The lingering psychic residue of Grumbleson's metaphorical fervor clung to the air in the shop like stale beer fumes. Blueprint for the soul of Oakhaven. Derived from bridge maintenance tips. The sheer cognitive leap involved was staggering. It wasn't just thinking outside the box; it was thinking outside the entire concept of boxes, logic, and possibly sentient thought itself.
I needed tea. Desperately. Not just for the dwindling caffeine, but as an anchor. A ritual of mundane normalcy in a world rapidly dissolving into interpretive absurdity.
The Dragon's Leaf pouch felt depressingly light. Feather-light. The last few precious crumbs of adequacy. Re-steeping was looking less like an act of desperation and more like inevitable future planning.
The stove. The kettle. The bucket water (still vaguely suspect, but needs must). The familiar, soul-crushing routine of basic beverage preparation on Aerthos commenced. Each step felt heavier today, weighted down by the knowledge that even this simple act could, somehow, be misinterpreted. Was filling the kettle a metaphor for 'drawing upon the wellspring of community spirit'? Was lighting the stove 'igniting the fires of passion within'? Probably. Best not to think about it.
Focus on the task. Water heated (eventually). Leaves were carefully scraped from the pouch – barely enough for one weak cup. Water poured. The familiar pale amber colour bloomed. The faint, dusty aroma filled the small space. A tiny island of almost-normalcy in a sea of crazy.
I cradled the mug, letting the minimal warmth seep into my borrowed hands. Waiting for it to steep felt like waiting for the heat death of the universe, but with less certainty of a satisfying conclusion.
Outside, the sounds of Oakhaven life continued their predictable rhythm. The distant clang of Borin's hammer provided a percussive counterpoint to the faint strains of the tortured lute. Borin. The blacksmith. The skeptic. The one island of potentially rational thought in this village-wide ocean of delusion.
Or was he? His sarcasm about the 'legendary goblin-repelling horseshoe' showed awareness. But his continued scrutiny... what was he really after? Did he genuinely suspect magic? Or was he just pragmatically trying to figure out if the weird new hermit was a harmless eccentric or a potential source of trouble?
His steady, rhythmic hammering was almost soothing compared to Grumbleson's vibrating pronouncements. Just a man, hitting metal. Cause and effect. Simple physics. Predictable stresses and strains. Comforting, in a way.
Then the hammering stopped.
Mid-clang.
An abrupt cessation that felt... deliberate.
Followed by heavy footsteps. Not hurried. Not panicked. Measured. Deliberate. Heading directly towards my shop.
Oh, nebula sludge. Speak of the devil, and he apparently stops hammering horseshoes to come pay a visit.
The door opened without preamble. Borin Stonehand filled the entrance, silhouetted against the weak afternoon light. He wasn't dusty from the forge this time; looked like he'd rinsed his hands and face. His expression was, as usual, carefully neutral, revealing nothing. His eyes, however, were sharp, scanning the shop's interior before settling on me and the steaming mug in my hand.
"Bob," he greeted, his voice a low rumble.
I offered my customary grunt in return, taking a cautious sip of the tea. It was weak. Very weak. Barely tinted water, with only the faintest ghost of flavour. The dregs. Truly the end of an era. A very short, disappointing era.
Borin stepped inside, letting the door creak shut behind him. He didn't launch into questions or accusations. Instead, he looked around, seemingly distracted. "Looking for a bit of scrap," he said casually, his gaze sweeping over a pile of miscellaneous metal bits near the corner. "Odd shape. Might fit a cracked ploughshare I'm mending. Thought you might have something."
Plausible deniability. A reason to be here. A reason to observe. Transparent, but marginally more subtle than Grumbleson's approach. I almost appreciated the effort. Almost.
"Help yourself," I mumbled, gesturing vaguely towards the pile with my mug. "It's all junk." Let him rummage. Let him watch. I had nothing to hide, except perhaps the sheer depth of my boredom and irritation. And maybe my dwindling tea supply.
Borin nodded slowly and walked over to the scrap pile. He crouched down, examining pieces with apparent concentration. A bent hinge. A fragment of pot-mending wire. A misshapen lump of rusted iron that might have been anything.
But his focus wasn't entirely on the scrap. I could feel his peripheral awareness on me. Noting how I held the mug. How I sipped the weak tea. How I slumped on the eternally wobbly three-legged stool. Cataloguing my every mundane action.
It was intensely irritating. Like being audited by a particularly thorough, silent tax inspector from a dimension obsessed with quantifying existential ennui.
"Find anything like this back in... wherever you came from?" Borin asked conversationally, picking up a piece of warped metal plating. His tone was light, but the question probed. Origins. Background.
"Don't recall," I replied, truthfully enough. My specific memories of pre-Aerthos junk piles were mercifully blurred. I'd dealt with collapsing civilizations and malfunctioning Dyson spheres; specific recollections of planetary detritus hadn't made the 'priority retention' cut during the memory wipe.
"Right," Borin murmured, putting the plating back down. He picked up a heavy cog, its teeth worn smooth. Weighed it in his hand. "Takes skill to work metal properly. Not just brute force. Understanding the grain. The stresses. How it yields to heat and hammer."
Was this a lecture? A test? Gauging my knowledge of basic metallurgy?
"Seems noisy," I offered, opting for clueless indifference.
Borin glanced up at me, a flicker of something – amusement? Frustration? – crossing his face before settling back into neutrality. "It has its moments." He continued sifting. "Heard the Mayor was by earlier. Excited about... bridge metaphors?"
Ah. The village grapevine. Faster than gossip, more invasive than mould. Of course Borin had heard. Probably heard Grumbleson's mangled interpretation verbatim within minutes of the mayor leaving my shop.
"He seemed enthusiastic," I conceded neutrally, taking another sip of disappointment-water.
"He usually is," Borin grunted. "Especially when he thinks someone else is going to solve his problems with 'wisdom' instead of hard graft." He selected a piece of curved, rusty bar. Held it up. "This might do. With some... reshaping."
He stood up, brushing rust flakes from his leather apron. He walked back towards the counter where I sat, placing the piece of scrap down. He leaned against the counter, seemingly relaxed, but his eyes were still sharp. Assessing.
"Funny thing about this village, Bob," he said quietly. "Things tend to follow patterns. Harvests succeed or fail. Winters are hard or mild. Goblins raid occasionally, steal some chickens, get chased off. Predictable."
He paused. Let the silence hang.
"But lately," he continued, his gaze steady on mine, "the patterns are... skewed. Goblins don't just get chased off; they develop sudden religious obsessions with compost and vanish. Signs don't just get loose; they stop squeaking the moment you touch them. Root cellars don't just echo; they fall silent."
He ticked off the points mentally, his eyes never leaving mine. He wasn't accusing. Just… listing observations. Building a case, brick by skeptical brick.
"And grumpy hermits who sell junk," he added softly, "end up dispensing advice that gets interpreted as mystical blueprints for village salvation."
My turn to respond. Deny? Deflect? Offer another cryptic non-answer? The 'coincidence' well was running dry. Ignoring him felt rude, and oddly, Borin was perhaps the one person here whose perception I might grudgingly acknowledge, even if it was inconvenient. Still, admission was out of the question.
"People see what they want to see," I said, swirling the dregs in my mug. "Especially when bridges wobble."
Borin nodded slowly. "True enough." He picked up the piece of scrap metal. "But sometimes," he added, his voice dropping lower, "what they see… lines up a little too neatly." He held my gaze for another long moment, searching for… something. A reaction. A flicker in the eyes. A sign that the grumpy hermit wasn't just a hermit.
I offered him nothing but bored indifference. Let him search. The void within was vast and contained few answers he'd understand. Or appreciate.
Finally, with a small sigh that might have indicated frustration or simply the effort of thinking, Borin pushed off the counter. "Well. Thanks for the scrap." He turned to leave. Paused at the door. "Try not to perform any more… structural enchantments before the Harvest Festival, alright? The Council's got enough metaphors to chew on for a while."
And then he was gone, pulling the door closed with a quiet click. Leaving behind the scent of forge smoke, rust, and lingering, unsatisfied skepticism.
He was closing in. Not with accusations or demands, but with patient, methodical observation. He was gathering data points, testing hypotheses. Treating me like a particularly puzzling piece of metal whose properties he couldn't quite ascertain.
It was, in its own way, far more unnerving than Grumbleson's panicked pronouncements or Elara's starry-eyed assumptions. Borin wasn't looking for magic. He was looking for the mechanism. The underlying truth.
And the truth? The truth was far stranger, far bigger, and far, far more likely to cause widespread panic and possibly attract the real kind of unwelcome attention than any misinterpreted roof repair ever could.
I stared into my empty mug. The last whisper of Dragon's Leaf was gone. My small island of adequacy had sunk beneath the waves of Aerthosian reality.
Borin's observation was a problem. A slow-burning fuse leading towards an inevitable explosion of questions I couldn't, or wouldn't, answer.
My retirement plan needed more than thicker walls or a moat. It needed a contingency for persistently perceptive blacksmiths. And, more immediately, it needed a new source of tea. Urgently. The fate of my composure depended on it.