Caleb Nomad's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The young woman walked into the workshop the next morning and told Caleb that the settlement needed metal brackets for the new gathering hall roof. She said they'd asked around, but no one here worked metal. She looked at him and waited. Caleb told her he didn't work metal anymore. She pointed out the window at the abandoned workshop with the glass walls, the one the trader had described. She said it had been sitting empty since before she arrived, full of tools no one knew how to use. The settlement had hauled a water tank from the eastern dunes last month, she said, but they couldn't mount it properly without someone who could forge the connection brackets. The tank sat behind the gathering hall with a painted figure on its side, waiting. Caleb asked why it mattered to her. She said because if he didn't do it, they'd have to send someone east to find another smith, and that would take weeks they didn't have. Caleb walked to the glass workshop alone that afternoon. The door hung crooked on its hinges. Inside, the anvil sat under a layer of sand, its surface cracked and dented like something that had taken more weight than it was built for. He touched the edge and felt the crack run under his palm. The sound of his hand on the metal was wrong, hollow. He thought about his father standing at a different anvil, in a different place, making the same choice to walk away. Caleb could leave again, keep the pattern clean. Or he could stay and see what happened when he broke it. He picked up a hammer from the workbench and tested its weight. The handle felt like it remembered being used. He spent two days clearing sand from the forge and repairing the bellows with leather scraps from the young woman's tools. On the third day, he lit the fire and worked the first bracket, shaping the metal slowly until it fit the tank's mounting holes. The work was rough, louder than he remembered, and his hands blistered in places stone had never touched. When he finished, he carried the brackets to the gathering hall and watched while others bolted the tank into place. The young woman stood nearby and asked if he'd make more. Caleb said yes. He didn't know why his father left, and working metal wouldn't answer that. But now he knew what staying felt like, and it felt different enough to matter.