Kael placed the hammer in Hatim's hands the way a judge delivers a sentence.
Or maybe… the way a father passes down a curse.
It was heavier than it looked.
A long-handled brute of blackened steel, cold as consequence, worn smooth where countless hands had gripped it—until the hands failed, or didn't. No glyphs adorned it. No pretty lines. Just mass. Just purpose. Its weight sank into Hatim's palms, dragged down his spine, settled in his gut like a stone dropped into deep water.
"This is where you start," Kael said.
Flat. No fanfare. No kindness.
Around them, the forge breathed.
Bellows groaned—deep, guttural things that sounded less like tools and more like beasts chained beneath the floor. Heat warped the air into trembling glass. Flames curled and hissed in their pens, licking the sides of smelters, casting gold-red scars across the soot-black walls. Metal screamed—red-hot bars crushed, bent, folded beneath merciless hands.
The sound of hammer on anvil wasn't noise. It was rhythm. A war drum. A sermon. A threat.
Hatim's gaze dropped.
The billet waited on the anvil—an angry shard of orange heat, glowing like a wound not yet scabbed. Raw Akar pulsed within it—not the clean, elegant current of controlled glyphs, but something dense. Heavy. Animal.
Ugly.
Kael's voice cut over the furnace roar. "Hammer's song, boy. It ain't about strength. Ain't about force. It's rhythm. Feel the iron. Listen. You don't beat it. You talk to it."
Then Kael moved—fluid, practiced.
His shoulders coiled. His wrists loose. The hammer rose—not with strain, but like an extension of his breath—and crashed down.
CLANG.
The sound shivered through Hatim's ribs. Sparks fled the anvil in perfect arcs—tiny, dying stars. The billet flattened, obedient.
Something shimmered under Kael's skin—a soft pulse, like veins woven from light. Not blazing, not showy. Controlled. Disciplined. The Sennari glyph inked along his spine glowed faintly as he moved, not dominating, but partnered with him. The line between muscle and magic blurred until there wasn't one.
"Your body's the hammer."
"Your Akar's the flame."
"Shape reality with both—or shape nothing at all."
Kael stepped back.
Hatim swallowed. The hammer twitched in his hands—too long, too top-heavy, biting into blistered skin. His grip felt wrong. His stance wrong. His breath—already ragged.
But still, he raised it.
The weight pulled at his shoulder. His fingers slipped.
He brought it down.
THUNK.
Wrong.
A dull, graceless thud. Sparks flinched but didn't fly. The iron barely shifted, sneering beneath the blow. Pain jolted up Hatim's arms, sharp as snapped wire.
"You're fighting it," Kael snapped. "Stop fighting. You don't win against iron. You lead it. Let it push back. Answer it."
Hatim gritted his teeth. Sweat poured. He adjusted. Raised the hammer again.
Harder this time.
CLANG.
The hammer jolted—rebounded like it wanted to tear from his hands. The blow was crooked, off-center. His shoulder flared, a burst of white-hot pain igniting through joint, through bone, down his spine.
The Akar inside him—those clean, precise Veshan channels—refused him. Silent. Dim. Like a friend turning away.
This wasn't glyphwork. This wasn't lines of light and elegant flow. This was violence. This was pressure. This was honest.
And it was undoing him.
The forge didn't care.
The iron didn't care.
The other apprentices didn't look.
Didn't laugh.
Didn't mock.
Worse.
They expected it.
Expected him to fail.
He could feel the pressure climbing—raw Akar flaring under skin, desperate to help. It surged, unbidden, wild.
Hatim gave in.
Pushed.
Too fast. Too much.
Heat exploded inside his chest. His vision went sideways—the forge walls twisted, rippled like cloth in a storm. His limbs trembled so hard the hammer slipped.
It fell.
The sound of it hitting the floor echoed sharper than any failure.
He staggered back. His hands groped for the waterskin at his belt, tore the stopper free. Water hit his tongue like cold iron—but it couldn't cool the fire chewing at his bones. Couldn't drown the shame.
"Overheating already?" Kael's voice landed somewhere between disappointment and expectation. Not cruel. Not angry. Just... stating. A fact.
"That Akar of yours… raw. Wild. You don't channel it. You bleed it."
The words hit harder than any hammer.
Hatim looked at his hands—
Cracked. Smeared in blood and soot.
Shaking. Small.
He remembered Kander's eyes—watching him conjure a Veshan shield weeks ago. The pride in them. The quiet belief.
And now—
Now he was just a boy. A hammer he couldn't lift. An anvil that didn't care. A wall of iron that might as well have been the sky itself.
Kael didn't soften. Didn't lean. Didn't offer.
A scream cut the air—an apprentice clawing at his eyes. Above him, a Veil-Wasp droned, its wings humming in a frequency that warped the anvil's shape. The metal rippled, now a twisted mimicry of a face Hatim half-recognized. Lyra's?
Kael crushed the wasp midair. "Focus," he snarled. "Illusions thrive on distraction."
"Again," he said.
Hatim stared at the billet—still glowing. Still waiting.
Then at the hammer, lying like judgment at his feet.
His breath dragged in—shaky, thin. The fire didn't relent. The pain didn't fade.
But neither did he.
Fingers closed around the handle.
He stood.
Raised.
Struck.