The night was moonless, cold. The air thin and sharp. Marshal lay on the sheepskins, staring at the ceiling. Thoughts circling without urgency — Marshal. Empty. Gestures. Sounds. The gap.
Sleep wouldn't come. He pulled the rough wool cloak over his shoulders and stepped outside.
The village was asleep. Dark windows, silence, a distant owl and the endless murmur of the river.
He walked without purpose. His bare feet had grown used to the cold. He reached the edge of the village, where the kitchen gardens met the low fence, then turned back along the houses.
That's when he heard it. Metal. Muffled. The careful scraping of an iron latch.
He stopped in the shadow of a barn. Twenty paces ahead, by Widow Mary's goat shed, a figure crouched. Short, hunched, with long arms too large for its body. It was working at the wooden bolt on the henhouse door.
Goblin. The word came instantly, carrying weight: forest thief, cowardly, dangerous in packs, smells of rot and wet earth. How he knew this, he couldn't say. The situation didn't leave room for that question.
The goblin scratched at the wood, clicking its teeth in frustration. The bolt was about to give.
He stood in the shadow. No weapon. No armor. No memory of how to fight. Only his body, suddenly filled with cold, clear focus.
He didn't feel fear. Didn't feel anger. There was the fact: creature. Theft. Harm to Widow Mary — he knew her face, she brought Hollen eggs in exchange for fixing her sickle. He wanted to help her.
But how? Shout? The village wakes, the goblin runs. Or worse — it lunges at him.
He looked at his hands. Then at the pile of large stones stacked by the barn corner for foundation repair. He crouched, picked one up. Heavy, rough, the size of his fist.
The goblin popped the bolt. The henhouse door creaked. It spun around, sniffing. Its eyes — yellow, narrow — darted toward the shadow where he stood.
They froze, staring at each other across a strip of moonlight.
The goblin hissed. Straightened to its full, unimpressive height, baring a row of small, sharp teeth. In its long hand, a short, dirty knife — fashioned from a broken scythe blade — caught the light.
It didn't run. Maybe one man in the dark wasn't a threat. Or maybe the absence of fear-smell confused it.
The goblin stepped forward, then again, moving sideways, crab-like. Its hissing grew louder.
He stepped back, feeling the ground with his foot. His fingers tightened on the stone. He should throw or strike. But the distance was already too close for a strong throw, and letting a creature with a knife get closer —
His body made the decision. Right foot snapped back, left knee bent, torso turned. A stance. Muscle memory, deep and wordless. The posture of someone ready to fight.
The goblin hesitated. Then, with a piercing shriek, it rushed at him, driving the knife toward his gut.
Time slowed. He saw the movement, the flash of steel. His left hand shot up and to the side. His palm opened, fingers folding into a shape he didn't consciously know. And in his mind, soundless, a command compressed into a syllable: Ken!
The air between his palm and the blade turned blue and slightly glowing. With the «Ting!» blade hit something, and as suddenly as it appeared the glow faded. The goblin stumbled forward.
His body finished what it started. The stone in his right hand — already raised before he was aware of it — came down. Heavy, precise, silent.
It caught the goblin in the temple with a dull, bony crack. The creature dropped without a sound. The knife rang against the ground.
He stood over it, stone still in hand. Looked at the body. At the dark liquid spreading beneath its head. At the crooked, thin fingers.
He let go of the stone. It fell alongside the body.
Silence returned. Different now — thick, ringing with adrenaline that only now began to pulse. His hands shook slightly. From tension leaving the body.
He picked up the goblin's knife, examined it — dirty, chipped, handle wrapped in rotten leather — and tossed it into the bushes. Then grabbed the goblin by the ankle and dragged it past the village edge, to the forest margin. Left it in a ditch. The forest would clean up by morning.
He walked back. Fixed the broken latch. Made sure everything inside was quiet. Returned to the smithy.
At the doorway he stopped and looked at his hands. No blood. Just dirt on them.
He went inside, lay down. What stayed wasn't the goblin's face, but his own palm, folded in that strange gesture. And the word that had surfaced in the dark — Ken — that he hadn't invented. That had come from somewhere inside him, already formed, already precise. Like a tool pulled from a drawer he didn't remember opening.
* * *
Nobody found out about the goblin.
A week passed. The same rhythm — coal, iron, water. But the thoughts that came between the strikes were different now.
He watched Hollen forge a sickle. Curved blade, sharp as a crescent moon. Widow Mary would take it to the field, cut the grain. Grain becomes flour. Flour becomes bread. Bread gets eaten.
He made nails. Short, thick. They'd be hammered into boards. Boards become a wall, a floor, a roof. Inside — warm and dry. People sleep.
He fixed the harness for Bern's horse. The horse pulls the cart. The cart carries hay to town. In town, hay trades for coins. Coins buy salt, cloth, maybe a new pan.
Everything was connected by simple, iron chains. Every action had a visible, tangible purpose. Not why live? but why this nail? To hold boards. Why boards? To make a house. Why a house? To have somewhere to sleep and eat. Why sleep and eat? To forge new nails tomorrow.
A closed loop. A mechanism. The world as a giant, crude machine, where everyone is a cog and the smithy is a small workshop for repairing other cogs. There was a strange, calming clarity in that simplicity.
* * *
And then the hunter came.
Yaromir — tall, quiet, a bow on his back. He walked into the smithy not for repairs, but with news. His face serious, grey.
"Hollen. In the forest, by the Old Pine. Tracks. Lots of them. Not wolves."
Hollen set down his tongs. "What kind?"
"Small. Two-legged. Clawed. Probably goblins. But not one or two. A whole trail, like a patrol. Moving in formation."
Silence in the smithy, except for the crackle of coals. A goblin patrol. Not a lone thief in the night. A threat. They could hit a herd, a farmhouse on the outskirts. And if there were many, organized...
The news ripped through the village. By noon, men gathered at the elder's house. Loud voices, everyone talking over everyone. Some wanted a militia, some wanted to send for mercenaries. The oldest shook his head: "Sit tight. They'll move on."
The smithy flooded — but not with orders for sickles or nails. Weapons. Rusty swords pulled from above the mantelpiece. Spearheads. Axes and scythes sharpened into something resembling a fighting edge.
Hollen worked in silence, furiously, without breaks. "Empty! Coal! Bellows! Heat — faster!"
Marshal ran between forge and anvil. He saw the fear in the men's eyes. Saw hands shake when they took a freshly sharpened scythe. This fear was different from his own emptiness — collective, sticky, the fear of an outside threat that both unites and paralyzes.
And he saw the gap again. For Elira and her companions, goblins were a minor inconvenience. For Riverside — potential death.
That night, lying on the sheepskins, listening to Hollen grumble in his sleep, the thought came. Simple, like everything he understood now.
People are afraid. And people praise whoever takes the fear away.
He was already giving bread — indirectly, through sickles. Fixing roofs — through nails. But protection was different. Protection removed the threat that disrupted the order of things: the smithy, the food, the sleep. And protection brought a different kind of gratitude.
He liked that thought.
And he had a tool. Broken, rusted, buried in the dark of his forgotten past — but a tool nonetheless. The gestures. The syllables. Fragments of something that once worked, the way a shattered sword still has edges.
Not something he needed to learn. Something he needed to remember.
He clenched his fist under the sheepskin. For the first time since waking under that tree, now he had a wish, a direction.