The Boy Who Builds Instead of Breaks
The bells did not ring so much as scream, three iron throats bolted to the watchtower crying out in a rhythm every soul in Skarholm knew in their bones before they knew their own names. Torvald woke to it the way he always did, with his heart lurching sideways and his elbow finding the corner of his workbench in the dark.
"Up, up, UP!" His father's voice rolled through the village like a second horn, deeper and somehow louder than the bells themselves. "Dragons on the wind! Shields to the wall!"
Outside, the grey light of dawn had barely cracked the horizon, a thin bruise-colored seam between sea and sky, and already the sky was wrong. Wrong in the way it always went wrong on raid mornings — a smear of wings cutting black shapes against the clouds, too many to count, too fast to track. Torvald yanked on his boots with fingers that would not quite cooperate and half-fell down the ladder from the loft, landing in the forge in a clatter of limbs and dropped tools.
The forge was chaos already. His father's smithy, usually a place of ordered heat and rhythm, had become a staging ground, axes and spears leaned against every surface, embers roused to furious life for last-minute…
