Reincarnated as an SSS-Ranked Blacksmith Who Refuses to Forge Weapons-Chapter 235. The Blacksmith Who Refuses To Forge Weapon, but Forge Peace [END]

The forge was ablaze. The clasp was starting to look like it should.

Outside of whatever this place was, the world went on without him. Home breathed in the morning air; ten kids woke up and started their days, and a nation of 1,247 people went about their normal, irreplaceable work of living in peace.

Greg Greyson, the Peaceforger, put down his hammer for a moment and looked around at the people he loved who had already arrived. He felt something he had never felt before in the space beyond life.

Ordinary.

Happy.

Complete.

...

Fifty Years After Greg's Death...

Home Nation, with a Population of 107,000

Seraphine conceived the idea for the museum, but she passed away before its completion.

The museum is located in what was once the original workshop, which has been expanded and preserved with the same care that people give to things they consider important.

On any given afternoon, a mix of scholars, kids, and regular people came to see the things that had started it all.

The Frying Pan of Eternal Flame was still warm to the touch if you pressed your palm against the glass case.

The Ladle of Magical Dispersion.

The pieces of the Headphones of Harmonic Peace were carefully put together, with the metal shaped by hands that were no longer there.

The last teacup, sitting on a shelf that had been moved whole from the original workshop, was surrounded by hundreds of other things on other shelves.

There was a picture on the far wall of a man in his forties with gray hair at his temples and four women on either side of him. Children were all around them in the happy mess of a family that had not been arranged for a formal purpose but just happened to be together at the same time, and someone thought to take a picture.

As she often did, Elwen Silverleaf-Greyson stood in front of it.

She had been alive for 265 years and planned to live for at least another 200. This meant that she had been to the funerals of her husband and three of her four children.

She carried that knowledge with the grace of someone who had learned that carrying things was not the same as being crushed by them.

Her seven-year-old granddaughter's child was holding her hand and looking at the picture with the serious interest of someone who is young enough to know that important things need attention.

The child said, "Great-great-grandmother Elwen."

The title was awkward, but everyone used it because the shorter options didn't seem right.

"Did you really marry the Peaceforger?"

"I did." Elwen said, "I loved him very much."

"I lost him fifty years ago, and I will keep losing him for as long as I live, which is going to be a long time."

The child thought about this. "Will it get better?"

"It changes," Elwen said. "It gets different."

"The sharp part becomes softer, and the rest of it becomes something you carry like you carry your own hands as part of you instead of as a weight."

She stared at the picture. She didn't remember the exact moment when Greg laughed, but she knew it was real because he had laughed like that before, like people do when they are really surprised and pleased.

The child asked, "Is he somewhere now?"

"Yes," Elwen said, and there was no doubt about it.

"How do you know?"

"Because he told me he would wait for me before he died, and he never lied to me." She held the small hand in hers. "I think it will be very good when I get there."

"He'll have been working on a teacup for two hundred years."

The kid looked at the shelves full of things for the house. "He made a lot of stuff."

"He made everything that was important," Elwen said. "And most of it is still here."

When she said "things on the shelves," she meant the things in the museum, but she also meant the country outside the museum walls, the university that Seraphine had founded, the Combat Academy that was now in its fourth generation of instructors, and the culinary school that had trained chefs in six kingdoms.

She was talking about the 247 reincarnators who had spread out across the world after Home was founded and built their own things. Most of them had some version of what they had learned here.

She discussed the gods who had mastered the art of knocking, the effective treaties, and the world that had become more chaotic, difficult, and truly free than it had when three divine beings had been rearranging its pieces.

She was talking about the kids who were outside right now, her great-great-grandchildren and the great-great-grandchildren of people who came here with nothing, built something, and grew up in a world where peace wasn't a promise from God but something people did every day.

"What should I do?" The kid asked, "What should I do when I'm older...? Pay him respect?"

Elwen looked down at her.

"Do something," she said. "Whatever you're good at, make it for someone who needs it."

"Make it with care and honesty because you really want them to have it." She turned back to the picture. "That's all he ever did... and that's all he wanted any of us to do." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The museum was quiet when they were there. The Hearthstone glowed in the plaza outside, where he could see it through the window.

It was as steady and sure as it had been the day he put it there.

Elwen stayed a little longer because she wasn't in a hurry and the painting was delightful to be around.

She went home, which was still the island, which would still be called Home long after the original inhabitants were gone. The name had outlasted the people who chose it and become the thing itself.

She had to write a letter to the First Forgemaster, who had started writing to her from time to time. She also had to get dinner ready for her grandchildren, who would be coming over in the evening, and she needed to start a new sketchbook because the last one was full of fifteen years of her life that she was still living and would be living for a long time.

She walked home under a sky that wasn't watching her from heaven but was just being itself—blue, ordinary, and indifferent in a good way. It meant that the world is big and goes on, and the work is yours to do.

...

Somewhere beyond, a forge burns.

A dwarf works on a clasp and complains that it isn't quite right yet, which is probably true.

A spirit in a maid's outfit organizes tools by a classification system she has not explained to anyone and probably never will.

A blacksmith works on a teacup, carefully, without hurrying, because there is plenty of time and the person it is for deserves the careful version.

In the world they left behind, one hundred and seven thousand people live in peace on an island that was once three buildings and twenty-three people with nowhere else to go.

The forge hums.

The Hearthstone glows.

Home continues.

And somewhere in the spaces between heartbeats, in the warmth that persists after the fire has gone, Greg Greyson smiles and goes back to work.

One household item at a time.

One choice at a time.

One bond at a time.

And that, more than any rank or divine recognition or two lifetimes of consequence, was enough.

As The Blacksmith Who Refuses to Forge Weapons, but Forge Peace.

~FIN~