WOSE Chapter 37

If someone asked when the sharpest, most vivid period of her life had been, Kelgrida would recall a corner of childhood—that fledgling time before she truly understood the weight of responsibility.

It had been a year when the sun beat down with particular cruelty. Even the desert sparrows refused to emerge from beneath the rocks, folding their wings and huddling in the shadows.

The dwarves lived in a world already difficult by nature—the desert and stone took on a periodic madness—so they had adapted long ago. They reversed their days and nights without fuss. During the scorching daylight hours, they slept the sleep of the dead behind heavy curtains. Only when the sun vanished would they tend their forges and kindle their flames.

By rights, noon should have been silent as a tomb. Yet from her estate—specifically from the workshop—came the relentless thunk-thunk-thunk of a hammer.

Kelgrida was too old to be called a child, too young to be properly adult. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her hand and shouted.

"Uncle! I'm dying of heat! How much longer are you going to keep making garbage?"

Her uncle, Sindri, stopped mid-swing. He lifted the object he'd been working on—a broad, flat thing.

"Keli, it's not garbage. It's a sunshade. This way, the marigolds and lavender you worked so hard to grow won't wither away, won't they?"

A sunshade. For plants.

"That's garbage."

Kelgrida sat perched on the table, her dangling feet kicking at her uncle's back—thump, thump—in protest. It irritated her that he'd promised to craft her arrow tips, then lost himself in some pointless project instead.

Sindri was a blacksmith excellent enough that even fastidious Kelgrida couldn't quite deny it. But he had a terrible habit: whenever something occurred to him mid-work, he'd abandon whatever he was doing to pursue the new idea.

'If he was going to be like this, he should've just let me nap.'

It wasn't the first or second time this had happened. She kicked his broad back twice more, harder now, out of spite.

"Ow!"

It hadn't been hard at all, but Sindri curved his bent shoulders inward, pretending agony while letting out a pathetic, wheezing laugh.

Sometimes she thought about locking this ridiculous man away somewhere no one would find him. After all, if the future clan leader's temperament became known, wouldn't the dwarves panic? Wouldn't that slow production? Wouldn't her people starve?

Kelgrida's mind spiraled into imagined apocalyptic scenarios. She narrowed her eyes and clicked her tongue sharply, mimicking her grandfather's disapproval.

"Uncle, you have no dignity whatsoever."

The remark was rather insolent, but the man didn't sharpen his gaze at all. Instead, his dimples deepened as he laughed—genuinely, widely.

Without shame or thought, Sindri reached over with his rough hands and tousled her hair, making it worse.

"Took you long enough to figure that out?"

"Stop treating me like a child!"

"Right, right, young lady. Don't be mad. Come here."

Beneath his callused palms, her already-disheveled hair became a complete disaster. It had been singed by forge heat, rough and tangled.

She managed to wrench free, her face crumpled. She jumped down from the table—she wanted to kick his face instead of his back, but she hadn't lost the ability to control herself. She wasn't the kind of thoughtless child who couldn't manage her feelings. So she walked toward him anyway.

He seemed to ignore her declaration about not wanting child-treatment. Her uncle sat her on his lap and began methodically undoing the mess he'd just made.

Then, in his characteristic gentle voice, he spoke: "You don't need dignity."

"For someone who's going to be clan leader?"

Kelgrida thought of her grandfather—the current leader who had guided their people for so long. His hair had gone white, his hands creased with calluses, yet a single glint in his eyes could make any opponent falter. That was the dignity of a leader.

She'd believed it was natural for a future leader to possess such a thing.

"You just need the will to protect them. That's enough."

Her uncle said something so soft, so unsound, that Kelgrida could have produced a hundred counter-arguments on the spot. She was certain of it.

But instead of rebutting, she leaned her back against his sweat-dampened chest. The embrace she'd known since childhood, the one that had substituted for parents she couldn't remember, carried an undeniable comfort. So did the large hand smoothing her hair.

She accepted that touch quietly. Only after a long while did she open her mouth to point out one thing:

"Don't think you can slip past me. Make my arrow tips."

The relentless sun didn't last, as everyone had predicted. Once the heat retreated and rain began to fall more frequently, the marigolds and lavender—saved beneath Sindri's creation—began to bloom profusely.

Late one evening, while the brief green flourish still lingered.

Kelgrida pulled herself up from the floor with a gasp. She'd lost track of time assembling the mechanical toy her uncle had given her. The design was more complex and precise than expected; she'd skipped dinner entirely in her focus.

Hunger finally won out. She left her room. She meant to steal what remained from the kitchen. Of course, if her grandfather or his aide caught her, she'd be lectured about impropriety, so she kept her footsteps deliberately soft.

'I think tonight was lamb stew. Maybe some's left.'

She was mentally sampling the flavor when a lightning-crack of a shout stopped her dead.

"What? Say that again!"

The voice was her grandfather's—sharp, parched with age. Kelgrida held her breath and crept toward his study.

The door hung partially open. Inside, lit only by a few candles and moonlight, her grandfather and uncle faced each other in a poisoned atmosphere.

From where Kelgrida watched, Sindri stood with his back to her. His fists were clenched. When he spoke, his declaration was clear:

"I don't want to make weapons anymore."

"Hah! You don't understand the value of the Orichalcum sword you crafted? That money could feed every dwarf in this village for a month! So what? You want to stop because of a feeling? You irresponsible wretch!"

"It's not about feelings, Father! When I think about how the weapons I've created with these hands have taken lives, I can't breathe—"

"That's for the one holding the weapon to consider, not the one who forged it! In all my years, I never thought I'd hear such weakness—"

Her grandfather's weathered hands seized Sindri's collar. He dragged him toward the window with savage force.

He could have shaken off an old man's grip easily enough. But Sindri made no resistance. He was pulled like a beast.

The passivity inflamed their father's fury further. His voice rose:

"Look! Every column holding up this village, every stone beneath it—all built with money from selling those 'weapons.' Do you truly wish your own people to live like animals in the sand? Do you want them to starve?"

"If we need something valuable to sell, I can make other things! Jewelry, ornaments—"

"And do you genuinely believe the God gave us this barren world and the gift to work metal so that we might fashion decorations? How amusing."

"…"

"Foolish, simple-minded boy. War has never ceased in history. It continues everywhere. We dwarves have fattened ourselves on the profits of others' conflicts. That is our identity, whether you like it or not. That is how we survive."

"… Even if I truly find it horrifying? Even if I can't bear it anymore?"

"A creature incapable of sharpening swords has no value—it matters little where or how they find meaning. But you cannot afford that luxury. You hold responsibility."

"…"

The words escaped like a sigh—exhausted, yet absolutely uncompromising.

The man with the broad shoulders let them fall slack. He offered no further argument, no further attempt at persuasion. No answer at all.

After that night, Sindri changed.

The uncle who had visited her room countless times without cause, pestering her endlessly, now locked himself in the workshop. He didn't emerge.

All night and all day, the sound of hammering and bellows-work continued. The workshop forge never cooled—it radiated a strange, terrible heat.

"Uncle?"

Silence.

"Sindri!"

Silence.

She called to him from outside the door many times. But no answer came, just as on that night.

'He'll come back once the work is finished.'

When he threw himself into a project, he sometimes didn't notice her footsteps, didn't hear her voice. So she pushed back the shapeless anxiety. Perhaps the conversation with grandfather had simply shaken him. That must be it.

How many more days passed in his absence, with everything turning hollow and flavorless?

By the time even that small hope—that he'd emerge and smile again, absent-mindedly—had faded and clouded over completely, someone entered her sleeping room.