[This post is from Thordin’s point of view.]
The wall of the forge was cool against his back, the ground still damp from the rain that had come two days before. It was strange to see it quiet and cold, but with Matt gone for more than a month, now, Thordin knew he shouldn’t be surprised. There was no one else, not really—Davon had made noises about trying his hand at it, but his heart wasn’t in it.
All of them—including Thordin—were still silently hoping that one day Matt would just walk back into camp as if nothing had happened and life would get back to normal before they had to figure out what a new normal was. In fact, there had been a small part of him that thought that maybe, just maybe, he’d limp up to the forge to hear the sound of a hammer against an anvil and open the door to see his friend standing inside as if nothing had happened, as if the past few weeks had been nothing but a fever dream.
The sun was shining and the birds were singing in the trees that were starting to bud out, to sprout green leaves months later than normal, but the forge was quiet.
It hadn’t been some kind of nightmare.
Thordin stared up at the sky.
It didn’t feel right, but this was the way things were now, the way they’d be for the foreseeable future. He—and everyone else—needed to get used to it.
Somehow, he felt like he’d failed his friend, though. There should have been something he could have done, something he should have seen.
He hadn’t, and now he had to live with the consequences of his oversight.
“The new normal,” he muttered, then closed his eyes for a moment before he stood up slowly.
The smithing still needed to happen.
I was wondering who would do that.
With the semi-medieval tech they have, a smith is nearly essential.
Wood working is another essential skill that they are going to need once they get past the “scavenge 2x4s from the wreckage” stage.