Chapter 62: Village of Thornfield
Maren’s daughter hadn’t straightened her left arm in six weeks.
The bone had broken during the storm — a rotten roof beam had come down on Liss while she slept, and the village healer had set it wrong. Not through incompetence. Through exhaustion. Old Torben had been setting bones and dressing wounds for thirty years with nothing but splints, poultices, and the fading memory of a god who’d stopped answering prayers before Maren was born.
The arm had healed crooked. The elbow locked at a wrong angle, the forearm twisted slightly inward. Liss was nine. She held it against her chest like a bird with a broken wing and learned to do everything with her right hand and didn’t complain about it because children in Thornfield learned early that complaining didn’t fix things.
Maren watched the caravan approach from the north gate — two carts, eight people, a mix of races she’d never seen together. A Kobold counting crates on a wooden board. A Human in plain traveling clothes who walked with the easy confidence of someone accustomed to authority. A priest — Maren knew a priest when she saw one, even without vestments — whose calm was the kind you couldn’t fake.
And guards. Lizardmen and a Gnoll, armed with weapons made of metal so dark it looked like river stone.
"Traders," said Aldwin, the village elder. He stood next to Maren at the gate, leaning on his staff. Seventy-three years old. His knees ached in the cold and his eyesight had gone soft around the edges but his mind was still a blade.
"Traders don’t bring priests," Maren said.
"No. They don’t."
The caravan stopped at the village boundary — politely, properly, waiting for an invitation rather than assuming one. The Human in traveling clothes stepped forward and raised an open hand.
"My name is Harsk," he said. "We’re from a settlement called Ashenveil, north of here. We’ve brought tools and a healer. If you’ll have us, we’d like to trade. And if you won’t, we’ll leave the tools anyway."
Aldwin looked at Maren. Maren looked at the carts. The crates were open — she could see plowshares, axe heads, hoe blades. All the same dark metal.
"What kind of tools don’t break?" Aldwin asked.
Harsk picked up a plowshare from the nearest crate and held it out. "Try."
***
Aldwin tested the plowshare himself. He took it to the fallow field behind the grain store and drove it into the hard clay that had dulled every iron blade Thornfield had ever owned. The plowshare cut through the soil like the soil was water. No resistance. No flex. No dulling on the edge even after thirty meters of furrow.
He pulled it up and examined the blade. Not a scratch. Not a chip. The edge was exactly as sharp as it had been when Harsk handed it to him.
The village gathered. Sixty people, then a hundred, then most of Thornfield’s two hundred. They watched the old man drive the plowshare into clay that had broken three iron blades this season alone, and they saw the furrow open behind him like a wound in the earth that had been waiting to be cut.
"What is this metal?" Aldwin asked, breathing hard. His arms shook but his eyes were bright.
"Stonesteel," Harsk said. "Forged in our god’s workshops. The process was given to us through divine knowledge — the specifics of the alloy, the tempering technique, the reinforcement."
"Your god," Aldwin said. The way he said it carried decades of weight. Thornfield’s god had been called the Rainkeeper — a minor deity, Rank 1, who’d controlled a small weather domain. He’d brought rain when the fields were dry and warmth when the frosts came early. Then he’d stopped. No warning. No farewell. One season the rain came when asked. The next season it didn’t. The prayers went up and nothing came down. Old Torben said the Rainkeeper had dissolved — run out of believers elsewhere, lost his power, faded into whatever empty space gods went when they ceased to exist.
That had been forty years ago. Thornfield had survived on its own since then. Barely.
"Our god is called the Grand Ordinator," Harsk said. Not preaching. Not selling. Just stating. "He answers prayers. I can’t tell you he always answers the way you want. But he answers."
Aldwin was quiet for a long time. Around him, the village waited. These were people who’d been promised rain by a god who vanished. Trust didn’t come easily.
"The healer," Aldwin said finally. "You mentioned a healer."
Harsk looked back at the caravan. Father Edrik stepped forward, the iron cog hanging at his chest.
"Where’s the girl with the broken arm?" Edrik asked.
***
They found Liss in the grain store, sorting seeds with her one good hand. She looked up when her mother entered with the stranger and went still the way children go still when they sense that something important is about to happen.
"This is Father Edrik," Maren said. She knelt beside her daughter. "He’s going to look at your arm."
Edrik crouched. He was patient with it — didn’t rush, didn’t reach for the arm immediately. He let the girl study him first. His face. His hands. The iron cog.
"What’s that?" Liss asked, pointing at the cog with her good hand.
"A symbol. Of the god I serve."
"Our god went away."
"I know."
"Is yours going to go away too?"
Edrik considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "I don’t think so. But I can’t promise you things I don’t control. What I can promise is that right now, today, I’m here. And I can fix your arm if you’ll let me."
Liss looked at her mother. Maren nodded.
Edrik took the girl’s left arm gently. He felt along the bone — forearm, elbow, the place where it had set wrong and grown into a shape that would limit her for the rest of her life if left alone.
"This will hurt," he said. "For a few seconds. Then it won’t."
He closed his eyes. His right hand pressed against the misaligned bone. His left hand steadied the forearm.
Maren saw his lips move. The words were quiet enough that she couldn’t hear them clearly — something structured, rhythmic. A prayer, but not the kind she remembered from the Rainkeeper’s shrine. Not a request. More like a statement. A declaration spoken to someone who was listening.
Liss gasped. A sharp, short sound. Her eyes went wide.
Then the warmth came. Maren felt it from where she knelt — a radiance that didn’t come from the firepit or the sunlight through the grain store’s slats. It came from Edrik’s hands. It traveled through her daughter’s arm like heat through water — not burning, not painful, warm in the way that blood is warm when it returns to frozen fingers.
The bone shifted. Maren heard it — a soft, wet click that made her stomach turn. Then another. Then a grinding sensation that lasted three seconds and stopped.
Liss stared at her own arm. The twist was gone. The elbow was straight. She opened and closed her fingers, watching them move with the detached fascination of someone who’d forgotten what a working hand looked like.
She bent the elbow. Full range. No catch. No pain.
Maren didn’t speak. She pulled her daughter into her chest and held her and breathed and didn’t let go for a long time.
Outside the grain store, the village watched through the open door. They’d followed. The crowd filled the narrow street — two hundred people who’d survived forty years without a god, who’d buried children that healing could have saved, who’d watched crops fail that rain could have fed.
They watched a stranger heal a girl’s broken arm with warm light and quiet words.
No one spoke. The silence was heavy with something that wasn’t fear and wasn’t awe. It was simpler than that. It was hunger. The specific, desperate hunger of people who’d been living without something they needed and had just been shown it existed.
Aldwin pushed through the crowd. He stood in the doorway and looked at Liss flexing her arm and Maren holding her and Edrik sitting back on his heels with the calm of a man who’d done exactly what he’d said he would do.
"The prayer," Aldwin said. "The one you said. Teach me."
Edrik stood. He turned to face the elder and the village behind him and the two hundred people who were watching with the hunger of the faithless who’d just seen proof.
"Kneel," Edrik said. "Right knee down. Left fist over your heart."
Aldwin knelt. The motion cost him — his knees protested and his back stiffened — but he got down. Right knee. Left fist.
"Repeat after me," Edrik said. He placed his own fist over his heart. "By iron and fire, I stand before the Design. My hands are the hammer. My will is the forge. I am shaped and I shape in return. Order above. Order within. Until the last flame dies, I am Yours."
Aldwin repeated it. His voice cracked on the middle lines and he stumbled on I am shaped and I shape in return and had to start that part twice.
Behind him, Maren knelt. Then a farmer near the door. Then his wife. Then a group of younger men who’d been watching from the back of the crowd. One by one, then in clusters, then in a wave that moved through the village like water filling a hollow, the people of Thornfield knelt.
Not all of them. Some stood and watched with arms crossed and faces closed. Some walked away. Some looked at the statue the Kobold was unpacking from the second cart — a carved stone figure, humanoid, holding a hammer in one hand and an open book in the other — and felt nothing except suspicion.
But most of them knelt. Most of them tried the words. Most of them stumbled and repeated and stumbled again and kept going.
Above it all, Zephyr watched. The system registered the conversions as they happened — a cascade of new faith bonds forming, flickering, stabilizing:
[FAITH CONVERSION — Mass Event]
[Settlement: Thornfield]
[New believers: 112]
[Starting tier: Casual (all)]
[Conversion catalyst: Demonstrated healing miracle]
[Statue bonus: Active (+40% Casual→Devout progression)]
A hundred and twelve. The rest held back — watching, uncertain, arms crossed. That was fine. The door was open.
[TERRITORY UPDATE]
[Total Believers: 2,212]
[FP Generation: 2,912/day (+112)]
[Rank 4 Progress: 41,000 / 80,000 FP]
He felt the FP counter tick upward. Not dramatically — a hundred new Casuals was a hundred FP per day, a rounding error against the 80,000 needed for Rank 4. But it was a start. And starts were all that mattered in the early game.
He checked the map. Five more settlements. Millhaven next — the river traders. Then Greymoss, the Beastmen village that would require a different approach entirely.
Six months, he thought. Maybe five if the conversion rate exceeds baseline. Five months to Rank 4. And then we see what the Rotting Grain does about a neighbor she can’t ignore.
In Thornfield, the statue of the Grand Ordinator was placed in the village center. Stone eyes looking out over a crowd of kneeling humans who didn’t yet know what they’d chosen, only that for the first time in forty years, someone had answered.