Rise of the Living Forge - Chapters 221 - 222 (Patreon)

Hi all! Please note that this chapter is in a new collection called 'Advanced Living Forge Chapters' that will make it far easier to filter through chapters without having to skip/bounce over the single chapter posts when catching up! I know it's stupid, but Patreon's system is scuffed. Sorry! (No change to actual chapter content. Just a new collection that they will be posted in from here on out.)

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Once Arwin and Lillia got back to the inn, Lillia made straight for the baths while Arwin waited near the entrance of the tavern to avoid tracking filth everywhere. Once Lillia finished and stepped out, her wet hair hanging around her shoulders in strands, he hurried to take her place.

The water in the tub had already been replaced and Arwin was pleasantly surprised to find that it was already warm.. He stripped out of his ruined clothes and sank into the bath, letting out a relieved sigh as the water soothed his exhausted muscles.

Somehow, it felt even better than a normal bath. The water almost seemed to massage him. Arwin wasn’t sure if that was an aspect of Lillia’s class or if he was just exhausted. At the moment, he didn’t care.

He let himself enjoy the water for a minute longer before getting to work scrubbing himself furiously. He’d been covered in dirt for far too long. Even if he hadn’t cared, Lillia would probably execute him if he tracked it into her room.

As tempting as it was to remain in the bath for another hour, Lillia was waiting for him. Arwin finished washing his hair and snagged a towel and a spare set of clothes that hung from a rack, where he’d taken to leaving them.

It was a lot easier to swap into a new set of clothes when he didn’t have to either make the trip wrapped in a towel or track dirt into her room in order to retrieve them. Arwin dried himself off and pulled his change of clothes on.

He then squinted at the pile of oil and soot-stained rags that had once been on his body. There were some things that could be saved. There were some that couldn’t. The pile before him was the latter.

He nudged the pile into the corner, making a note to toss it out the following morning.

 I should try to get a leather apron or something so I don’t destroy a perfectly good set of clothing every single time I do something really intensive in the smithy.

Arwin ambled out of the bathroom and through the kitchen as he made his way over to Lillia’s room, using his memory for the final portion of the trip when the darkness surrounding it took the last of the light away.

He carefully tested the bed to make sure he wasn’t about to sit down on top of Lillia before lowering himself into it with a weary sigh.

“What a week,” Arwin muttered as his head sank into the pillow. Lillia laid back beside him and rested her head against his chest.

“Not exactly how I expected it to go,” Lillia agreed, a small note of amusement in her voice. “But I don’t think we can complain too much. I hope Melissa succeeds.”

“Me too,” Arwin said. He could still feel the faint connection running from him to the armor. At the very least, that meant she was still alive. “Going up against a whole group of assassins on her own is going to be rough, but we can’t afford to interfere beyond what we already have.”

“I think we did everything we could. She’d have already been dead if that drunkard didn’t bring her to us and if Anna hadn’t healed her. She would have been dead afterward if you hadn’t made her the armor. She’s got a fighting chance. That’s more than most.”

“Don’t pretend like you weren’t part of it,” Arwin said. A thought struck him and the corner of his lip curled up as he bit back a laugh. “And can you really call one of your clients a drunkard when you’re the one selling him alcohol? That feels like it’s got to be bad for customer relations.”

Lillia lifted her head slightly and drummed her fingers on his chest, their faint points poking just enough into his skin to make themselves known without being uncomfortable. “It’s his fault that he won’t give us an actual name to use, and it’s not going to be a problem so long the information remains between us — which I’m certain it will.”

He snorted. “You won’t get any trouble from me. I was just making an observation.”

“I’m sure you were,” Lillia said. Arwin could hear the amusement in her tone. She laid her head back against his chest and fell silent.

Arwin closed his eyes and let his body relax as he tried to drift off too sleep. Given how long they’d both been working, it should have been easy. Yet, somehow, rest evaded him.

Minutes ticked by. He lost count of how many. The darkness made it impossible to tell what time it was or how long he’d been lying there. Arwin couldn’t say he wasn’t comfortable — he wouldn’t have chosen anywhere else to be.

He just couldn’t sleep. 

“Arwin?” Lillia whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah. I can’t seem to fall asleep tonight, but I’m too tired to actually get up and do anything. You too?”

“Yeah.” Lillia’s tail wrapped around one of Arwin’s legs and she shifted her position, looping her arms around his neck as she let out a huff that tickled his neck. “It’s so annoying. I’ve had it happen before, but not recently. There’s just so much I want to do that my brain won’t let me sleep.”

   “Maybe you need to distract the distraction.”

“Great suggestion. How?”

“Let me know if you figure it out,” Arwin suppressed a grin as Lillia let out an irritated grumble.

They fell silent for a few seconds. Then Lillia’s weight shifted once more as she lifted her head off his chest. Her hair brushed across him.  

“We don’t speak too much about… before all of this,” Lillia said.

“No,” Arwin agreed, his smile falling away. “I don’t have many good memories from before this. Before I met you and Reya, before the Menagerie — it was hell. Just endless death and slaughter. Even when I thought it was for a just cause, it was never something I wanted to think about.”

“Not at all?” Lillia asked.

Arwin hesitated. Then he shook his head as best as the pillow would let him. “I wouldn’t say that. There were some good things. Some men and women that made it worthwhile. I don’t know if I would have made it this far without them. I damn near gave up after some of the bloodiest fights. Blake stopped me more than once.”

“You’ve mentioned him before,” Lillia said, the question clear in her voice.

Old memories brushed across Arwin’s mind. He winced. Memories that he hadn’t let himself dwell on in years. Memories that should have carried more pain than he felt himself able to bear — but, to his surprise, the pain didn’t come.

There was the bitterness of loss and a deep, throbbing ache that Arwin suspected wouldn’t leave as long as he lived, but not the open wound that he’d expected to find.

“Sorry,” Lillia said. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. I know how—”

“No, it’s fine. I’ve been avoiding it for long enough.” Arwin let out a slow sigh and stared sightlessly up at the ceiling above him. “Blake was my best friend. He was the most optimistic person I ever met. I can barely ever remember a time when he wasn’t smiling.”

“He sounds like he was a good man.”

“He was. He never wanted to kill. Blake hated everything about adventuring. He absolutely loved complaining about it, but you could never tell if he was serious. I remember him swearing up and down that he’d abandon us the moment the Guild took their eyes off him so he could run off and become a tanner in the countryside. He never did. He’d have been so damn jealous if he saw me now. You know, he never should have died. He wasn’t meant to be in my party in the first place.”

“Nobody should have died. The whole damn war never should have happened.”

“Blake would have agreed with you before we even knew the truth,” Arwin said, letting out a heavy breath. “But it wasn’t just that. A few weeks before Blake died, I found out he wasn’t even in the guild.”

A second of surprised silence delayed Lillia’s words. “What do you mean?”

“He was just a random warrior. Never registered with the guild, but he kept joining party after party and working his way up through word of mouth alone. He was so determined to help everyone he could that nobody ever really thought about it. Everyone else in my camp — even the best of them — were there for more than just justice. They were there for money. For honor. Blake was just there to help.” A small laugh slipped from Arwin’s mouth before he could stop it. “He was an absolute idiot. Never thought anything through and he exaggerated every single thing he did. If he saved five men, he’d say it was ten. When we pointed it out, he just claimed he’d make up the difference the next time around.

“He just did whatever he wanted to and made the rest of us feel like heartless bastards in the process. I think he was responsible for more than a few adventurers taking a real hard look at themselves, myself included. It was hard not to. It didn’t matter who you were — if you were a prick, Blake called you on it.”

Lillia remained silent, clearly content to just listen. At this point, the words were flowing from Arwin’s mouth with enough momentum that he wasn’t sure he could have stopped if he wanted to.

“He was like that all the way up until the end,” Arwin said. His chest constricted and the corners of his eyes prickled. “We were covering a retreat. Our healer had been injured earlier and had already pulled back. A mage blew up a huge tower to our side in attempt to cut off the pursuing monsters, but some of our own men got caught in its collapse.”

“The city to the north of the kingdom. Stonebrook,” Lillia murmured. “I remember that battle.”

“Your forces nearly killed us, so I can imagine why. It was Blake’s fault,” Arwin said with a sad smile. “Instead of running, he ran right back to the tower to try and pull the people that got caught in it free. Some monsters had already made it through, so I held them off while he tried to rescue people. I told him he was being an idiot, you know. Said we were just going to get ourselves killed and there wasn’t anyone left to save. I was wrong.”

“He succeeded.” It wasn’t a question. There was more reverence in Lillia’s tone than Arwin had expected, as if she’d known Blake herself.

“Bastard pulled it off. Dragged four people out of the flames. Took his sweet time doing it, too. By the time I managed to defeat the monsters on my back and turned to see what was going on, he was already dead.” Arwin’s throat felt tight, but it felt good to tell someone else about Blake. Almost as if, by speaking of him again, a small part of the man still lived on. “A support beam fell and crushed his back. His stupid fancy armor was spending all its energy trying to mend itself and it crumpled like paper. He died in my arms. And you know what Blake did with the last moments he had? He smirked up at me and said that he’d saved ten people. He only saved four. The liar.”

Arwin let out a soft laugh. The sides of his face felt wet, but the sadness felt bittersweet.

“Fancy armor…,” Lillia muttered, her tone strange. From everything Arwin had retold in his story, that really didn’t feel like the bit to latch onto. Lillia grabbed Arwin’s shoulder. “Was it white?”

Arwin blinked. “I — yes. It was, but only when he activated it’s self-repair properties after a battle. Did I mention that?”

“No.” Lillia’s grip on him tightened as disbelieving words tumbled from her mouth in a stunned whisper. “The reason I remember the battle of Stonebrook wasn’t because we almost killed you. It was because six demons were caught in a collapsed tower, and a masked warrior clad in white amor dragged them to safety. The same warrior that had been rumored to have rescued hundreds of demons in other battles, binding their wounds and dragging the injured to safety. The warrior that died in that battle, dragged away by the Hero before anyone could ever see his face. We all thought he was a demon that you killed. I don’t think Blake ever lied to you, Arwin. He was just counting the lives of everyone he saved.”

Chapter 222

If Lillia hadn’t been lying on top of Arwin, he would have jerked upright. He just barely managed to keep himself from launching her off him as he stiffened in disbelief, his mind reeling at the revelation that Lillia had just dropped on him.

“You knew Blake?” Arwin asked, surprised to find his voice raspy. “He was saving demons? Through the whole war?”

“I never met him myself,” Lillia said. There was a note of awe in her words. “But it’s too close to be a coincidence. A warrior in fancy white armor that saved people and got carried away by the Hero. Who else could it have been?”

“I — how? How is that possible?” Arwin murmured. He couldn’t believe it — but he could. If there was anyone in the world that would have been saving people they’d been fighting just minutes before, it would have been Blake.

Dozens of conversations long since shoved into the reaches of Arwin’s mind to keep them from haunting him rose up, unbidden. All the people Blake had joked about saving. They hadn’t been jokes at all.

So many lives. Is it possible he knew that demons were more than just evil monsters?

Arwin’s throat felt tight.

If he did, why didn’t he ever tell me? He couldn’t have known what we were doing, right? Or did he not trust me enough to believe that I’d have understood?

That thought gave him pause. The growing pit in his stomach clenched even tighter and stifled his breath.

Would I have understood?

“It seems Blake was even more than you believed,” Lillia said gently. “It takes a warrior to kill an enemy and a kind man to spare one, but the kind of man that would save a foe possesses honor beyond compare. You were beyond fortunate to have someone like that in your life.”

“He was, and I was,” Arwin agreed as a small smile returned to his lips. Some of the tension slipped from his shoulders and he let himself sink back into the bed. Somehow, the more time he had to think about it, the more it made sense.

If there had been anyone that would have tried to save demon and human alike, it would have been Blake. It was impossible to know what Blake had discovered. If he’d known the truth about the war, or if he’d simply been a man doing what he could in the wake of tragedy.

It didn’t matter. Arwin couldn’t ask him anything anymore, and everything Blake had done had been to help others. Even if he’d known more, there was no way to find out — and Arwin refused to let something like doubt taint his memory.

“I’m a little jealous I never got to meet someone like that, but I’m thankful that I got to feel his influence,” Lillia said. She gave his shoulder a small squeeze.

“From the demons he saved?”

“Not just them,” Lillia said with a quiet laugh. “To the demons, he was a legend. A hero of our kind that emerged from the flames and left without a word. Another casualty who fell in battle to our great enemy — but that isn’t what I’m talking about. I can feel his influence in you. The reverence in your tone and the great respect you so clearly had for each other. His spirit lives on in your actions.”

It had been so long since Arwin had allowed himself to truly let his thoughts drift back to Blake. To the rest of the men and women that had died at his sides. He’d never permitted himself the chance to dwell on it.

Fighting bandits and clearing dungeons, he had no problem with. But the past — the past was an enemy that no sword could slay. It was a wall of pain and loss, a sea of pitch-black despair, and the agony of wasted years. It bore the weight of every innocent he had killed and every innocent he had failed to save.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

In all the death, there were the civilians that he’d pulled from burning buildings. The warriors that he’d born from battle. The brief moments of respite with his allies where the world had been still and they had spoken of the future.

Blake hadn’t been the only one. Faces that he had nearly forgotten in the haze of pain lurked at the edges of his mind.

Men and women that had passed through his life. Some had died just days after they’d met. Some had traveled with him for years, and some still lived. The laughter of a dwarven shieldmaster with a passion for fish. The scowl concealing the twinkling eyes of an elven assassin with an obsession for juggling. Blake’s endless quest to save everyone he could. They were motes of light in the dark. Memories that had been lost at sea but shone brightly like stars in the sky when his gaze finally lifted from its depths. 

“Thank you,” Arwin murmured, his voice barely more than a choked whisper. “I’d nearly forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” Lillia asked. “Forgotten what?”

“I’ve dwelled so much on the deaths of my friends that I let the memories of their life fade from my memory.”

Lillia laid back against his chest and rested her cheek against the crook of his neck. “We have a saying. Your battle brothers do not die until you lay down your sword. It’s not exactly about battle as it is about giving up. My council — my friends — were demons that wanted nothing but peace and were led to believe that war was the only path to it. Blake and every other life that the Adventurer’s Guild stole from this world were no different. We can’t bring them back, but with every step we take to make the world a better place, they live on within us.”

“Those are sage words,” Arwin said. “I occasionally forget how wise you are. Are we really the same age?”

Lillia let a snort out against his neck and looped her arms around his neck again. “I can’t take too much credit. I’m just parroting what a Mother once told me back when I was much younger. I think only a tenth of the wisdom she tried to impart stuck. I was more focused on learning how to fight at the time. Didn’t think anything else mattered. Now I wish I paid more attention to her and less to my combat instructors.”

“Perhaps the best balance is found in equilibrium. There’s no point in wielding a sword without a purpose, but purpose without a blade to achieve it is just idealism.”

  “Now who’s sounding like a wise old woman?” Lillia snickered. Her tail re-wrapped itself around his leg and she was silent for a few seconds before speaking again. “We won’t forget them. Some day, I want you to tell me about every single one of your friends.”

“Some day?”

“Not today,” Lillia said, her words growing softer. “I’m ready to sleep now.”

“Yeah,” Arwin said softly, his shoulders feeling lighter than they had in as long as he could remember, like a heavy chain had been unwrapped from his neck and thrown from his back. “Me too.”

***

Arwin woke the following morning feeling more rested than he ever had in recent memory. The previous night’s conversation was still fresh on his mind as he hoisted Lillia out of bed and set her down beside him.

The two of them wasted no time in preparing to head out for the day. With any luck, the night’s passing would have been enough time for the heart to finish whatever it was doing to his smithy.

Arwin felt equal parts excitement and trepidation to discover what had changed. He only knew one thing for certain — and it was that he didn’t want to wait any longer to see the Infernal Armory.

Well, I don’t want to wait too much longer.

There was time for breakfast, of course. It was getting harder and harder to pass up on Lillia’s meals whenever he didn’t absolutely have to. Having actual magic that let him sate [The Hungering Maw] was just the cherry on top. It definitely beat out eating a bunch of scuffed bracelets.

Everyone — other than Madiv and Esmerelda, who were nowhere to be seen — had gathered in the common room by the time Lillia finished cooking. She brought out several plates piled high with fried strips of Wyrmling meat and eggs, passing them out to all of the Menagerie before sitting down beside Arwin with her own portion, and everyone dug into it without hesitation.

“It’s been a while since I’ve caught you around,” Arwin said to Rodrick once he’d mowed through about half of his plate and was willing to waste time speaking. “Everything going okay?”

The warrior glanced up at him. His face was covered with grease. Anna wordlessly handed him a napkin, not even looking up from her meal.

“Thanks,” Rodrick said, wiping himself off and clearing his throat. “Sorry. I was starving. Nothing builds up an appetite like being out all night. Nothing to worry about. I’ve just been keeping tabs on the Ardent Guild.”

“Don’t tell me they’re planning to try something again. I was really hoping they’d gotten the message at this point.”

“They were rooting around a bit, but I’ve got their head twisted around their tail right now,” Rodrick said with a chuckle. “Their information is all screwed up. It looks like they’ve got bigger issues to deal with anyway. They look pretty stupid to the general populace right now, which isn’t great for them.”

“Why?” Reya asked, finishing off the last of her meal and speaking before she was done chewing. Olive shot her a look and she reddened, closing her mouth and swallowing before speaking again. “I mean, aren’t they just merchants? Nobody is going to care who they buy from when there’s no alternative.”

“Not in Milten,” Rodrick agreed. “But Milten isn’t the Ardent Guild’s main goal. They’re here because they’re preparing to move into a larger city called Axeport. It’s still on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Lian, but it’s built on a major river. There are a number of merchants guilds already present there. The Ardent Guild needed a closer base of operations to try and worm their way in, and Milten was perfect after the Iron Hounds fell. They wanted to build a reputation here and then use it as leverage. But…”

“They look like idiots,” Olive finished. “Hard to use that as leverage.”

“Exactly.” Rodrick nodded. “They’ve been pretty caught up with that recently. The only way to walk it back is to somehow deal with us or do something else impressive. They could go for either, so I’ll have to keep tabs on them for now.”

“Well, let us know if you need anything,” Arwin said. “I’m not sure what we can do, considering I have no clue exactly what it is that you do, but the offer is there.”

Rodrick snickered and raised his fork in salute. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. Did you and Lillia wrap up that project you were working on?”

Arwin polished off the last off the food on his plate and pushed his chair back, rubbing his hands together. “That’s hard to give a straight answer to. Anyone want to come look with me?”

Five chairs scraped across the ground as everyone rose as one. Anna shoveled the last few pieces of egg into her mouth. Reya speared the last piece of food on Olive’s plate with a snicker, but Olive bit it off the fork before Reya could bring it to her mouth. Arwin bit back a laugh at the stunned look on the former thief’s face.

Everyone filed out of the tavern and across the street. The smithy looked perfectly normal from the outside, which was a good thing. The Mesh didn’t activate when he looked at it either. They all headed inside, where Arwin led the veritable charge over to the back room.

He put his hand on the doorknob. Then he hesitated.

“Just open the door already! I want to see it,” Rodrick complained. “By the way, what exactly was it you were making?”

“If I’m going to be honest, I’m not entirely sure,” Arwin said.

“It may have stolen the smithy yesterday,” Lillia added.

They hadn’t all gotten tossed out yet. That was probably a good sign. Arwin twisted the knob and carefully pulled the door to the forge open. A wave of heat rolled over him and prickled at his eyes. Rodrick let out a curse and Reya drew in a surprised breath. Arwin’s eyes went wide as he stared at the room before him, only able to muster a measly three words.

“What the hell?”