Erik Thorson struck the glowing bar, and the steel cracked in two. He stared at the broken pieces on his anvil. For six nights he had tried to forge one blade hard enough to kill the thing beneath the ice. Six nights, six failures. The horror had already taken four villagers. His blade was the only plan left. He shoved the halves back into the coals and worked the bellows. The flames leaped orange, then sank. His forge ran too cold. It always had. Ordinary fire softened iron, but the metal his blade demanded needed a heat his little hearth could not reach. Without that heat, every edge he hammered turned brittle and snapped. His stone cottage sat alone against the cliffside, built to outlast storms. Tonight it felt like a cage. Erik gripped the cold bar and pressed his thumb against the fracture. The grain inside was gray and lifeless. He needed fuel that burned hotter than any wood he owned. His dog lifted her head from the doorway. The pale Rottweiler rose, ears stiff, staring at the dark beyond the threshold. A low growl rolled up from her chest. Erik set down the bar and reached for the axe by the door. Something heavy moved outside. He heard the drag of claws on stone. Then the smell hit him, rot thick enough to taste. He eased the door open. A bear stood in the yard. Its fur hung in filthy clumps. Green sores split its hide, and one eye glowed red in the dark. It had come down from the same ice that hid the horror. The thing below was sending its servants now. The bear charged. Erik swung the axe and caught its shoulder. The blade bit, then stuck in diseased muscle. The bear twisted and tore the handle from his grip. He stumbled back into the forge's heat. The dog lunged and clamped onto the beast's leg. The bear roared and spun. Erik grabbed the broken steel bar from the coals, still glowing at one end, and drove the hot point into the red eye. The bear screamed, thrashed, and fell against the anvil. It did not rise. Erik knelt in the quiet, breathing hard. His dog limped to his side. He pressed a hand to her flank and found no wound. Then he looked at the dead bear, and at the frozen peaks beyond his yard. The thing under the ice would send worse. His cold forge could never arm him in time. He had to find real fire, the kind that lived inside the mountain itself. Erik pulled his axe free of the carcass and wiped the blade clean. At dawn he would climb toward the ice. Not to fight yet, but to find the heat that could finally forge his blade.