Moradin’s face settled into a solemn expression as he stared down at Torrin. “You’ve done me a great service,” he intoned. “A service beyond price. I might have died were it not for your valiant actions. I will thus watch over you for all of your lifetimes and aid you whenever you call.”
Torrin bowed again. And I will honor you, in all of my lifetimes.
“I know.” the god said, smiling. “There are many things a god can foresee, and that is one of them.”
Moradin rose from his throne. He moved toward the soulforge, still carrying the soul that had been Torrin on his palm. The souls waiting in line at the forge paused, all eyes turning upward. “And now the time has come for you to be reborn,” Moradin said.
Torrin startled. Had he heard correctly? But you said I would be Kier’s son. Has that much time really passed? Is he a grown man already?
The god’s eyes twinkled as he said, “Time is flexible here.”
The soul that had been Torrin breathed a long, slow sigh of relief. In his next lifetime, he would be a dwarf. Kier’s son. Although the boy would never know him, that was something. My thanks, he said.
“No thanks needed,” said Moradin. “It is as it should be.”
It was indeed.
As the god lowered him to the forge, the soul that had been Torrin was bathed in sustaining warmth. Then the hand closed, and he saw only a dim red glow through the cracks between Moradin’s closed fingers. The pounding of the hammer on metal dulled to a muffled thud, thud, thud of a heartbeat heard through sustaining blood and cushioning water. Torrin felt himself squeezed, compressed, crystallized down to his soul’s essence. Then he felt the closed fist rise to the god’s mouth, and heard the rush of Moradin’s exhaled breath. The gust of warm air pushed him tight against the god’s clenched fingers.
What will I look like, this time? he wondered.
The breath at last forced the fingers open. He was carried along with it in a rush of sensation and sound.
Wet, shivering-yet cradled in loving hands-he opened his eyes on a new lifetime.
Kier, a grown man, peered over the midwife’s shoulder at the newborn babe the midwife had just placed in his mother’s arms. “Look at that red hair,” he observed. “And he’s a stout one, too. Just look-he’s not even crying.”
For just a moment, the soul that had been Torrin remembered its last life. There had been a woman he’d loved as a shield sister, a boy he’d loved as a son, a family who’d taken him in when all others had ridiculed him…
As the midwife wiped the bloody afterbirth from his face, the sharpness of those memories dulled, then fled.
The newborn babe nuzzled against his mother’s breasts, found the milk he’d been searching for, and suckled, content at last.