Thorgrott's dream

He is walking a corridor.
 
Stone walls. Iron sconces. A smell of rust and cold grease.
He knows this place. Or remembers thinking he knew it.
No—Grandpa Ironhide used to tell stories of it, half-drunk, by the fire, and in song:
the old trade tunnels beneath the first Forge, long since abandoned, where echoes never die.
 
His footfalls make no sound.
 
Around the corner, a table waits—sturdy, plain.
Five chairs. Four filled.
 
His mother, tying a thin silver wire around her wrist.
His father, face unreadable, slowly turning a coin over and over.
His uncle, sharpening a blade that isn't in his hand.
His cousin, staring at a wall that isn’t there.
 
They look at him, but do not see him.
 
“You’re late,” his mother says, gently.
 
Thorgrott tries to speak.
Nothing comes. Only dust.
 
The fifth chair is empty. A chain runs from it to his ankle.
He tries to sit, but the table slides back. Away. Always away.
 
A sound starts behind him—clink, clink, clink—like metal dragged across tile.
He does not turn.
 
The floor becomes water, rippling blue and violet.
Not wet. Not cold. Just… wrong.
 
He stands on it anyway.
 
The tunnel widens. Becomes a hall. Becomes a sky, filled with beams and cranes, cracked rails, half-sunken gears, shattered sigils painted in rust.
 
Somewhere distant, the harbor bell tolls, though he’s never heard it in waking life.
 
“They keep breathing because you keep walking,” the voice says.
 
It’s close now. Not loud. But inside.
 
It doesn’t echo.
It folds.
 
“Yours? No—yes? So many hands. So many names. I was... before. Or under. Or between. Stone… turned to dust. Steel… whispered too long. Gems... Shimmer with memories unspoken.”
 
The sky falls away.
 
Now he’s back in the Forge—but younger. Maybe fifteen.
Grandpa Ironhide kneels in front of him, holding a broken gear between his palms.
 
“Not all things can be mended, lad,” he says with a grunt. “But even the busted parts tell you where they came from.”
 
He presses the gear into Thorgrott’s chest.
 
It sinks in.
 
And suddenly, Thorgrott is back at the table. The fifth chair is filled. By him.
 
And across from him sit his family, still, waiting.
But now their skin is translucent. Veined with blue light.
Not dead. Not alive. Kept.
 
“They're waiting,” the voice croons. “Always waiting. For the shape of your hands. For the path of your bones. For the choice.”
 
The corridor flickers.
 
He is beneath the crane. Then beneath the forge. Then beneath the water.
And then… in a tree that does not grow, roots cracking through the broken rails.
 
A single chain runs through them all.
It is connected to the place behind his heart.
 
“You are not the first to carry the fire,” the voice says.
“But you are the one who must burn.”
 
And then—a flash of light, so blue it turns white, so purple it bruises memory.
 
The voice fades into humming.
Grandpa’s forge song. Again.
This time… sung by someone who doesn’t know the words, not the same ones at least.
 
Thorgrott gasps awake.
 
The room is quiet.
The warforged is still working on Yrmidon's parts, a faint blue hue shimmering off it,
contrasted by the warm glow of the smoldering coals in the forge that still smell of soot.
 
His skin still feels warm.
And his chest is heavy, like a gear buried deep in flesh, still spinning.