By the time the forge yard settled into its uneasy night rhythm, Serious’s leg had become a steady throb beneath the bandage, Tollen had fallen into a healer-guarded doze near the wall, and Dava had already threatened three different people for hovering in the wrong place.
The Lower Drift remained open in his head even when rain and darkness hid the road, and every line he had scratched into the wax tablet seemed to point back toward the same unfinished problem.
Bran had told him to write down every measurement and stupid thought before fear edited it.
Serious had obeyed, but obedience had only made the shape clearer: the shifted brace, the missing wedges, the loose straps, and the way nails crushed wood when too much holding force was trapped in too little place.
The forge slept badly around him.
Men came and went at the gate, Dava moved between the hearth and Tollen with a cup of bitter medicine, and Vayra sat under the awning with her injured arm tucked close while pretending not to watch everyone at once.
The friend channel remained quiet for a long stretch.
When it finally chimed, the words appeared at the edge of Serious’s sight while he had one hand pressed to the wax beside the line about failed joins.
[Vayra: You are not resting.] The message carried no sound and made no change in the yard, but Serious still looked up as if someone had spoken.
Vayra did not turn her head, and to everyone else she remained a tired traveller staring into the rain.
[Serious: Neither are you.] He sent the reply while pretending to study the sketch of the storage chamber.
The small lie of posture mattered because Dava had already shown she could detect foolishness from across a yard.
[Vayra: I am watching.] Vayra kept her face blank after sending the message, but her eyes flicked once toward the road.
The movement was slight enough that only someone already looking for it would have noticed.
[Serious: From under Dava’s roof?
Bold.] Serious let the message go and felt a little of the day’s pressure loosen when Vayra’s mouth almost moved.
The private joke did not make the mine safer, but it made the waiting less empty.
[Vayra: I mean it.
Your leg needs rest.] The private words appeared while Dava adjusted Tollen’s blanket and muttered at him for trying to apologise in his sleep.
Serious looked down at his bandaged thigh and felt the System’s last warning sitting behind his eyes.
[Serious: I cannot walk.
I cannot swing a hammer.
I can still think.] He paused before sending the next part, because naming the option made it real.
[Serious: I am going to step out and research from my side.] Vayra’s gaze moved to him then, quick and sharp.
She looked away again before Dava could notice, but the answer came almost at once.
[Vayra: Now?] The single word carried more alarm than the clean text should have been able to hold.
Serious read it twice, then rested his stylus carefully beside the wax.
[Serious: I will not move this body if I can help it.
I need old craft knowledge, not sleep.] He chose the words with care because Vayra could understand the player layer, but the yard around them could not.
[Serious: People solved fastening problems before modern factories.
I need to know how early screws were made.] [Vayra: That sounds like something a player says before doing something stupid.] Vayra’s eyes remained on the road after the message, and the private warning sat under the public stillness.
Serious could not deny the warning without lying.
[Serious: Probably.
Watch the yard while I am out.] He hesitated, then added the part that mattered more.
[Serious: Do not say anything to Bran or Dava about the real world.] [Vayra: Obviously.] The reply came fast enough to sting, but the second line softened it.
[Vayra: Come back before they notice you have gone quiet in the wrong way.
I can cover watching, not explain vanishing.] Serious dismissed the channel and leaned his head back against the wall.
To anyone watching, he was an exhausted apprentice closing his eyes because pain, rain, and Dava’s medicine had finally beaten stubbornness.
He opened the logout command with a thought, and the world narrowed in answer.
Rain, smoke, forge heat, pain, and the smell of iron folded away in layers until Mordrea became pressure, memory, and then distance.
For a moment he was nowhere except between the two shapes of himself.
Then Sirius Smith woke in the real world to stale air, dim ceiling panels, and the low electrical hum of the Outer-Hab block.
His real body felt wrong in a different way.
It was not wounded, not exactly, but weak from too much stillness and cheap food, with a dry mouth and shoulders cramped from the pod’s restraints.
The pod lid opened with a sigh.
Cold recycled air touched his face, carrying the familiar scent of dust, plastic, old metal, and the faint sourness of too many people living in too little space.
Sirius lay still for several breaths because Mordrea did not leave him quickly.
The forge yard still existed behind his eyes, Tollen’s blood still marked the edge of memory, and the line from the wax tablet repeated itself with the stubbornness of a thing not yet understood.
Holding can damage what it holds if the force is too concentrated.
The sentence felt less like a conclusion than a door he had not yet learned how to open.
He pushed himself upright and let the pod’s restraints retract.
The room beyond was narrow enough that he could reach the desk from the mattress if he leaned, though doing so usually knocked something else over.
A cracked mug sat beside the terminal, a stack of ration wrappers had collapsed against the wall, and the small viewport showed only the underside of another residential tier and the pale advertisement glow bleeding through the maintenance haze.
His real account balance waited in the corner of the terminal display, but he did not look at it for long.
There were some kinds of pressure that became harder to think around once they had numbers attached.
Sirius needed a solution before he needed another reminder of how little room the real world allowed him.
Research access was metered unless routed through public archives, and public archives were built like punishment for anyone without priority credentials.
Sirius had learned to work around that years ago: old manuals, museum scans, hobby reconstructions, obsolete patents, and forum posts written by people too enthusiastic to hide useful knowledge behind a paywall.
He opened a search window and began with the obvious words: early screws, handmade screw manufacture, primitive screw cutting, wooden screw press, and hand-cut threads.
The results arrived in uneven layers: ancient presses, wooden screws, crude thread-cutting, files, dies, lead screws, and the long unpleasant history of standardisation.
He skimmed too fast at first, chasing the finished modern object because his mind wanted relief.
Then Bran’s voice returned inside his head, not as magic or memory trick, but as the shape of a lesson he had earned badly: no guessing past the break, because the thing had already told him how it died.
Sirius slowed down.
The earliest useful idea was not the modern screw as a polished, standard fastener, but the spiral itself: a ramp wrapped around a cylinder, a way to turn rotation into forward pressure and forward pressure into grip.
Ancient presses had used the principle long before anyone made cheap metal screws by the sack.
Large wooden screws could press grapes, olives, cloth, or anything else that needed steady pressure instead of a blow, and that mattered because Mordrea already understood force.
Mordrea already had wedges, nails, straps, pegs, clamps, and runes.
What it lacked, at least in Bran’s forge and the parts of Briarvale Sirius had seen, was a small, repeatable fastener that could draw two materials together gradually, hold pressure, and be removed or adjusted without tearing everything apart.
He searched again, this time for what Bran could test: hand-cut threads, wooden screws before mass production, screw plates, taps, and slotted heads.
The terminal showed diagrams he could barely use and explanations he had to translate into forge sense.
Before mass production, screws had been handmade, irregular, expensive, and hard to standardise, which made them closer to Bran’s world than the perfect little objects Sirius had taken for granted.
He did not need a factory.
He needed Bran to believe the shape, and more importantly, he needed the shape to survive Bran trying to break it.
Sirius opened an old scan showing a simple hand-cut wooden screw.
The thread was crude compared with modern machining, but the principle was visible enough: a cylinder, a spiral line, material removed between ridges, and a matching hole or softer receiving material to accept the bite.
Another image showed a screw plate and tap.
Too advanced for immediate use, but important because matching internal and external threads proved the first crude version would only be the beginning if it worked at all.
He made notes in a cheap offline pad, forcing the words into a form he could remember under forge pressure.
A screw was not a nail with ridges; its thread was a continuous inclined plane, rotation advanced the shaft, a slot or shaped head allowed torque, a pilot hole prevented splitting, a thread cut too sharp would damage weak material, coarse thread suited wood better than fine thread, and the first test should be a crude wooden or soft-iron screw peg cut by marking a spiral and filing a groove.
He stopped on that last point.
Marking a spiral sounded simple until he imagined himself in Bran’s forge with no lead screw, no lathe, no gear train, no thread die, and no precision gauge.
Mordrea did not need those things for the first version, but Bran would not accept a miracle handwave.
Serious did not want to become the sort of player who spoke finished knowledge into a room without paying the cost of making it real.
Sirius searched again, this time for primitive layout methods rather than machines.
The answer came from several crude demonstrations rather than one clean explanation: wrap a strip around a cylinder at a steady angle, mark along its edge, and cut or file along the spiral line left behind.
It would not be precise, standard, or fit for mass production.
It might still be enough to make the concept real inside Mordrea, and that was both the promise and the danger.
He worked for another hour, maybe two, losing track of real time because the Outer-Hab room had no honest morning or night.
He watched a silent reconstruction of a wooden screw being cut by hand, read an old argument about why early screws were inconsistent, and copied a simple diagram of a slotted head because a screw without a way to turn it was only a stubborn peg.
His stomach cramped before he remembered food.
He ate half a ration bar without tasting it, then spent too many minutes staring at a paragraph about early screw-cutting lathes and the leap from handmade pieces to repeatable threads.
The System would like repeatability.
Players would like it even more, and that thought made him uneasy before he understood why.
A screw in Mordrea was not just a better peg, because if the System recognised it as a blueprint, then it could become player knowledge.
Player knowledge could move faster than local craft, faster than Bran, faster than Briarvale, and faster than anyone could think through the consequences.
Sirius looked at his account balance again, then at the notes.
Money mattered, food mattered, rent mattered, and he hated that those facts sat beside Tollen’s blood without becoming less true.
He copied the minimum he needed into memory, closed the search window, and lay back in the pod before he could find another reason to delay.
Returning to Mordrea felt different with a purpose in hand, as if the idea had weight enough to cross worlds with him.
The forge yard unfolded around him: rain, smoke, pain, warmth, and the ache in his wounded thigh arriving all at once.
Serious sucked in a breath through his teeth and gripped the bench hard enough to make the wood creak.
Dava was there before he fully focused.
“You look like you swallowed bad news and forgot to chew,” she said, and after speaking she put two fingers against his forehead as if daring him to have a fever.
“No fever,” Serious said, though he let her check because refusing would only prolong the inspection.
“I was thinking through the join problem.” Dava’s eyes narrowed.
“Thinking is what people call disobedience when they are too tired to stand,” she said, and after speaking she looked toward the wax tablets scattered beside him.
“If your thinking opens that wound, I will make you regret becoming clever.” “I will try to remain stupid enough to heal,” Serious said, and the answer earned him a look rather than forgiveness.
The look promised that Dava was perfectly willing to enforce stupidity if healing required it.
Bran turned from the worktable.
He did not ask where Serious’s thoughts had gone, because from his side nothing impossible had happened; an exhausted apprentice had closed his eyes and then opened them again with the expression of someone who had found a dangerous idea.
“You have that face,” Bran said, and his eyes sharpened at once.
“The one that means the work is about to become annoying.” “I found a possible shape,” Serious said, reaching for the wax tablet and stylus.
He stopped before drawing because the thing in his head suddenly felt fragile.
“Shapes do not pay rent by hiding,” Bran said, and he dragged a stool closer with one boot.
“Put it where I can dislike it properly.” Serious drew a straight wedge first because everyone in the yard understood wedges.
Then he drew a ramp, then a cylinder, then a sloping line wrapped around the cylinder in a rough spiral.
“It is not a nail,” Serious said, keeping his voice low and practical.
“It is more like a wedge wrapped around a peg.” Nim, who had been pretending to sort rivets while listening to everything, looked up.
“That sounds stupid,” he said, and then flinched when Dava turned her head.
“It might be,” Serious said before Dava could scold him.
“That is why we test it.” Bran came closer and said nothing.
That was worse than interruption because it left Serious alone with the burden of making the shape make sense.
“If you push a wedge straight in, it forces things apart or holds by being trapped,” Serious said, tapping the first drawing.
“If you wrap the wedge around a round shaft, then turning the shaft makes the wedge move forward slowly.” He drew a crude head on one end and a slot across it.
“You need a way to turn it, maybe a groove for a blade, and the thread bites into softer wood if the hole is prepared.” Nim leaned closer until Dava caught the back of his shirt and pulled him out of Serious’s light.
“So it is a nail you twist?” he asked, squinting at the drawing, and his doubt was honest enough to be useful.
“No,” Serious said, then stopped because the first answer was too quick.
“Maybe it looks like that at first, but a nail depends on being struck and friction holding it where it lands.
This depends on turning, pressure, and the spiral pulling it forward.” Bran took the wax tablet without asking.
He looked at the drawing for long enough that Serious became aware of every bad line, every guess, and every place where real research had become an awkward sketch in a wounded apprentice’s hands.
“Can you make one?” Bran asked at last.
The question was not kind, but it was fair.
“Not well,” Serious said, and the admission hurt less than pretending.
“Not yet.
I need a round blank, soft iron if we try metal, or hardwood if we try the shape first.
A strip of leather or cord to mark the spiral.
A file.
A saw for the slot.
A small drilled hole in scrap wood.” Bran’s eyes narrowed.
“You came back from thinking with a list,” he said, and the words were almost approval.
“That is better than coming back with confidence.” “I came back with a problem that has instructions attached,” Serious said.
“The first one will be ugly.” “All first things are ugly if they are honest,” Bran said, handing the tablet back.
He looked toward Nim, who straightened so fast the rivets in his hands rattled.
“Hardwood peg box.
Thin leather offcuts.
Fine file.
Bow drill,” Bran said, counting each item with a finger against the table.
“And stop making that face before it freezes into stupidity.” Nim ran.
Dava watched him go, then looked at Serious with the grave suspicion of someone who had seen men call a bad idea clever and bleed from it later.
“Is this going to explode?” Dava asked, and the question sounded only half like a joke.
She did not move away from Tollen while asking it.
“It should not,” Serious said, then added, “unless Nim helps too enthusiastically.” The answer did not comfort Dava, but it did make Nim shout from the shed.
“I heard that,” Nim called from the shed, and the clatter that followed suggested he had proven the point.
Dava closed her eyes for a moment, either praying for patience or deciding where to apply blame.
They began with wood because wood forgave more cheaply than iron.
Bran chose a straight-grained hardwood peg as thick as Serious’s thumb and cut it longer than the drawing suggested.
Serious wrapped a thin leather strip around it at a shallow angle, trying to keep the spacing even while his injured leg throbbed and his hands shook from more than pain.
Bran watched the angle for three breaths before making a sound of disgust.
“Too steep,” Bran said.
He did not soften the correction, and Serious unwound the strip before pride could turn the mistake into an argument.
Serious unwound it and tried again.
His hands wanted to rush because he already knew the idea, but the wood did not care what he knew.
“Too close,” Bran said.
This time Serious breathed through his nose and reminded himself that the wood had no reason to respect what he had learned outside it.
Serious tried a third time, slower now, and the line looked less embarrassing.
It still looked like a beginner had argued with a vine, but at least the vine had begun to lose.
Nim held the peg steady while Serious marked along the leather edge with charcoal.
The spiral wavered, tightened near one end, and drifted wider near the other, but it remained a spiral.
“That looks like a drunk vine,” Nim said, and after speaking he glanced at Bran to see whether the joke had been permitted.
His grin survived only because Bran was looking at the mark instead of him.
“It does,” Serious said, picking up the fine file.
“Now we find out if a drunk vine can hold.” He could not do the cutting himself for long.
The first few strokes sent pain up his leg because his whole body tried to brace even while seated, and Bran took the file from him without comment.
That was almost worse than being scolded.
Serious swallowed the protest because the work mattered more than his pride, but the surrender sat bitterly behind his teeth.
He guided with words instead.
The cut needed to follow the line shallowly at first, not too deep, leaving ridge and removing valley, rounding the crest slightly, and avoiding any edge sharp enough to behave like a knife.
The thread had to bite without splitting everything it touched.
Saying that aloud made the problem feel moral in a way Serious did not enjoy.
Bran worked slowly, and because Bran worked slowly, everyone else became quiet.
The peg changed by degrees under his hands, first looking merely damaged, then patterned, then deliberate.
With one end tapered and the slot cut across the head, it became something that Serious’s mind recognised before Mordrea did.
It was crude, uneven, handmade, and impossible to mistake once the shape existed in front of him.
The System reacted before anyone touched it to wood, opening a silent analysis in Serious’s vision.
It compared the object against nails, pegs, wedges, and clamps, found no direct local blueprint match, and marked the prototype as a spiral-threaded fastening peg pending demonstration.
Serious swallowed and kept his face still.
Bran was watching the object, not the invisible panel, and the difference mattered more now than ever.
“Hole,” Bran said.
The single word moved everyone because the prototype had reached the point where drawing no longer mattered without proof.
Nim handed over the scrap block too quickly, and Bran cuffed the back of his head without force.
“Tool first, fingers second,” the smith said, and Nim nodded as if this wisdom had never been presented to him before.
They drilled a narrow pilot hole with the bow drill.
Serious insisted on the pilot hole twice, and Bran accepted it the second time only because the first test without one split the scrap almost immediately.
The failed block taught them more than the drawing had.
Bran examined the split, turned the broken scrap toward the light, and made the soft disgusted sound he usually reserved for bad welds.
“Too much bite,” Bran said.
“It is not asking the wood.
It is ordering.” “Coarser start, shallower thread,” Serious said, and he wrote that down before the thought could vanish into embarrassment.
“Or wider pilot hole.” “Both,” Bran said.
He pushed the split block aside and made room for the next attempt as if failure were only another tool on the table.
The second prototype took less time and more attention.
They marked the spiral wider, filed the grooves shallower, tapered the point more gently, and cut the head slot deeper so the turning blade would not slip out immediately.
Bran made a crude driver from a flat scrap of iron, not because the first slot deserved a dedicated tool but because he wanted to remove excuses from the test.
He gave the little tool one contemptuous look, then fitted it into the slot.
The screw entered the pilot hole badly at first.
It leaned, chewed the rim, and made Nim wince as though the wood were alive.
“Back it out,” Serious said, and Bran did.
That alone changed the yard, because a nail did not back out like that.
A peg could be pried out, and a wedge could be knocked loose.
This ugly little thing reversed by the same path it had taken in, and Bran looked at Serious once before setting it again.
“Again,” Bran said.
His voice stayed flat, but the command carried a pressure that made Serious sit straighter despite the pain.
This time Bran kept the shaft straighter.
The driver turned, the slotted head resisted, and the spiral thread bit into the wood with a faint, dry creak.
The screw drew itself down, not far, not perfectly, and not cleanly enough for any master craft hall to admire.
It still drew itself down, and nobody in the yard mistook that for failure.
Bran stopped turning when the head touched the surface.
He took his hands away as if leaving the thing alone might reveal whether it was lying.
Nim poked the block.
Dava slapped his hand without looking, and Nim recoiled as if betrayed by justice.
Bran picked up the block and tried to pull the screw free with his fingers.
It did not come, so he took pliers and pulled harder.
The wood complained, the head shifted slightly, but the fastener held until Bran reversed the driver and turned it out again.
The screw came free with its thread packed in pale wood dust.
No one spoke for several breaths.
The System did, because the System did not understand the value of silence.
A blueprint notice opened in Serious’s sight, clean and pitiless in the middle of the forge’s stunned stillness.
It named the successful prototype as a crude wood screw, registered Serious Smith as inventor, unlocked a crafting tab, created a blueprint archive, and stored the design with notes about hand-cut spiral thread, slotted head, pilot hole requirement, poor standardisation, and low durability under repeated use.
Serious stopped breathing somewhere around the word inventor.
The interface opened wider beside the notification, unfolding like a ledger only he could see.
Blueprints, materials, variants, rights, licences, public access, and private use arranged themselves into neat categories.
His name sat beside the crude screw as if he had done something large enough to own.
Bran set the block down very slowly.
“Again,” he said.
Serious blinked.
Bran was not looking at the System, because Bran could not see the System.
He was looking at the screw, the hole, the dust, the slot, the driver, and the way the block had changed.
“We need to test it in two boards,” Bran said, and his voice had become dangerous in its calm.
“Then wet wood.
Then old wood.
Then a strap.
Then pull across grain.
Then twist.
Then hang weight.” Serious closed the blueprint tab with an effort.
“Yes,” he said, and the word came out dry.
Bran’s eyes moved to him.
“You look like a man who just heard a bell no one else heard.” Serious chose the truth that could stand in the room.
“The pattern fixed itself in my head,” he said carefully.
“I think I can repeat it now, and improve the versions if we keep testing.” Bran’s face did not soften.
If anything, it sharpened as if usefulness had made the thing more dangerous rather than less.
“Repeat it how?” Bran asked.
“As a remembered pattern,” Serious said, avoiding every word that belonged only to players.
“Measurements, variants, notes, what works and what fails.
I can track it more clearly now.” Dava looked from Serious to the screw.
“That sounds useful,” she said, and then suspicion entered her voice because useful things often brought trouble behind them.
“Too useful.” “It also may not stay local if I am careless,” Serious admitted, and the words tasted of the Outer-Hab account balance he had tried not to stare at.
“Other adventurers might be able to copy things like this if I let the pattern spread through the wrong channels.” Bran went very still.
Nim did not understand the full shape of that stillness, but Dava did, and she set her spoon down.
“Copy how?” Bran asked.
“Fast,” Serious said, because that was the safest honest word.
“Faster than a craft master teaching an apprentice.
Faster than a town deciding what a tool should cost.” Nim’s eyes widened.
“People would pay to copy a peg?” he asked, and the innocence of the question made the whole thing sharper.
“A screw,” Bran said.
The correction landed like a naming, and Nim looked at the block again with sudden respect.
Bran picked up the screw, turned it between thick fingers, and held it near the firelight.
The uneven thread threw tiny shadows along the shaft.
“This is ugly,” he said.
He turned the fastener so the rough thread caught the firelight and showed every flaw.
“I know,” Serious said.
He felt the admission settle more easily than a defence would have, because the object deserved honesty.
“It is slow,” Bran said.
His thumb moved along the thread, testing the uneven ridges without mercy.
“Yes,” Serious said.
He kept his hands still on the bench because his first instinct was to reach for the screw and protect it from criticism.
“It needs a hole first, a turning tool, and a fool who knows not to split the board,” Bran said, and after each flaw his eyes grew more alive rather than less.
Serious recognised that look now; Bran was not dismissing the flaws, he was counting the work they revealed.
“Yes,” Serious said again.
The word sounded less like surrender this time and more like acceptance of the tests still waiting.
Bran looked at the two scrap boards waiting on the table, then at the broken spear shaft, the torn hinge strap, and the pile of failed joins Briarvale had brought him since morning.
“And it can pull two things together without striking,” he said.
Serious nodded.
“That is the important part.” “No,” Bran said, setting the screw down with care.
“That is one important part.” Serious waited, because by now he had learned that interrupting Bran during the useful kind of disapproval only made the lesson take longer.
The forge fire snapped behind them, sending a brief orange line down the screw’s uneven thread.
Bran tapped the slotted head.
“It can be loosened without wrecking the work if the maker has sense,” he said, then tapped the spiral thread.
“It holds along a path, not just at a bite point.” He tapped the block last.
“It teaches the wood while entering.
Badly, in this first ugly child of yours, but it teaches.” Serious felt something in his chest shift at the word yours.
The word was small, but it attached him to the object more firmly than the System’s inventor notice had done.
“I did not invent the principle from nothing,” he said quickly, because the lie would have been too large.
“I had heard of things like it before.
I only worked out how to try one here.” Bran’s gaze returned to him.
“Did hearing of it put it in my hand?” “No,” Serious said.
The answer was small, but it held because there was nothing useful to hide behind.
“Did hearing of it make it with my file, my wood, my boy bleeding on my bench, for my village’s broken mine road?” Bran asked, leaning closer after he spoke, not angry exactly but unwilling to let Serious escape into modesty or guilt.
“No,” Serious said, softer this time.
He looked at the screw again and felt the distance between hearing about a thing and making one narrow into responsibility.
“Then do not hide behind absent clever men when the living work starts,” Bran said.
“You brought the shape.
Now we decide what it costs.” The cost would not only be coin.
It would be who used it, who copied it, who was priced out, and who got hurt when the first careless imitation failed.
The word costs changed the room more than inventor had.
Serious glanced at Dava and saw she had already reached the same thought Bran had.
Money, rights, craft guilds, players, Khradrin, and Briarvale crowded around the little wooden fastener.
Every hinge, cart, gate, brace, chest, scaffold, wagon, mill, and mine support that could use a fastener able to draw rather than merely pin seemed to stand behind it.
Bran picked up the crude screw again and closed his fist around it.
“This cannot stay only here,” he said.
Serious’s first reaction was panic.
The second was shame, because he had thought about player licences and real money before fully thinking about what the screw would do to Bran’s world.
“It could cause problems,” Serious said, and that was a weak sentence for a large fear.
“If adventurers get it too fast, they may spread it without understanding the craft.
If locals get it through the wrong hands, someone powerful may take it.” “If nobody gets it, the mine still has bad joins and Hallis still waits for dry weather,” Bran said.
“Keeping a tool secret is not the same as using it wisely.” Dava folded her arms.
“And letting every passing adventurer copy the pattern from some unseen road of theirs is not wisdom either,” she said, looking straight at Serious though she could not see the menu waiting behind his eyes.
“That sounds like throwing seed to birds and hoping a field appears.” Serious swallowed.
The licensing tab waited behind his sight, patient and clean, offering private use, public player release, per-use fee, lump-sum licence, and scaled production licence as if control could be arranged by selecting the right line.
Each option looked like control until he imagined losing it.
He closed his hand around the edge of the bench and chose the only safe answer he trusted.
“I can keep it private for now,” he said.
“No public release.
No licences yet.” Bran nodded once.
“Good.” Nim made a disappointed sound and tried to disguise it as a cough.
Dava ignored him, which was worse than scolding because it gave the disappointment nowhere to go.
Bran set the screw on the table between them.
“But private does not mean buried,” he said.
“I know a man in Khradrin who understands craft protections, guild teeth, royal workshops, and how merchants smile while stealing boots off your feet.” The name struck Serious harder than it should have, not because it confused him, but because it did not.
Khradrin was the city he had come from in Mordrea, the only true city on the northern continent, a place of stone roads, crowded markets, layered guild authority, and too many people looking for advantage in anything new.
Briarvale had made the world feel smaller by necessity.
Khradrin made every useful thing feel visible.
“The city,” Serious said, and his hand moved unconsciously toward the wax tablet where the screw notes waited.
“If this reaches Khradrin, it will not stay a forge-yard curiosity for long.” “No,” Bran said, and the old smith’s expression told Serious he had wanted him to understand that before the first letter was written.
“It will become coin, argument, law, theft, protection, or all of them before anyone has the decency to finish testing whether it deserves the trouble.
Tools do not leave a forge alone, boy.
They leave inside people.” Dava snorted.
“Caldus will smell profit from behind a locked door,” she said, looking at the crude screw as if it had already begun inviting strangers into her yard.
“Whether that makes him useful or dangerous depends on what he thinks he can get away with.” Bran’s mouth tightened.
“His name is Master Caldus Venn,” he said, and the formality of the name carried history he did not explain.
“We apprenticed under the same bastard for three years before he found cleaner roads and I found honest soot.” Serious looked from Bran to the screw.
Khradrin meant guild halls, registries, merchants, officials, and adventurers with better equipment than sense, but it also meant protection might exist there in a form Briarvale could not provide alone.
“I remember enough of Khradrin to know this could disappear there,” Serious said.
“Or become something I no longer control.” “That is why I ask before writing,” Bran said.
“The shape came through your head.
I can test it, improve it, curse at it, and likely make it less ugly, but I will not sell your name while you are too young and wounded to know who is buying.” Serious looked at the screw.
A crude wood screw, Tier 0, the System had called it, while Bran had called it the first ugly child of a living problem.
Blueprint, archive, licence, public release, and scaled production were words from one world wrapped around a small uneven thing made in another.
He thought of the Outer-Hab room, the ration wrappers, the account balance, Tollen bleeding in the storage chamber, the old water crack, loose straps, crushed wood, and Hallis waiting for weather while the hill moved underneath them.
He thought of players.
He thought of locals, and then of what it meant to invent something in a world where some people saw menus and some people only saw consequences.
“You can write to him,” Serious said at last, and the decision frightened him enough that he knew it was real.
“But not as a sale.
Not yet.
Ask advice.
Ask what protections exist.
Ask what would happen if this became a registered craft design in Khradrin, and what would happen if adventurers got it first.” Bran held his gaze.
“And if Caldus says to bring it to the capital?” “Then we decide after the next tests,” Serious said.
“And after we know whether it can help with Briarvale’s problems without making bigger ones.” Dava nodded faintly, approving the caution more than the answer.
Her approval did not make the choice safe, but it made Serious feel less alone inside it.
The System opened again, confirming that blueprint access remained private, public release was locked by inventor choice, no licences had been issued, and the crafting tab and blueprint archive were available.
It suggested prototype improvement, material testing, ownership terms, and economic impact assessment with the calm of something that could make fear sound like homework.
Serious almost laughed at the last part, then stopped because nobody else had heard it.
Around him, the forge still smelled of wet wool, wood dust, iron, medicine, and stew.
Bran turned back to the table.
“Nim,” he said, and the boy straightened as if someone had yanked a string through his spine.
“More scrap boards.
Dry, wet, hard, soft.
Bring the old hinge too, and if you run, I will assume your head is empty enough to store nails.” Nim ran carefully, which was impressive in its own way.
Dava lifted the pot lid and looked at Serious with the expression of a woman who refused to let history interrupt supper.
“You will eat before you invent anything else,” she said, and the sentence made the invention feel absurdly domestic.
“I refuse to have Khradrin hear you changed the world on an empty stomach.” “I am not changing the world,” Serious said, though the protest lacked strength.
It sounded weak even to him, and Bran looked at the screw before answering.
“Every world is held together by small things,” the smith said, picking up the driver.
“Best learn which ones turn before someone else does.” They tested until the rain deepened and the forge lamps were lit.
During a lull, Horv came for Vayra’s eyes on the road camp, and she left with her arm bound tight and Dava’s warning not to bleed on purpose.
After that, the first screw split old pine, the second tore its own thread, and the third held two thin boards together until Nim leaned on them with too much enthusiasm and snapped the board instead of the fastener.
Bran laughed at that, a short rough sound that startled everyone, including himself.
Nim looked proud and worried at the same time, as if he had contributed to science by breaking something under supervision.
By evening, the wax tablet held new notes beside the old mine map: pilot holes, thread spacing, head depth, driver shape, wood hardness, grain direction, pulling force, removal damage.
The System stored each variant silently when Serious allowed it, but he kept the public release locked.
The mine remained uncleared, Hallis had not answered properly, Vayra had not yet returned from the road camp, and something under Briarvale had scraped too deep to be thunder.
None of those facts became smaller because three ugly screws lay on Bran’s worktable.
But on that worktable, beside a cracked wedge and a torn hinge strap, lay a new kind of problem.
Serious rested his hand near the screws, not touching, and understood that invention did not feel like triumph.
It felt like responsibility arriving early, while his leg still hurt and nobody had finished supper.
Beyond the forge gate, rainwater found old paths under the dark, and the small things that held the world together waited to be tested.