Smith to the small gods.., p.1
Smith to the Small Gods: A Retired Legend Cozy LitRPG, page 1
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Chapter 1
It had been six months since I abandoned my old life and set out to disappear into the countryside, but people still tended to recognize the killer in me. Even the seedier patrons gave me a wide berth as I entered the pub, and I didn’t blame them.
After all, I’d taken on the Barbarian class at the tender age of sixteen, and it had been many long years of killing since then. I’d hoped growing my beard out during my recent travels would help cover most of the prominent scarring, but nothing could conceal a physique honed as hard as steel.
I offered a polite nod to the people I passed, and I chose a seat near the one person who hadn’t looked up at my arrival.
Just one drunk had ignored me. He was a trim man with a dark complexion not unlike mine. He didn’t bother to move as I sat down next to him, but that was probably because he was in the middle of a conversation with himself.
“Calls himself a m-mashter…” The man downed another swig of cheap beer. “I sh… shoed horses for years and… and ain’t no one e-ever charged that much fer nails.”
Apparently the drunk was a farrier. I hadn’t met a farrier before that couldn’t hold his drink, but I supposed there was a first time for everything.
I ordered an ale of my own. It was watered down and cloudy, but I drank it anyway, and I noted that a couple patrons had subtly switched seats to sit just a bit further away from my end of the bar.
People tended to avoid me. I didn’t know if it was because some phantom of my bloody past lingered over me, or if the sight of a large man with clear experience with a blade was what frightened them, but it was fine with me either way. If others turned their gazes away from me, it gave me the opportunity to hone the art of disappearing into the background. If I sat in a dark corner and kept quiet, I overheard a lot of things.
“Mashter, my ass!” The drunken farrier hiccuped suddenly. “The old man can bar’ly lift his hammer anymore. Horace Hurst’s washed… washed up…”
My gaze flicked toward the drunkard for half a second.
I had actually heard the name Hurst before. In fact, the last few towns I had stopped in all had at least one person who seemed to know it. He was both praised and cursed, and it respectively seemed to be for the quality of his work or his prices.
I could sympathize. I knew the burden of a widespread reputation.
I glanced at the barkeep and gestured for him to come closer.
“Is this Hurst person really worth him being this deep in his cups?” I jerked my thumb in the direction of the drunkard.
The barkeep was a thin blond man who mainly resembled a lamppost. He paused with his hand on the rim of a mug and sighed.
“Horace Hurst used to be the best of the best,” he said. “A true master craftsman. But age gets us all, I guess. Really a damn shame.”
“Is he accepting assistants? Or apprentices?”
“Well, no… not that I’ve heard. But I guess you could always try.”
“Where does he live?”
“Havenhold. It’s a lil’ fishing town a bit further to the east. Actually…” The barkeep suddenly lit up and reached under the bar.
I tensed.
Twenty years of experience warned me that a barman reaching for something unseen was rarely good. I needn’t have worried, though. A letter was gripped gently in his spindly fingers when they came back into sight.
“I have a cousin there by the name of Iris,” he continued. “This is for her. If you deliver it for me, I’ll gladly give you a map to make the trip.”
The thin man smiled at me hopefully, and I couldn’t help smiling back. This was exactly why I’d wanted to disappear into the countryside specifically. Country folks were kind and trusting, and I missed that kind of living.
I nodded in agreement and shook on it with the barkeep. Then the kind man offered me a room for the night at a discounted price and went to get the map he’d promised.
Still, that night, I dreamed of the slaughters.
I hadn’t exactly taken joy in beheading the king’s underlings during the glorious rebellion. Satisfaction, yes, because I was only human and vengeance is a sweet, sweet thing. But never joy, really. That’s what all the stories and songs about me got wrong.
The ballads either painted me as a valiant hero freeing the oppressed masses with a glorious grin on my face, or as a bloodthirsty monster whose bloodlust couldn’t be quenched no matter how many souls I hunted.
In reality, I never felt like either of those things. I was just a man who had made a decision and followed through on it to the end. Sometimes I grinned during it, but most of the time I focused on my work, so to speak.
And I was very effective.
By the time I’d taken the king’s life myself, I was already known across most corners of the world as The Final Axe.
The final blade you’d ever see.
An inescapable executioner coming for any person loyal to our tyrant king.
My legend had become bigger than me somewhere along the way, and when my ultimate task was done at last, my men had celebrated for months on end.
I didn’t join the celebrations. I just felt… tired.
I awoke from my feverish dreams feeling tense all over, like I’d truly been swinging an axe for the last eight hours straight. My mind was filled with blood and screams, but the warm sun pouring in through the window soothed those darker thoughts. The countryside smelled like honeysuckle on the morning breeze, and birds were singing merry tunes that coaxed a slight smile out of me.
I drew a few steadying breaths as the nightmare killings faded further and further to the back of my mind. Then I sat up and stretched, and I reminded myself for the tenth time this week that my life wasn’t on those battlefields anymore.
It was stretching out before me, unmarred by fury or destruction. And my new life could be waiting for me at the end of this very journey.
In Havenhold.
After washing up, eating, and bidding the barkeep farewell, I found myself traveling on a worn, rocky road for the better part of the day. Clearly, most thought Havenhold wasn’t important enough to warrant the upkeep of the only path leading there, but that was a good sign to me.
That meant it would be a mostly quiet town, somewhere I could truly put down roots in peace.
I let a small smile curl across my lips as I looked up at the clouds that were dyed in light oranges and pinks from the slowly setting sun. Based on the stout stones that marked every five miles I passed, I would arrive in Havenhold just before nightfall, if my intuition was right.
My journey toward the small town had been blessedly peaceful so far. The only problem with traveling alone on an uneventful road was that it gave me too much time to reminisce on the past, and during that last leg of my journey, I couldn’t help dwelling quite a lot on my upbringing.
It was hard not to, in beautiful country like this.
My mother had once told me a story of a goat her family owned when she was a child. The creature had been born early, and this left it smaller than the two others they kept in the yard. For some reason, despite its size, it would constantly pick fights with any other animal it saw.
It was born angry, she said.
They ended up having to sell it to the butcher when it nearly broke into the henhouse one night. Her father had found it stuck by its front legs in the small shelter’s thatched roof, and its eyes were rolling madly while its tongue lolled out with exhaustion.
I hadn’t told my mother at the time, but I felt a kinship with the goat.
I think I was born angry.
Unlike the goat, I had learned how to control my temper as I grew up, with one notable exception: tyrannical kings and their corrupt courts brought out the demon in me. That was why, after twenty years full of blood and conquest, I had made an oath to never kill an intelligent creature again.
I chuckled a little to myself at the idea as I gazed out at the orange clouds building up like castles along the horizon. That vow had seemed so simple to me at the time. As simple as my plan to abandon my old life and start anew in the beautiful countryside.
The fact was, I’d spilled enough blood for ten lifetimes, and a man with my capabilities could just as easily solve issues in other ways.
But I knew how it sounded to others.
It would seem like “too little, too late” to anyone who knew my history.
Two decades spent hunting the tyrant who razed my tiny village and left me the only survivor had changed me as a man. It would change anyone, most likely not for the better, but there was no other path that would have satisfied me.
And I regretted nothing.
King Rothrik was of a royal bloodline so vast that none could remember when his ancestors hadn’t ruled over our country of Domaste. It was his order that had killed everyone in my hometown for gold.
He had raised taxes absurdly high for a town that was widely known to have gone through a drought. That year, the villagers had barely enough food to feed themselves, much less enough to sell. King Rothrik had known this, yet sent insistent couriers carrying official royal decrees.
The couriers donned fancy clothes the likes of which anyone from our village couldn’t have dreamed to af ford and were flanked by menacing guardsmen on white horses. The soldiers, on the other hand, had armor with gold filigree around our country’s banner.
Expensive.
I remembered how my rage bubbled seeing those guards, and how it had exploded when I woke after the king’s raid, with my left side pinned under the collapsed roof that had hidden me from the soldiers’ wrath.
My anger had been enough to allow me the strength to throw off the wooden beams, and I’d limped to the next town. Then I collapsed onto the stoop of a poor old woman who nearly jumped out of her skin when she opened the door and saw me.
After that, I chose my Class as soon as I was well enough to focus the translucent, hovering panel into being in front of me.
The gods had blessed us long ago. Father once said it was to be able to choose our paths and see how we grew as we strived to achieve our goals. I hadn’t put much thought into it before the tragedy of the raid, because I’d always thought I’d have more time to figure my life out. That I’d become a blacksmith like my father, if nothing else called to me.
Instead, the king unleashed his men on my humble village, and I took on the Barbarian class at sixteen years old, with nothing but vengeance burning in my heart.
Over the course of the next twenty years, I became a force to be reckoned with. I honed my body into a weapon. I gathered others like me, who had been burned by the greed of King Rothrik. We fought his influence. We pushed the minions that called themselves nobles out of town after town. We hunted them down like hounds hunted rabbits.
And that sort of thing takes a toll on a man. Not just visible scars.
That was why I’d finally chosen to reclassify as a Blacksmith, replace my official Barbarian title accordingly, and change my legal name.
No one would know me out here, and that was how I wanted it.
I crested the final hill that was noted on the map, and the gorgeous countryside of Havenhold came into view. This area was teeming with life, and my small smile turned into a true grin as I watched a pair of sparrows flit to a hollow in a massive tree. All around, the chorus of daytime bugs and animals was dying down, and it was being replaced by the first notes of their night-dwelling cousins.
As I started to descend the far side of the hill, I noted the well-kept land near the walls of my destination. The farm was at least a two-person property, with five large fields instead of the typical three. The one I was walking by had a charming scarecrow dressed in a shirt that looked like it had been repaired several times before finally being given up to the straw effigy.
An old fence was the most worn thing that I could see about the land, and it enclosed the fields in an ancient embrace. There was a group of large draft horses inside the fencing, too: one bay, one chestnut, one blue roan, and one black. They were near an old mill, and a trough had been put out by the building for them to drink from. One of them was dozing on its feet as the others grazed.
I was so enamored with the large animals that I almost missed their owner. He was a tanned man around my age, and his arms were bare and muscled from a life of hard work.
He pushed a sweat-soaked mop of red fringe out of his eyes to properly squint at me. His face was creased just slightly at the corners of his eyes, which told me a frown was uncommon on his features. This was a man who was typically happy, even if he wasn’t at the moment.
He whistled in my direction, and then his level and class suddenly sprung up over his head in a gently glowing white text:
Level 8 Agriculturalist.
“You with them bandits?” the farmer drawled in a heavy country accent.
A sickle hung idly on his belt, and his hand hovered near it in the most casual way possible. This was a man who didn’t want a fight, but would if he had to.
I could relate.
“No,” I said. “Do you have a wife named Iris?”
I slid my traveling pack to the ground, and the farmer squinted at the motion with the same distrust I’d felt for the barman.
“Maybe,” he said. “Who’s askin’?”
“It’s alright, I’m just delivering this from her cousin,” I said as I rummaged in my pockets. “He sends his regards.”
“Well, now! Why didn’t you say so?” he hollered back.
The change in his demeanor was instant, and the dark cloud over his features vanished to make room for a brilliant smile. The farmer loped over to the fence to take the offered letter, and his gait was easy now that he was sure his home and wife weren’t in danger.
As he reached me, I realized he had a gap between his front teeth that made him instantly seem harmless, and his eyes were an unusual shade of gray.
“Thank you, stranger,” he chuckled. “She’ll be mighty pleased to get this.”
“The name’s Orin,” I said as he thrust out a callused hand, and I shook it firmly. “I was coming this way anyway. I’m looking for Horace Hurst, the blacksmith.”
“Ol’ Horace! Good luck with him, Orin. He’s awful mean, especially to strangers. Cantankerous, you know? Tell him Arlo says hi. He might be a touch more friendly if I vouch for you.”
Apparently Arlo was quite the chatterbox once he saw someone as friendly.
I couldn’t blame him. I hadn’t been a farmer, but I had some idea of what a lonely life tending fields could be. Even if his wife helped, a farm like this would be worked from sunup to sundown. It was tiring work too, especially on a hot summer day like this one, so you couldn’t waste much energy talking. This was probably the most conversation he’d had since breakfast.
The text over his head now read:
Arlo Gainstay, Level 8 Agriculturalist.
“Oh, you’ll be wanting to get past young Jobe at the gate,” Arlo added.
The farmer turned toward the town and craned his neck upward. He let out the same sort of whistle he used to call me closer. The sound was loud and shrill through the gap in his teeth.
I wasn’t expecting the tiny face that peered over the wall at the top of the gate. At this distance, I couldn’t tell exactly how old “young Jobe” was, but the pale, blurry smudge of his face could barely reach halfway over the wall to look our way.
I nearly activated one of my abilities to try and see better, but mentally scolded myself. I just needed to be patient, no need to fall into old habits when I wasn’t even in danger.
Arlo waved at the figure with his easy smile, then pointed to me.
The head ducked back down behind the wall.
“He takes his job so damn seriously,” the farmer practically cooed. “Wonderful child, his daddy is so proud of him. Ah, I love kids, but me and the missus have had no luck with them. Kept trying for years, but–”
“I’m sorry, but I should get going before dark falls,” I said gently.
I hoped I interrupted as kindly as I could, but I really wanted to get to Horace’s smithy before nightfall. If the blacksmith was as irritable as Arlo claimed, I wasn’t about to interrupt his dinner and hurt my chances at becoming his apprentice.
Arlo rallied his bright smile in an instant without any fuss.
“Sure, I getcha,” he said. “You probably been on the road a long time, Orin. Good luck with Horace! And welcome to Havenhold!”
I nodded in thanks, and as I stepped away from the fence and got closer to the wooden gate, I saw how brittle it was.
The frame was riddled with termite damage and rotting in some places. It creaked in a gentle wind, and I wondered how safe Jobe was when he stood atop the makeshift wall. The gate itself was made of long branches thicker than my wrist that were pulled as straight as whoever had built this could manage, and they were held in a lattice pattern by iron nails that looked old and loose in their holes.
This gate could maybe persuade someone unobservant to leave, but I doubted it did much for the bandits Arlo had mentioned. As it was, it could easily be broken by a strong man with a heavy boot.
Jobe leaned out from behind the left side of the frame. Now I could see that he was, in fact, a child. No older than twelve, the boy stood barely waist height to me. He stared up at me with startlingly blue eyes and an almost overly serious expression. His nose wrinkled in concentration.
I guessed he was studying my face and clothes to find tell-tale signs of a bandit.
Whatever those were to him.
A few red curls spilled out from under the bucket someone had made into a helmet for him, and he clutched a pitchfork taller than he was in both fists. Over his plain clothes, old and tarnished cooking pans were tied to his back and front with rope. The handle was broken off from one, and the other had a punctured side. The damage rendered both useless for cooking.
