The son returned the old man’s smile. “I could have done it myself father.”
N’bel was cleaning his tools, smacking off the fire-scale and brushing away the soot. It was dark in the forge, all the better to see the temperature of the metal and gauge its readiness. The air was thick with the scent of burning and thickened by the heat. Far from oppressive, the son found the conditions invigorating. He liked it here. He felt safe and a measure of solace he couldn’t emulate anywhere else on Nocturne. His father’s tools hung in racks upon the walls, only hinted at in the gloom, and lay upon benches and anvils of all sizes and shapes. The son had strong hands, and here in the forge and workshop was where he could put them to best use.
N’bel kept his eyes on his work and didn’t notice the son’s brief reverie. “I am a humble black-smiter. I don’t possess the skills of the metal-shapers nor do I have the wisdom of an earth shaman, but I am still your father and a father likes to do things for a beloved son.”
The son frowned and approached the old man tentatively. “What’s wrong?”
N’bel kept cleaning the tools for a short while longer before his arms sagged to his sides and he sighed. He set the hammer down atop the anvil and looked his son in the eye.
“I know what you have come here to ask me, lad.”
“I…”
“You don’t need to deny it.”
The pain at his father’s discomfort was etched on the son’s face. “I’m not trying to hurt you, father.”
“I know that, but you deserve the truth. I am just afraid of what it will mean when you have it.”
The son held N’bel’s shoulder and cupped the older man’s chin. It was like a child’s in his immense hand and he towered over the black-smiter.
“You raised me and gave me a home. You will always be my father.”
Tears welled in N’bel’s eye and he wiped them away as he broke from his son’s embrace.
“Follow me,” he said, and they walked to the back of the stone forge. For as long as the son could remember there had been an old anvil sat in the gloom there. It was shrouded in a leather tarp that N’bel ripped away and cast to the floor. Rust colonised the surface of the massive anvil and it shocked the son to see such disrepair. N’bel barely noticed as he braced his shoulder against the ruddy metal side. He strained and the anvil scraped forwards a fraction. “I didn’t raise a giant of a son just so I could still do all of my own heavy lifting,” he said wryly. “A little help for your old man?”
Ashamed he’d just been looking on, the son joined him at once and together they moved the great anvil aside. He barely felt the weight, the strength in his arms was incredible and extended to every muscle and sinew in his body, but the simple act of working together with his father was soul-enriching.
N’bel was sweating when it was done and wiped a hand across his brow. “I’m sure I used to be stronger,” he gasped. The levity was shortlived as he pointed to a square recess sunken into the floor. “There…” It was thick with soot and dust, but the son realised at once that it was some kind of trap-door.
“Has this been here all the time?”
“I bless the day you came to us,” said N’bel “You were, and still are, a miracle.”
The son looked at his father but he gave nothing away. He knelt down and felt around the edges of the square depression in the floor. His fingers found purchase and in a feat of strength that no other man in the township could manage, the son lifted the great stone slab into the air. Despite its weight, he set it down carefully and then stared into the dark passageway it revealed retreating back into the earth.
“What’s down there?”
“Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve never shown fear. Not even the drakes below the mountain gave you pause.”
“I fear this,” he admitted openly. “Now I’m faced with it, I’m not sure I want the truth.”
N’bel placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “You will always be my son… always.”
He took his first steps into the darkness and found a stone stairway underfoot that clacked loudly with his every footfall. As the son went deeper the edge of something hard and metallic began to resolve out of the blackness.
“I see something…”
“Do not fear it, lad.”
“I see…”
Echoing through the walls of the forge, a low reverberant bellow stopped the son’s next faltering step. It was a warning. Up in one of the town’s watchtowers a horn was being blown. Even deep within the forge, N’bel and his son heard it.
Relief swept through the son as he abandoned the darkened hollow and returned to the forge’s gloomy light above.
“Truth will have to wait,” he said.
N’bel was scowling, reaching for his spear, his favoured hammer already tucked into his tool belt. “Dusk-wraiths.”
Every tribe on Nocturne had its legends about them. They were the night-fiends, the stealers of flesh, the dark spectres, a waking nightmare brought to life when the skies became as crimson and the clouds boiled overhead. Few who’d seen them had lived and even those rare individuals were forever broken by the experience. Horror stories given form, they were alien slavers who stole people from their homes and earned them away on their ships into the endless dark. None who entered that place ever returned.
The son snarled. “Are we to be forever hunted?”
“It is the anvil, that is all,” said N’bel. “Endure it, be tempered by it and become stronger.”
“I am already strong, father.”
N’bel gripped his son’s shoulder. “You are, Vulkan. Stronger than you know.”
Together, they ran from the forge and out into the town.
A SANGUINE SKY reigned over Hesiod and rust-rimed clouds billowed and crashed in the bloody heavens. Ash and smoke laced the breeze and a pregnant heat lay heavy on the air like a mantle of invisible chain.
“Hell-dawn, when the ash banks break and the sun burns,” cried N’bel, pointing to the sky. “It heralds the blood. Every time at this inauspicious hour they come.”
In the town square there was a panic. The people hurried from their homes, clutching what meagre belongings they could to their chests, clinging to their loved ones. Some were screaming, afraid of what they knew was coming and terrified that this time they would be dragged into the endless dark.
Breughar, the metal-shaper, had emerged out of the throng and was trying to restore calm. He and several of the other men were shouting for the rest of the people to take refuge. The horn bayed on, driving the fearful to an ever greater frenzy.
“This madness must end,” breathed Vulkan, appalled at the terror now seizing his tribe. These were a strong people who endured the ravages of the earth when the ground split and the volcanoes cast fire and darkness into the sky. But the dusk-wraiths, the fear they evoked was beyond reason.