Tallow Brendyn liked roads that made sense.
Stone should slope in a clear direction. Paths should lead somewhere specific. If you walked long enough, you ought to end up at either a door or a cliff. Ideally a door. Preferably with food behind it.
The road from the Larenweald toward Harrowsrest was doing its best. It curled along the edge of the forest, then began to lean into the foothills, trading moss for scrub and soft soil for packed earth and splintered rock. The trees thinned. The air picked up a sharper chill that tasted faintly of iron and smoke.
Behind him, the forest sat like a closed book. Ahead, the low stone sprawl of Harrowsrest waited, its smoke threads rising toward the already pale afternoon sky.
He should have been thinking about trade posts, or forge reports, or the completely reasonable brief that had sent him down here in the first place.
Instead, he was thinking about an elf who had not come with him.
He shifted his pack a little higher on his shoulder. The straps creaked in a familiar way. His travel hammer thumped against his hip, light enough for walking, heavy enough to reassure.
“Right,” he muttered to the road. “You are a sensible piece of ground. You do not care about feelings. Thank you for that.”
The road, being a road, offered no opinion.
He had left the Larenweald before full daylight, when the first thin light tried to convince the mist to go home. The forest had been too quiet. Even the birds had seemed to be waiting for someone else to start the morning.
He had almost gone to her door. Almost knocked. Almost handed over the letters he had not written yet and the invitation he did not know how to phrase without sounding like he was asking her to step into a problem wearing its most dramatic coat.
Instead he had walked.
Leaving had felt wrong. So had staying.
That was the trouble with the world lately. Everything chose wrong at the same time.
He rounded a bend where the trees finally gave up and let the hills take over. The view opened. Harrowsrest spread across the slope below, a patchwork of stone and timber pressed up against the foot of the mountains.
The town had grown out of practicality. No one had tried to make it beautiful. That was why Tallow liked it. Low stone buildings, dark roofs, smoke curling in steady lines from forge chimneys and cooking hearths. Carts moved slowly through the main street. Flags marked guild houses. The faint ring of metal carried on the air like a familiar greeting.
Beyond the town, the first teeth of the Duskglint range rose, jagged and dark, catching what little light there was. Home sat somewhere beyond those ridges, tucked into the mountain itself, where forge songs and stone hymns wove through the rock.
He paused for a moment and let the sound of Harrowsrest settle into him.
The hum felt wrong.
Not loudly wrong. Not obviously. The town’s resonance usually sat under everything like a low, steady chord: metal, stone, voices, the Constellars’ far off thread of approval. Today it wobbled, thin in places, as if someone had gently pulled at a string and forgotten to put it back.
Tallow’s skin prickled.
“Clemberry,” he said under his breath, “you were right and I hate that for both of us.”
He started down toward the town.
Harrowsrest noticed him before he reached the first houses. It always did. Dwarrow were not rare here, but Tallow had the kind of presence that made people instinctively look twice. Broad shoulders. Compact weight. A beard that had never learned restraint. His boots landed like small, decisive decisions.
A pair of human children playing with a hoop paused to stare at him. One of them waved. Tallow tapped two fingers to his forehead in salute. The boy grinned and immediately tripped over his own hoop.
“Strong omen,” Tallow informed a nearby barrel.
The barrel also had no opinion.
The closer he came to the center of town, the more details he noticed. A resonance chime above a doorway that should have been singing gently with the day’s harmony sat still, its crystal dim. A set of prayer flags dedicated to the Verdant Antler and the Maiden Vessel hung at half mast, not in mourning, but because someone had paused mid change and forgotten to finish.
People moved as they always did. Carrying goods. Arguing about prices. Laughing. Yet their eyes flicked up more often. To the sky. To the mountains. To nothing in particular.
He knew that look. It was the look of people who had felt the world breathe wrong and were hoping it had been a one time mistake.
The main square of Harrowsrest held the usual mix of stalls and semi permanent structures. A baker selling flatbreads. A tanner with carefully arranged goods. A small shrine under a stone arch where travelers could leave offerings for safe passage along the trade roads. The forge compound sat just off the square, a low cluster of buildings around an open yard and a chimney that had opinions about height.
The forge was where he was supposed to go first.
So he did.
Heat hit him even before he stepped under the archway. The familiar smell of coal and hot metal wrapped around him, sharpened with tangs of oil and sweat.
It should have been comforting.
It was not.
The yard held three forges, each with its own bellows and work station. Sparks rose from one where a human smith hammered out a horseshoe. Another forge sat banked and quiet. At the third, a dwarrow woman Tallow knew as Master Runa Stoneset stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at a row of metal rods laid out on a bench.
She was short even by dwarrow standards, built like a granite problem, with gray threads in her dark hair and arms that made Tallow’s look underachieving. Her apron bore burn marks that told stories. So did the scar across her left knuckles where a piece of curious molten metal had chosen chaos one memorable year.
“Runa,” Tallow called.
She looked up. Her frown eased very slightly.
“Tallow Brendyn,” she said. “The mountains send you or did you wander down here by accident and refuse to admit it.”
“Official business,” he said. “Accidental business would have better snacks.”
“True,” she conceded. “You are late.”
“I am exactly on time,” he said. “You have just been worrying for longer than you admit.”
She snorted. “Do not start with that reading people nonsense. That is an elf habit.”
“I spend time in forests now,” he said mildly. “It rubs off.”
She gestured him closer. “Come listen to this.”
He stepped to the bench. The rods laid out there were of different lengths and alloys, some dull, some with a faint sheen. Resonance rods, used to test forge balance and Constellar blessings on metalwork. Each should have held a clear note when struck, in harmony with the local threads.
“Hit the middle one,” Runa said.
Tallow picked up a small testing hammer and tapped the indicated rod.
A note rang out, pure and steady.
He nodded. “That one is fine.”
“Now this.” She pointed to another.
He tapped it.
The note that came out was wrong.
Not sharply wrong. Not obviously. It held the right pitch for half a heartbeat, then wobbled, shivered around itself, then settled half a breath late as if it had forgotten what it was supposed to be and had to be reminded.
Tallow grimaced. “Off pitch.”
“Every rod we tested after last night did that,” Runa said. “Some worse than others. Not a single Myth Wake signature on any of them. No Constellar surge. No emotional overtone. Just structural nonsense.”
“Mountain enclaves reported the same,” Tallow said. “For a moment. Then some stabilized. Some did not.”
Runa folded her arms. “And someone up there decided to send you.”
“They said, and I quote, Tallow pays attention.”
Runa grunted. That was about as close as she ever came to a compliment.
“Any other oddities,” he asked.
She nodded toward the far wall, where an older set of tools hung. “The old hammer there. The one my grandfather used. It sang on its own in the middle of the night. No one touching it. Just one note. Off pitch. Then silent.”
“That is not creepy at all,” Tallow said. “Excellent. I love that story.”
“It will help you sleep,” she agreed.
He set the testing hammer down and listened more widely. The forge’s resonance field usually hugged him like a heavy blanket. Today it felt thin at the edges, like something had scraped at it from outside and taken a few threads with it.
“Any apprentices?” he asked.
“In the back, sorting scrap,” she said. Her mouth flattened. “One of them woke screaming just before dawn. Said the Stone beneath him skipped a beat.”
“Did it,” he asked.
She hesitated. “The floor did hum. For just a moment. Like a forge bellows that forgot which direction to move.”
He thought of the Heartgrove he had left behind in the Weald, of elders talking about thread wobble and the Maiden Vessel’s song stuttering. He had not been there for that meeting, but reports traveled fast when the world decided to rearrange its breathing habits.
“Alright,” he said quietly. “We will need to log everything. Times. Durations. Exact wording. Every complaint. Every tool that misbehaved.”
Runa noticed the change in his tone. “This is not just some Myth Wake side effect then.”
“No,” he said. “Myth Wakes are loud. This is not loud. It is rude in a quiet way.”
She grunted again. “Good. I prefer my catastrophes polite.”
He almost smiled.
A flicker crossed the air.
Tallow went still.
It was subtle. A tightening against his skin, a sense that someone had turned the world’s volume knob down by a small, precise notch. The forge noise did not drop, exactly. It dulled around the edges.
Runa felt it too. Her jaw clenched. “There it is again.”
Across the yard, the human smith paused mid swing. The hammer in his hand vibrated with a pitch Tallow could not hear but could feel, a faint buzz in his bones.
The ground under Tallow’s boots did not shake. It remembered how to be solid. Yet the way weight sat on it shifted in a small, uncomfortable way, as if downward had become slightly uncertain.
“Here it comes,” someone whispered from inside the main building.
A second ago, the forge yard had been full of ordinary sound. Fire crackling. Metal ringing. Bellows wheezing gently. Now, for a heartbeat, the sound seemed to forget itself. The crackle staggered. The ring of the horseshoe struck the anvil a fraction out of time with the smith’s swing.
Tallow felt the pressure slide along the ground. Not through it. Along it. As if something outside the stone were running a fingertip over the world’s surface.
Verdant Antler’s influence did not sit heavily here, not like in the Weald, but the Constellars’ dream field brushed even mountain towns. The Maiden Vessel touched every knot of relationships. Star Vault light traced every roof.
All of that resonance shivered.
He pressed a hand to the nearest pillar, a broad stone support warmed by the forge. The vibration that murmured through it did not match any pattern he knew. Not Myth Wake tide. Not tectonic murmur. Not storm front bearing down.
“Do not push against it,” Tallow said, raising his voice enough for the smiths to hear. He had seen people try to throw their own resonance at strange phenomena before. It rarely went well. “Let it move. Note what it does.”
Runa shot him a sideways look. “Listen to the mountain boy, everyone. He thinks he is an elder now.”
“If I start telling you to drink more water and stop lifting things with your back, you may panic,” he said.
She made a choking sound that might have been a laugh.
The pressure tightened.
One of the resonance rods on the bench began to hum, a faint glow edging its length. The note it held trembled, trying to find itself. The air around it felt thick, like breath in a crowded room.
Tallow watched the smiths more than he watched the metal. Their fields shimmered faintly against the background of the forge, loose halos of light too subtle for most eyes. Dwarrow resonance tended to sit close to the body, dense and steady. Humans’ fields reached a little further, more prone to flare.
Today, all of them shook.
The human smith winced, pressing a hand to his temple. An apprentice staggered out from a side room, white faced, clutching the doorframe.
Runa swore quietly in a dialect that suggested the Constellars should mind their manners.
The pressure went on testing.
It brushed the edges of each resonance in the yard. Tallow felt it probe at the human’s field, at Runa’s compact, rock steady core, at the trembling halo of the young apprentice whose eyes shone with fear.
It tasted metal. It tasted stone. It tasted the faint thread of holy habit that hung around the small shrine to the Maiden Vessel in the corner, where someone had tucked dried flowers.
Then, as it slid further, it hesitated.
Not because of him. He felt it clearly: it did not quite know what to do with the layered, mineral density of dwarrow resonance, but it could still get purchase. It pressed. His ribs tightened. For a moment his heartbeat felt as if it had skipped and had to hunt for its own rhythm again.
The apprentice gasped and sank to one knee.
Tallow moved on instinct. He stepped in, putting himself between the boy and the invisible pressure, not because he thought that would do anything magical, but because bodies were good at blocking other bodies and he had not yet accepted that this did not work on intangible phenomena.
“Breathe,” he said, crouching to catch the apprentice’s shoulders. “In. Out. Count.”
“I cannot feel my thread,” the boy choked. “It is like someone grabbed it.”
“Threads bite if mishandled,” Tallow said. “Whoever is poking you is about to learn that.”
The boy let out a strained breath that might have wanted to be a laugh.
The vibration climbed.
Then, somewhere far away, it slipped.
Tallow felt it not as a physical movement, but as a sudden absence. The pressure that had been leaning in, as persistent as an unwelcome question, lost its shape.
The resonance rod’s glow snapped out. The hum in the pillar under his hand went quiet. The weight of the air relaxed, but not evenly. It was like a hand being pulled back reluctantly, fingertips dragging over the world until the very last moment.
The apprentice sagged fully, then blinked, lungs dragging in a full breath.
“It is gone,” he whispered.
“For now,” Runa said grimly.
Tallow eased the boy onto a stool and checked his pulse the way he had seen Thalen do it, two fingers against the wrist, counting quietly. The rhythm steadied as he watched.
“Any pain,” he asked.
The apprentice shook his head. “Just… a feeling like I was half way out of myself.”
Tallow’s jaw tightened. “That is my least favorite description today.”
He stood slowly, his own knees protesting the kind of bend that forges and long walks made inconvenient.
The forge yard exhaled. Sound came back in, a fraction too loud at first, as if it were trying to make up for lost time. Hammer strikes. Bellows wheeze. Someone dropping tongs.
Runa wiped a hand across her forehead, leaving a soot streak. “That was worse than last night,” she said. “Longer.”
Tallow nodded. “In the Weald, they are calling these ripples.”
“Ripples,” she repeated. “That sounds small.”
“They started small,” he said. “The second one does not feel interested in staying that way.”
He stepped to the bench again and tapped one of the rods softly. The note came, steady, no wobble.
Interesting.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it tests, then learns. It failed somewhere this time. Slipped. I would very much like to know where.”
“Some poor fool’s doorframe,” Runa said. “If they are wise, they will not open.”
He thought of the Larenweald, of an elf sitting on a bench and telling the sky to stop looking at her. The pressure had never been able to get a grip on Clementine. It slid off her like water off oiled glass.
If something out there had hands, she was the one place its fingers could not hold.
He realised his hand had tightened around the testing hammer. He set it down carefully.
“You know something you are not saying,” Runa observed.
“I know many things I do not say,” he replied. “It is what keeps me popular.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow.
He sighed. “There is a girl in the Weald. Unbound from the Constellars’ dream field. When these ripples come, they cannot get into her resonance. They slip. Every time. The elders noticed.”
Runa let out a low whistle. “Unbound, you say. That is rare.”
“Rarer than it should be,” he said. “She stands in the middle of whatever pattern this is whether she likes it or not.”
“And you,” Runa said, eyes narrowing slightly, “like this girl.”
“She is my friend,” he said. It was both exactly true and nowhere near enough.
“Uh huh,” Runa murmured. “The mountains will want to know about her.”
“They already do,” he said. “They just have not decided whether to be grateful or terrified.”
“That is a common reaction to unusual people,” she said. “Present company included.”
He chose to take that as affection.
They spent the next while documenting everything. Times. Descriptions. The exact moment the apprentice had felt something grab his thread. Runa’s recollection of the night’s tool song. The human smith’s sudden headache. The way the air had thickened.
Tallow wrote in neat, methodical script on a traveling slate, each detail a thread in a pattern he could not yet see. At the bottom, almost as an afterthought, he added a small rune cluster that would allow the slate to sync with mountain archives when he returned.
When the list was complete, he straightened and worked the stiffness from his shoulders.
“I will need to check with the river guild house,” he said. “See if their resonance bells did anything creative.”
Runa grunted. “Take Halen with you.”
The apprentice on the stool looked up, startled. “Me?”
“You felt it stronger than the rest,” she said. “You will remember details he does not know to ask about. Also, you need to walk it off.”
Halen glanced at Tallow, clearly torn between fear and the dwarrow impulse to treat any assignment as a personal challenge.
“I will walk at a reasonable speed,” Tallow said. “You can pretend it is a trip and not a duty.”
A small line eased in the boy’s shoulders. “Yes, master.”
“Not master,” Tallow said at once. “Just Tallow. If anyone calls me master I expect to be paid more.”
Runa muttered something about ungrateful youth and waved them both away.
They left the forge and stepped back into the square. The ordinary chaos of Harrowsrest had resumed, but the echo of the ripple lingered in the way people held themselves. Conversations sat closer to the edge of laughter or argument. Vendors glanced up more often. The resonance chime above the tavern doorway flickered fitfully instead of holding its usual steady glow.
The river guild house lay at the far end of town, where Harrowsrest’s main street sloped toward the thin ribbon of water that cut along the base of the hills. Boats could not go far here, but the river was wide enough for trade skiffs and narrow barges, and the guild made sure no one pretended otherwise without paying a fee.
As they walked, Halen kept glancing sideways at Tallow.
“Ask,” Tallow said finally.
“Does it get worse,” Halen blurted. “The… ripples. The feeling.”
“In my experience,” Tallow said, “things that start like this usually have the decency to escalate slowly and to send a polite written notice before they become unbearable.”
The boy blinked. “Really.”
“No,” Tallow said. “I just did not want to say probably yes.”
Halen made a strangled sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“I do not know,” Tallow added, more gently. “This is new for all of us. What I do know is that people are watching. Recording. Comparing notes. The world has survived Myth Wakes before. It does not give up easily.”
“It felt like it might,” Halen said quietly. “For a moment.”
Tallow nodded. “I know.”
They reached the guild house. It was a squat structure of stone and wood, with a wide porch and an assortment of river related objects hanging from its beams to prove its dedication. Nets. Ropes. Buoys. A carved water serpent that someone had given a hat.
Inside, the air smelled of damp wood, ink, and mild frustration.
A half circle of brass resonance bells hung above the main ledger desk. They were used to signal river surges, water spirit moods, and incoming Myth Wake waves. Faint color traces usually haloed them, either blue for river Constellar influence or soft gold when the Maiden Vessel smiled on safe journeys.
Today most of them were a tired, flat gray.
The guild keeper, a middle aged woman with weather lined skin and the expression of someone who had discovered new and exciting forms of paperwork, looked up as they entered.
“If Stonefolk are visiting twice in one year, something is wrong,” she said in greeting.
“Once for grain contracts, now for reality contracts,” Tallow said. “You truly are blessed.”
She made a face. “Do not say reality contracts. It makes my teeth itch. What do you need.”
“Records of bell activity during the last two disturbances,” he said. “And your impression.”
She snorted. “You want my impressions, you can pour me a drink first.”
“I will add it to the list,” he said. “But we start with bells.”
She waved them over. “They went mad last night. Not like normal Myth Wake mad. No colored surge. No specific Constellar signature. Just all of them ringing at once. Out of sync. Off pitch. Sounded like a drunk choir falling down a set of stairs.”
Halen made a tiny noise of horror.
“And this afternoon,” Tallow asked.
“Shorter,” she said. “Stronger. Three of them swung without ringing at all. Just moved like something had grabbed them. Then they stopped. When it was over, the middle one” – she pointed – “had a hairline crack. It was fine this morning.”
Tallow stepped closer. The crack was barely visible, a faint line along the bell’s curve. It looked very much like the fracture he had seen in the resonance bowl in Thalen’s house.
He wrote it all down.
By the time they left the guild house, his slate held more questions than answers. That seemed to be its new natural state.
As they walked back toward the square, the sky over Harrowsrest had begun to deepen. Not toward evening yet, but toward that peculiar slate color that suggested the Star Vault was thinking about being visible.
Halen kicked at a pebble. “Do you think the Constellars are angry,” he asked.
Tallow considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
“The Constellars are vast, distracted entities who think in centuries and mood shifts,” he said. “If they are angry, they are angry in very slow, complex ways. This feels different. This feels like someone outside the whole arrangement is poking.”
“Outside,” Halen repeated, clearly unhappy with that word.
“Like someone tapping the side of a glass,” Tallow said quietly. “Checking where it is thick. Where it is thin. Where it does not ring at all.”
He thought of Clementine again. Of the part of the glass that did not answer. Of something slipping, learning, adjusting the way it leaned on Astraeon.
His hand itched for ink and paper.
He had never been good at letters. Words behaved perfectly well in his head, then refused to line up properly on a page. But there were things she needed to know, and news traveled strangely when the world’s threads were shaking.
He stopped on the edge of the square.
“Halen,” he said, “run back to Runa. Tell her I will check the upper trade post at dusk instead of now. Ask her to have someone calibrate the old mountain channel stones. We may need them if the usual message nets misbehave.”
Halen nodded, eyes wide, and bolted off with more enthusiasm than accuracy, almost colliding with a crate.
Tallow stood for a moment, watching the flow of Harrowsrest around him.
Ordinary life marched on. It always did. People bargained. Children argued about whose turn it was to get chased by imaginary monsters. A dog of uncertain heritage barked at a cartwheel as if it had offended the Constellars personally.
Underneath it all, the hum of the town felt thinner than it should, stretched, as if it had been asked to cover more world than it was designed for.
He headed toward the small inn where he sometimes stayed on trade runs. The rooms were basic, the food was edible, and the innkeeper owed him enough favors to make it an ideal place to borrow a table and ink.
The common room was busy in the comfortable way of places where regulars knew each other’s gossip by heart. Tallow found a corner, ordered something that claimed to be stew, and asked for writing supplies.
The innkeeper, a wide shouldered woman with laugh lines and the ability to silence arguments with one eyebrow, caught the seriousness in his expression and did not tease.
“Big letters or small letters,” she asked, setting down ink, quill, and a stack of thin parchment.
“Small,” he said. “I have more to say than I want to admit.”
She gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and retreated.
Tallow stared at the empty page for a long moment.
Clemberry,
He wrote the word, then frowned at it. It looked ridiculous on paper. It also looked right. He let it stay.
Clemberry,
The mountains are humming wrong. Harrowsrest’s forges too. I know your father has already told you most of what the elders in the Weald are seeing, so I will not repeat their very serious words with their very serious frowns.
He paused, chewing the end of the quill. A small blot appeared. He glared at it.
Something pressed again this afternoon. It touched the forges. The river bells. One apprentice nearly fell out of himself. It feels like someone is testing the world for weak points. You said it felt like the forest was holding its breath. The stone is trying to do the same and it is worse at it.
He scratched that last part out and rewrote it more clearly.
The stone is trying to hold its breath too. It is not built for that. Breathing is a forest hobby.
He could hear her snort at that line, which made him keep it.
They say the pressure slips when it reaches you. I do not know whether that makes me relieved or more worried. Probably both. I am good at both.
He hesitated, then continued.
If this keeps getting worse, someone will ask you to stand in places and be a solution. If you do not want that, say no. Loudly. Then run. I will help with the running. If you do want that, if you choose it, I will still stand in front of you when I can, even if the problem is made of whatever this is and does not care about my shoulders.
He stared at the words. They were as close as he could get to saying I am not going anywhere without actually writing it down and terrifying them both.
The world is being rude, Clem. Doors are being poked. Glass is being tapped. If there is going to be a place in all of that where the fingers keep slipping, I am glad it is you.
He stopped, then scribbled a correction.
I am not glad it is you. I am furious on behalf of you. I am glad you exist, and I suspect the world is not sure how to handle that, which puts it in the same category as the rest of us.
He signed his name with the little mountain rune he always used and leaned back, letting the ink dry.
Outside, above the inn’s small windows, the sky had shifted toward early evening. The first faint pricks of Star Vault light pushed through the pale, reluctant blue.
He folded the letter carefully, sealed it with a drip of wax the innkeeper loaned him, and marked the outside with the Larenweald courier symbol. The forest’s message paths were faster than most roads when they chose to be.
As he handed it to the innkeeper with instructions for the next Weald bound runner, the air in the room tightened for the briefest of moments.
Not another ripple. Not yet. Just a suggestion. A reminder that the world above and beyond the Star Vault was paying attention.
Tallow looked up at the ceiling as if he could see through wood and rafters and sky and myth.
“I see you,” he said softly. “I do not like you.”
The ceiling, being a ceiling, had very little to say on the matter.
He pushed away from the table, collected his hammer, and headed back out into Harrowsrest.
The second ripple had come and gone.
Somewhere between the Weald and the mountains, between stone and leaf and river bell, something had taken notes.
The next time it pressed, it would press harder.
Tallow tightened his grip on the hammer’s worn handle.
“Alright,” he murmured. “We will press back.”
Written by C. D. Wynfell
Copyright © 2025 C. D. Wynfell. All rights reserved.
Do not reproduce, repost or modify without permission.
