Waterforge

Inside the serpent's mouth, Moradin found the end of the world.

It wasn't darkness there. It was a liquid, pale blue light, coming from all directions at once, and the dwarf god floated for a moment in those watery entrails, knowing, now understanding in a way impossibly real to a human, that he wasn't inside a body. He was inside an ocean. The primordial ocean. The flood before the flood.

Poketnaru wasn't a creature. It was a place. A walking dimension of eternal drowning.

Moradin felt the water enter his lungs even without breathing, felt the pressure crush his rock armor, but his body didn't flinch. He felt the memories of all the drowned that the serpent had consumed throughout the millennia whisper in his ears like cold currents. He saw Atlantises that never existed. He saw submerged continents that had been swallowed before the first fish set foot on dry land. He saw Atrahasis, the original chosen one, floating in the center of it all with open, empty eyes, his seaweed beard swaying in a current that led nowhere. It wasn't actually Atrahasis, but a manifestation of Poketnaru's resentment at being fooled by a human.

The dwarf god gripped the Brutal Pick with both hands. The metal groaned, but didn't flinch.

Time, he thought. I need time.

And time stopped.

Not his time. Everything else's time. Outside, in the waterlogged world, raindrops froze in mid-air like glass spheres. The moon stopped moving. Cars floating in the flood stopped mid-spin. People looking out the windows of buildings had their blinks cut short. Poketnaru himself, in his outer body of scales and jaws, froze like a three-dimensional photograph of chaos.

Renee, however, did not stop.

She felt time slow down like one feels the heart of a dying man beating for the last time. Her breath grew heavy, her movements slow, but she could still think, she could still see. The water around her waist solidified into an opaque glass surface. And then the voice came.

It wasn't a sound. It was a forge hammering inside her skull. It was the echo of a hammer against an anvil at the bottom of a mountain no map had recorded.

"Renee."

She raised her eyes to the sky where the serpent and the god embraced in a knot of scales and steel. Time stopped had transformed the fight into a statue of terror and glory. Poketnaru's triple mouth was wide open, and inside, deep inside, a small orange light shone like a forge at the bottom of the sea.

"You can't answer me," the voice said, and there was something strange about it now. A gentleness that Renee had never associated with the god of the dwarves. As if the one speaking wasn't the lord of storms, but the blacksmith who forged golden cradles for the children of the dwarf kings in ancient times. "Time is fragile. I cannot allow you to answer me. Just listen."

Renee tried to shout his name, but her mouth moved in slow motion, and no sound came out.

"You are very special," said Moradin. "I hope you don't forget that."

The orange light within the serpent grew slightly. Renee saw the scales on Poketnaru's neck begin to crack, fine cracks spreading like spiderwebs frozen in time.

"Know that it was great to have been with you. Even if only for a short time. You triumphed with me, you will triumph without me. I only ask that, if you can honor the legacy I have, go to the land of the dwarves, help them and bless them in my name. In this way, and only in this way, will my name live on."

Silence

"Goodbye, Renee. Shine. Burn. Be full and abundant in life."

The hammer inside Renee's skull struck one last time. And then the voice was gone. But not like someone disconnecting a connection. Like someone closing a door behind them in a burning house. Like someone who knows they won't return.

Renee reached out to the sky. Her fingers moved so slowly she could see each phalanx cracking. The frozen rain around her palm reflected the moonlight like rough diamonds. She didn't know if she was trying to reach Moradin or if she was just pleading. Perhaps they were the same thing.

Inside the serpent's mouth, Moradin released the Brutal Pick.

The pickaxe floated before him, slowly spinning in the primordial water. The god looked at his own hands. The lines of his palms gleamed like lava, like veins of exposed ore. He was the god of the earth, of the forge, of the depths. And there, in the heart of the water, he was where he should never have been.

"Then make the water your forge," he said to himself.

And he opened his arms.

The orange light exploded.

It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a flash. It was a sensation that pierced the fabric of the world like a fist through a sheet of paper. In the stopped time, Renee saw Poketnaru's body begin to glow from within, each scale becoming a window to a sun rising inside. The serpent tried to break free. In the frozen time, its muscles contracted with a slowness of millions of years, but it was too late. The forge had been lit.

Moradin, at the center of that forge, felt his own essence merge with the serpent's liquid hatred. He was the hammer. Poketnaru was the anvil. And the blow that would destroy them both would be the last artifact the god of the dwarves would ever forge: the eternal silence of a mad god.

Moradin sang one last song in that moment of confusion and solitude, saying, "I thought to make an anchor, for taking on the main; The hammer and the anvil relented once again; So they sat there together, as I prepared the cast; They braced themselves for impact like a sailor on the mast; And it's sparks a-flying, passion strong; I am the blacksmith singing; The hammer and the anvil song"

The primordial water began to boil.

Poketnaru's scales shattered into millions of shards that flew outward in all directions, each carrying a fragment of the serpent's consciousness. But before these fragments could escape, the heat of the divine forge reached them and turned them to vapor. The ocean within the serpent evaporated in a second that lasted an eternity. Atrahasis's body, the first to drown, dissolved into salt that scattered on the still wind.

Moradin looked through the serpent's transparent flesh, through the layers of still clouds, and saw Renee.

She was a red and gold dot in the middle of the flooded city. Her red hair floated in the frozen rain like flames from a candle in an empty temple. Her green eyes were open, and Moradin saw the frozen tears in the air around her face. Each tear reflected the moon. Each tear was a small moon of despair.

"Don't cry for me," he tried to say, but there was no voice left. There was no more telepathy. There was only consciousness melting like metal in a forge.

The last thing Moradin saw, before becoming light, was Renee's outstretched hand. The last thing he felt was the heat of a forge he himself had lit billions of years ago, when the world was young and the dwarves sang in the darkness. The last thing he thought was that that outstretched hand looked like a prayer.

And then time turned back.