on him for once. But old Elias had already been too deep in his years to build that out of his given scraps. Too close to the age where average adventurers started thinking about retirement because their bodies forced the matter. Death by dragon had felt close enough to retirement… because it was cleaner and faster than just failing slowly.
New Eli looked at it differently. He was ten now. Sure. Fine. Ridiculous. Infuriating. But now… useful. If the average adventurer burned out in about ten years from where old Elias had stood, then that was his number now too. Ten years.
That was the goal. Make enough money to retire in ten years. Have a home. Some land. A few pointless little things just because he wanted them. A chair that was all his. A shelf with books he probably wouldn't read. A bed no one else could turn him out of. Maybe even people. The kind that stayed.
Yes, it was ambitious. It was also, for the first time in either life, not entirely laughable. Of course, the road there would still be long and hard. That was what roads tended to be. Still. It was a plan.
And so two months after waking in the mountain, one month after training under Sera, and one month after learning how unpleasant independence still was in any body, Eli walked through the Selvyre Coast city with a small travel bag held close under one arm.
The city had become familiar enough to stop feeling like he was just a passerby. Salt rode the air. Merchants shouted over fish crates and spice carts. White stone streets threw back the afternoon light in pale glare, ropes on pulleys creaked, and gulls screamed over rooftops. Sailcloth flashed bright over the harbor where masts cut the skyline like a forest built with ships.
Eli moved through it all with more confidence now tahn when he first arrived. Enough to stop hesitating every time the crowd pressed in. Enough to know which streets fed back toward the guild, which alleys smelled like trouble, and which market stalls watered down soup too much to be worth the price. He kept one hand close to his bag and the other near the black hilt at his hip. Eli's blue-bladed sword rested there naturally now.
He had grown used to his body in small ways too. The shorter stride. The lighter step. The way people looked past him until he spoke and then had to readjust. The way carrying himself properly mattered more now than ever, because confidence did half the work of the height he lost.
Selvyre Coast bustled around him in all its noisy southern life, and Eli turned down a side street lined with hanging signs and weathered boards until he found what he had been looking for. There was the one on painted wood, a little faded, but still neat that read “Pet Supply & Rescue”.
Eli stopped at the front of the door. He then pushed his way inside as he adjusted his grip on his bag. Something inside it was pushing outwards against the inside of the leather.
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