Walking elegy( tensura/Marvel self insert): chapter 12: Wake up to reality

This is the last chapter I'll probably post until end of November/beginning of December. Thanks again for all your support and the well wishes. Now, I am going to post this and going to sleep because I honestly should have been since a long time

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Humanity is a forge where we hammer our regrets into new shapes.

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Borin did not invite me to his workshop. He dragged me there, as he had all the previous times.

His hand, thick as a bundle of roots and just as strong, closed around my wrist, and I was pulled from the sterile arithmetic of my command tent into a realm of heat, noise, and breath.

I could have stopped him. I knew it. He knew it. We both knew it. I was a true dragon, a being of power and strength, and he, while strong, while a Saint in his level of strength, was still a dwarf. Yet I didn’t stop him. Draconic limbs yielded to dwarven pull.

“Enough of your gloomy maps and numbers, lass,” he said. The word lass was equal parts irreverence and affection, something no one else could have gotten away with. The me of before would not have allowed it, but things were different now.

They were…gone, and thus I was different, for those left behind, for him who remained.

“The soul needs tending same as the army needs magic arrows.”

He didn’t wait for my answer. He never did in those days.

The tunnel leading to his forge smelled of iron and old stone, of smoke and dwarven stubbornness. The deeper we went, the warmer it became, until the Stillness in my veins—that cold, efficient poison I had brewed to dull everything unnecessary—felt, for a moment, the illusion of evaporating at its edges.

The forge lay at the heart of Dunegard’s roots, a cavern so large it might have once been a god’s ribcage. The light there wasn’t light at all, but molten breath. Great veins of magma ran through the walls, pulsing like arteries. The air shimmered.

“Sit,” he commanded, pointing at a familiar block of petrified wood; it could be described as a would-be throne.

I obeyed because I knew the dwarf would nag me endlessly unless I did so. Borin was the only creature I had ever met who could make defiance feel childish.

He shoved a mug into my hands. It was clay, chipped, still warm. The drink inside was thick and bitter, with a trace of honey.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Tea,” he said. “For most it’s tea. For dwarves it’s patience.”

Steam coiled between us.

Borin turned toward the forge. Sparks leapt like fireflies around his shoulders as he began to work. His hammer, engraved with runes older than the Federation, rose and fell in a rhythm that was almost prayer.

He didn’t look at me when he spoke. “You carry too much, girl. Every death. Every order. You’ve built a tomb in your chest and called it duty.”

Was it that visible, I wondered? Even with the Stillness? I knew I would have lost them sooner or later.

I had thought knowing this would have made it less… affecting, but I guess grief can make all of us fools.

I sipped the tea. It burned. “It keeps me steady.”

“This damned stone. It keeps you hollow,” he said. “You’ve mistaken silence for strength.”

I wondered how he knew. Was it because I had not been discreet enough? Was it because Lyra had spoken?

In any case, it didn't matter.

He brought down the hammer again. The sound rang out sharp and clear, echoing through the forge like a bell.

“You know what I’m making?”

“A weapon,” I said automatically, but what else is to be made in war?

He chuckled, low and rolling. “Wrong. A confession.”

A confession? And I who thought we were all no-nonsense. Still, I stayed silent.

Each strike seemed to draw something out of him, like he was bleeding into the work.

“We dwarves don’t shape metal,” he said. “We negotiate with it. Ask what it remembers. Ask what it wants to become.”

I watched, half in awe, half bored, as he worked. The Stillness in me was supposed to mute wonder, yet no matter how many times I watched, it still felt as entrancing; this song and this sight felt like a lullaby, one almost holy.

It was something I think I could have dreamed of for an eternity.

“You would think that this is about strength,” he went on. “But the forge isn’t where we make things stronger. It’s where we give our regrets a second chance.”

He raised the glowing metal and turned it so I could see the faint, rippling texture under the surface, like veins of light trapped in stone. “This piece was once part of a mining drill that collapsed and killed three of my kin. I’m not here to erase that. I’m here to remind the metal that it can still be part of something living.”

He quenched it in oil. The hiss was violent, almost like the scream of a suffering, damned thing.

The smell of burnt iron filled the air, and with it came a memory I had buried: smoke rising from the position of a person I failed to reach in time. I had promised myself that I would protect them. Just another promise I broke.

I took another sip of the tea. It was cooling, and I hated that it was easier to hold something hot than something living.

“Why show me this, Borin? Today and all those other times?”

“Because,” he said, “you’re forgetting how to be remade.”

“If only it could be as simple as that,” I told him. Becoming something else. If I could be a better version of myself, I would have done everything to become so.

The forge-light threw our shadows long across the wall; his looking broad and sure; mine, looking narrow and brittle.

He started hammering again. “You think leadership is about being the last one standing, about taking everything on your shoulders. It’s not. It’s about remembering why you stand.”

It sounded so straightforward and easy the way he spoke about it. He didn't know what it was like for your word to be the reason for the death of hundreds of thousands.

He didn't know what it was like to butcher ten times that number with magic and your bare hands.

Had he known this, maybe I wouldn't be here. Still, I knew that this was all to make me feel better, that it was him being as soft as a dwarf could be.

I stared at the anvil. The rhythm of his strikes was hypnotic. With each impact, I felt something tremble behind my ribs, like a wall cracking.

“Do you regret it?” I asked. “All the things you’ve lost?”

“Every day.”

He didn’t stop working as he said it. “But regret’s just raw ore, lass. Worthless till you melt it down. The trick’s to shape it into something that can hold weight. Otherwise, it’ll crush you.”

The Stillness whispered that I should leave. That this was sentiment, inefficiency, weakness. Yet I didn’t move. I watched him wipe sweat from his brow with a soot-blackened arm. His eyes caught the forge-light, amber, alive.

“Tell me, Nanana,” he said, using my name without title, “what would you make of your regrets, if you could forge them anew?”

I thought of faces. Of names. Of the way the world burned and how I learned to stop feeling and caring about the heat. “Something that couldn’t break,” I said.

He laughed softly. “Then it wouldn’t be real.”

It wouldn’t be real, huh? I felt half a smile bloom. You really know how to destroy dreams, don’t you, Borin?

Honest to a fault. I guess if it had been something other than that, this moment wouldn’t be happening.

The sound of the hammer stopped. Silence expanded.

He turned to me, holding what he had made. It wasn’t a sword or armor. It was a small bracer, simple and unadorned except for a few runes carved along the edge.

“Here,” he said, offering it to me. “Try it on.”

I hesitated. “It’s still warm. Shouldn't you use magic first?”

“You are warm too,” he said. “You just keep pretending otherwise. It'll be fine.”

I slipped it over my wrist. The metal felt heavy. The moment it touched my skin, I felt a faint vibration—not magic, not power. It reminded me of that stupid song Lyra had liked to play with her lyre when we were all together and off duty.

“It suits you,” he said. “A reminder that you’re still made of flesh, not decisions, regrets and death.”

“Thanks,” felt like the only appropriate response. The others and him, dead and alive, they were kind to a fault, weren't they?

For a long time, neither of us spoke. The forge crackled. The heat pressed against us like a heartbeat.

Then he said quietly, “You remind me of my daughter.”

I looked up. “You never told me you had one.”

“I don’t anymore.”

The words landed softly, but the silence afterward was immense. A child that has lost their parents is an orphan, but did you know that there is no word in English, in French, and other languages descended from Latin for a parent having lost their progeny?

I was never a parent, but I think that had I been one and had I lost my child, I would have probably not been strong enough to go on.

In some way, he was much stronger than I could ever be.

“She was a metalsinger,” he continued. “Could make even broken steel hum. When the Empire came, she stayed behind to hold the bridge. Bought us time.” He looked at the bracer in my hand, at the runes glowing faintly. “Every piece I make, I pretend she’s watching. It’s easier that way.”

I didn’t know what to say. Pity felt wrong. So I said the only truth that felt real: “You forge so you won’t forget.”

He nodded. “Aye. Forgetting’s just another kind of death.”

He reached for another lump of metal, placed it on the anvil, and paused. “And you, lass? Who are you trying so hard not to remember?”

The Stillness stirred. A quiet storm beneath my skin. I wanted to say no one, but the lie wouldn’t come.

“There was a man,” I said slowly. “He believed in what we were building. More than I did, I think. He died probably believing it was enough.”

“Was he wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then he’s still alive, in a way.”

The forge crackled. The air shimmered.

Borin handed me his hammer. “Here. Hit it.”

“I'm too strong. I’ll ruin it.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s part of the lesson.”

I stood. The sound was clumsy, off-rhythm, almost embarrassing.

“Again,” Borin said.

I struck again. The vibration ran up my arm. It felt like something inside me was answering.

“Again.”

I hit it harder. The sound was cleaner this time. Sharper. A small spark leapt where the metal met the anvil.

“See?” Borin said, smiling. “Regret’s not about what you did wrong. It’s about learning the rhythm you missed the first time.”

He placed his hand over mine on the hammer. His palm was rough, scarred, grounding. “You’re allowed to want to be remade, lass.”

My throat felt tight. The Stillness was failing. I could feel heat rising behind my eyes.

“I don’t deserve it,” I said.

“None of us do,” he replied. “That’s why it’s mercy.”

He let go, and for a moment, I stood alone in the light of the forge with the bracer on my wrist gleaming faintly, runes pulsing like a heartbeat.

Borin turned away to stoke the flames. “You keep trying to end things, Nanana. Maybe it’s time you learned how to begin again.”

I sat back down. The mug was empty. My hands shook.

“Borin,” I said after a long while, “when this war is over, what will you do?”

He snorted. “Build a door that never closes.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one that matters.” He glanced at me, his grin returning like a sunrise after a storm. “And you?”

I thought about it. I thought about death. I also thought about how they gave up their lives for me, how they had wanted me to live, how they had wanted to live, how they had people and things they would have wanted to take care of, to do if they were still alive.

I wanted to die, but doing so felt like spitting on their would-be graves. For the first time in what felt like forever, I didn’t know. For the first time in forever, I didn’t want to die.

“I’d like to learn how to plant something,” I said finally.

“Good start.” He handed me a small, iron nail from his bench. “First seed’s always the hardest.”

I turned it in my fingers. It was ordinary, unmagical, perfectly balanced.

The forge-light dimmed as the fuel burned lower. Shadows grew longer, softer.

Borin leaned back against the wall, wiping his hands on a rag. “You ever notice, lass, that the forge and the grave look the same? Both are places where things go to be changed.”

“Then what’s the difference?”

He smiled, eyes like twin embers. “One ends in silence. The other in song. Life itself is a crucible, a forge. It only ends when what remains from the beginning is gone, not before, not after.”

This is when I saw them.

Behind him.

Kael, leaning against the wall like he always pretended he wasn’t exhausted.

Lyra with a lyre tucked beneath her arm, fingers poised like she might start playing.

Shale, arms crossed, face stern, but his eyes, those traitorous, gentle eyes were warm.

They were smiling. Exactly like Borin had smiled.

Alive.

For a moment I thought it was simply light bending strangely or exhaustion making shapes where there were none.

But no. Kael tilted his head the way he always did when he wanted to ask a question.

Lyra’s braid was tied with that ridiculous silver thread.

Shale rolled his eyes at Kael.

“How?” I asked.

The word was smaller than a whisper, barely breath, but it felt enormous inside my skull.

How could they be there?

How could they be smiling?

How could they exist at all?

They had died for me.

They had died because of me.

“How?” I asked again, louder. My voice cracked like breaking steel.

Lyra’s smile softened. She stepped forward, skirts whispering like they always had when she walked across stone.

When she spoke, her voice was soft, cautious, as if terrified for me. “None of this is real, my lady. You need to wake up.”

No.

I knew what those words meant. I knew what was coming next.

I lunged. I tried to reach her, to grab Kael, to put my arms around all four of them and tear whatever nightmare or dream this was apart.

But the world warped, stretched, pulled away.

My feet found no ground. My hands touched nothing.

I tried to scream.

I tried to beg.

I tried to stay.

Lyra, Kael, Borin, Shale, they simply kept smiling as the forge dissolved around them.

My last sight of them was that impossible, gentle smile of Lyra.

Then everything was pain.

It was not said metaphorically, not poetically.

Pain, raw and savage, ripping up my nerves like barbed wire. My skin was wet. Sticky. Warm.

Nothing stopped it.

Nothing numbed it.

Nothing drowned it.

Still, I could still feel something else now that the pain was gone.

And that thing was blood.

Blood.

On my hands, on my face, soaking through my clothes.

Mine.

Others's.

Lyra’s.

The scent was iron and copper.

The ground was hard, colder than night air should have been.

When I forced my eyes open, stars glittered above me, sharp, distant, indifferent.

Sand stretched out in every direction, a dark ocean of dust and dunes.

No magma walls. No forge. No Borin. No ghosts of the dead I loved.

Just a desert.

Wind scraped dry earth across my cheek. My breath clouded in front of me.

I pushed myself up onto an elbow.

The blood clung to me like a second skin.

The only man-made thing in sight was a road a long strip of asphalt cutting straight across the sand.

Black.

Perfect.

Painted with faded yellow lines.

A road like the ones from my first life, the life before dragons, before magic, before kingdoms and empires and death.

Too modern.

Too familiar.

That should have been impossible.

And beside it, a weather-beaten metal sign, the white paint chipped by sand and sun.

Welcome to Puente Antiguo, New Mexico.