Yesterday, I sat on a crate and watched two grown men ruin good iron. I saw it so clearly. The temperature was off. The angle was wrong. I knew it. Like a mathematical certainty resting comfortably in the back of my skull. So when I walked into the Fourth Company's forge this morning, while Veyra was still "thinking" about what to do with me, I didn't just feel confident. I felt like a grandmaster descending among children to show them how a real hammer strikes. The senior smith, a massive, brooding man named Dag, had looked at me, looked at the supply wagons I'd unloaded yesterday, and grunted. "Need hands. Grab the tongs. Straighten those hinge belts. Don't overthink it." Overthink it? Please. I had this. I grabbed the tongs. I pulled a glowing strip of iron from the forge. It was bright orange. Perfect. I set it flat on the anvil. I knew exactly where the first strike needed to land—two inches from the center, angled slightly outward to stretch the grain. My brain laid out the geometry of the strike flawlessly. I raised the hammer. I brought it down. Clang. Fuck. It wasn't two inches from the center. It was right on the edge. And I hit it way too hard. The iron didn't just flatten; it bent violently sideways, warping upward like a startled snake. My brain stared at my hands in absolute betrayal. What the hell was that? My hands panicked. No problem, I thought rapidly. Just tap the other side. Compensate. Physics. Clang. Shit. The metal folded. It now looked less like a door hinge and more like a twisted piece of root. Straighten it! my inner voice yelled. It's getting cold, you idiot, hit it harder! Flip it! I flipped it awkwardly in the tongs, nearly dropping the whole mess, and came down with a heavy, desperate swing. Clang! A shower of sparks exploded over my apron. The metal didn't flatten. It rippled, a deep groove forming right down the middle. I was sweating profusely. My heart was racing. This wasn't right. In my head, this was a symphony of precision and ancient skill. In reality, I was just a sweating idiot frantically beating a piece of iron to death with zero technique. "What in the nine screaming hells are you doing to my iron?" Dag was standing right behind me. His voice sounded like grinding stones. "Give me a second," I said, my breath hitching as I scrambled to grip the twisted metal tighter with the tongs. "I can fix it. I just need to level out the edge, it's just a little—" "Put the hammer down, you lunatic." He reached for the tongs. "No, no, wait, I got it, just one more hit—" I swung the hammer blindly. CLANG. The impact vibrated up my arm so hard my teeth rattled. The iron strip snapped cleanly in half. One piece flew off the anvil and clattered miserably onto the stone floor by Dag's boots. Dag stared at the broken piece. I stared at the broken piece. Silence stretched in the forge, broken only by the roar of the bellows. After a moment, muffled laughter drifted over from the "incompetent" men behind me. Dag slowly picked up the ruined half-hinge. He didn't yell. "Get out of my forge. If you touch my tools again, I will quench your head in the water barrel." I set the hammer down very, very gently. I walked out into the cool morning air of the yard. I stood there for a long time, staring at the dirt. The confidence was gone, replaced by a scalding wave of embarrassment. What the hell was that? Why was I so sure? My mind had lied to me. It had fed me a feeling of absolute competence, complete with theoretical knowledge of grain and temperature. But looking at an anvil isn't the same as holding a hammer. I had strutted up to the anvil feeling like a legend. I left looking like a clown who had just discovered what metal was. Don't trust the confidence, I filed away in my mental ledger. * * * My fate remained undecided until the next morning. I woke up on the canvas cot in the infirmary, my body still sore from the goblin fight two days ago, though the healer's magic had miraculously sealed the skin. The door opened. Terro walked in. He was fully armored, his quiver packed tight with arrows. He stood at the foot of my cot, straight as a spear shaft. "You are assigned to the patrol," Terro stated. "Veyra decided?" I asked, sitting up. "Veyra is busy managing the quarterly budget and threatened to throw a chair at anyone who entered her office. She delegated perimeter duty to me. You are coming. We have three checkpoints on the eastern and southern edges of the city." I pulled on my boots. "Just walking?" "Primarily. However, caravans coming up the southern road reported walkers near the old bridge. We are to verify and clear." "Walkers." I repeated the word. It sounded exactly like what I thought it meant, but I needed to be sure. "Walking dead?" "Yes." Terro turned toward the door, expecting me to follow. "Reanimated corpses. Mindless, slightly aggressive, structurally compromised." I followed him out into the yard, where Renn was already waiting, tossing a pair of short swords in the air and catching them by the hilts. "They just get up?" I asked, looking between them. "Not everyone," Terro said, his tone entirely peaceful. "It is a documented side-effect of prolonged exposure to processed magical crystals. Miners, refiners, City Guild laborers. When they die, the body sometimes mistakes the residual magic for a spark of life and attempts to restart motor functions. Or at least, so I have heard." "It doesn't happen in the villages," Renn chimed in, sheathing his swords. "Villagers don't use magic stones to light their streets or power their forges. They just die and stay dead like normal, respectable people. City folk? We gotta double-tap them before we bury them." Villages. Riverside. He was right. Nobody ever talked about the dead walking in Riverside. "So we're hunting corpses," I said. "We are clearing a perimeter," Terro corrected. "Hunting implies sport or tracking intelligent prey. We are simply taking out the trash." I nodded. It made sense. Dead bodies, moving around, getting in the way. A physical hazard. My pulse didn't quicken. I felt no dread. But an incredibly faint, distant click echoed somewhere in the back of my mind at the word 'walker'. I ignored it and followed them out the gates. * * * The world outside Ashford's walls was different from the muddy woods near Riverside. The roads were paved with flat stones. Guard towers dotted the horizon. Even the milestones on the side of the road had small, glowing green crystals embedded in them, pulsing softly in the morning light. Renn didn't stop talking for the first two miles. "Had a walker last month," he said, walking backward for a moment just to make sure we were looking at him. "Used to be a baker on Market Street. Died. Two days later, he digs himself out of the pauper's grave, walks three miles back into town, breaks into his old bakery, and tries to knead dough. Just standing there, decomposing, aggressively pounding an empty wooden board." "He stood there for fourteen hours," Terro added, not breaking his forward stare. "I kept time." Renn tripped over a stone, righted himself, and glared. "Why the hell were you keeping time?!" "It was an observational opportunity. Data is valuable." "You watched a rotting man slap a table for fourteen hours! What data could you possibly—" Renn threw his hands up and turned to me. "See what I deal with? It's like patrolling with a very precise brick." I didn't answer. "You're not much better," Renn complained, falling into step beside me. "Where did you say you were from?" "A village," I said. "Which one?" "Riverside." Renn frowned. "Never heard of it." "There's nothing to hear." "Brilliant conversationalist. Between you and Terro, I might as well be talking to my swords." "Your swords do not speak," Terro observed. "And if they did, they would likely ask you to stop talking." We hit the first two checkpoints—a ruined watchtower and a junction in the dirt road. Nothing. Just the wind and the damp smell of coming rain. Terro checked the mud, found some old tracks, and dismissed them. The third checkpoint was the southern ravine. An old stone bridge covered in thick moss spanned a dry riverbed. Terro stopped abruptly. He raised a hand. I froze instantly. Renn dropped into a crouch, his hands on his hilts. Down in the ravine, standing motionless among the dry boulders, was a figure. * * * He wore the tattered remnants of a heavy leather apron. His skin was the color of old ash. His eyes were wide open, staring blankly at the mossy wall of the bridge. He wasn't breathing. He didn't blink. He just existed, a broken machine trapped in a pause state. Terro drew an arrow. I stared down at the walker. And then, it happened. The phrase that had been my very first conscious thought—the words I had woken up with all those weeks ago—screamed to life in my head. Someone betrayed me. I gasped, a sharp, involuntary intake of air. It wasn't just a memory of the words. It was the feeling. It hit me like a physical blow to the chest. My right hand shot to my pocket, my fingers closing around the small wooden token. The broken wheel. It hadn't gained weight—wood doesn't change weight—but it felt immensely heavy in my grip. I could feel every jagged edge, every groove carved into its surface. Someone betrayed me. Why now? Why looking at this? I looked at the corpse. The empty eyes. The utter absence of self. The hollow shell of a person, hollowed out and left standing. My stomach twisted in a cold, nauseating knot. I didn't recognize his face. I recognized his state. I knew what it felt like to be completely empty. To be a body without an owner. To stand up and walk without knowing why. The walker shifted. The sound of moving rocks echoed in the ravine. Its neck snapped toward us with unnatural stiffness. A low, rattling hiss parted its grey lips. It began to shamble up the slope. "Just one," Renn sighed, standing up and crossing his arms. "Boring." Terro drew the bowstring smoothly to his cheek. Twang. The arrow took the walker squarely through the left eye. The kinetic force threw the corpse backward. It hit the rocks and didn't move again. Total runtime from engagement to termination: maybe four seconds. "Check the tag," Renn said lazily, sliding down the embankment. Terro followed. I stood at the top of the ridge, my hand still gripping the wooden token so hard my knuckles white. I forced myself to walk down after them. Terro was kneeling by the body. He used the tip of his bow to flip the collar of the leather apron. There, embedded near the collarbone, the skin had grown around a thick, tarnished chain. Attached to the chain was a shard of crystal, completely dark and opaque. "Refinery worker," Terro noted. "The magic drains the life, then attempts to mimic it. A pathetic cycle." Renn pulled a small map from his belt and marked the location with a piece of charcoal. "Alright. Perimeter clear. Let's head back before Veyra decides to inventory the kitchen spoons and realizes I took the good ones." I stood over the body. I looked at the dark crystal, the grey skin, the arrow protruding from its eye. I pulled the wooden token from my pocket and looked at it. A circle that did not close. A cycle broken. The token offered no answers. The corpse offered no answers. But the invisible thread connecting the two was pulled taut directly through the center of my chest. Someone had betrayed me. * * * "You look like you swallowed a bad clam," Renn noted as we hiked back up the road toward Ashford's walls. I didn't look at him. I kept my eyes on the horizon. "Seriously," Renn prodded, walking backward again. "You stared at that corpse like it owed you money. You seen a walker before?" "No," I answered, my voice quieter than usual. "Then why the face? Did he remind you of someone from your village?" I looked at Renn. I thought about the empty eyes. The mechanical walking. The body moving without a soul to command it. "It wasn't that," I said. "He didn't remind me of anyone from the village." "Who then?" "Me." Renn stopped walking backward. He stumbled slightly as his heel caught a rut in the road. He looked at me, mouth half open, waiting for the punchline. He waited for a grin, a wink, a flex of irony. For the first time since I'd met him, Renn couldn't find a joke. He closed his mouth, turned around, and walked in silence. Even Terro shot me a brief, sideways glance before returning his gaze to the road. That night, lying on the cot in the infirmary, I turned the wooden token over and over in my fingers in the dark. My hands didn't know how to smith. My brain had lied to me about what I could do. But it wasn't lying to me now. The feeling of betrayal was real. The recognition was real. Someone betrayed me. I stared at the stone ceiling. But maybe, I thought, the coldness finally settling into my bones, maybe someone killed me first.

Chapter 9: Dead Weight