His stoic, wrinkled face dripped salty sweat into his eyes, but he didn’t care. His focus was on the blade atop his loyal anvil, whose heart his boy had discovered inside the mountain so long ago. A black anomaly covered in caked-on lime. Its uniqueness had inspired a debate about the infinite possibilities of the world, and what possibilities lie ahead for his son.

He glowered at the blade and seethed. It mocked him. “Again!”

His chest heaved as he drew back his massive hammer. He would sate his rage and draw its edge out with might! Metal and iron collided. Sparks of amber showered the room, but he wasn’t satisfied. Filling his muscles with all his anger, scorn and spite, he brought the hammer head down a second time.

The room shook with a wire-pitched strum so loud his eyes vibrated. Groaning, he looked at the sword’s edge and heard it snigger with defiance. In hatred, he thrust it deep into the forge’s burning heart, and slammed his boot down on the bellows to bid it hotter. Soon, the fire reached its apex and the coals burned a translucent amber. The heat was so intense it blistered and bubbled his skin, birthing nodules of putrid flesh.

“You will bend.”

He pulled the sword from its prison of flame and felt satisfaction. It was in pain. The metal’s back had been broken by the temper of the forge. It was a race now as the steel called the cooling air to its aid. As he drew the hammer back again, time suddenly froze and he stood outside himself, watching what his rage would sow, and heard his boy’s voice softly ask, “Do you give it?”

A tear fell from his suspended self as both forms answered, “I do.”

A white light exploded as the hammer struck with a power that rang through time and bone.

He fell to his knees. At his feet, remnants of the handle, and on the walls, shards of the hammer’s head. Weeping, he mustered himself towards the anvil, but his body refused. It was as broken as the treasure of his fatherhood, now fractured into two pieces before him. No anger remaining, he pleaded for his son to return. But in the dying heat of the forge, the sword was all that was left, still whole between his anvil’s halves.