The Blacksmith Daredevil Novels & Stories

His eyes wandered around the circle. "Perhaps we were right." A pause. "Perhaps we were incomplete." The young man in the silver cloak remained unmoved. "Incomplete ideas destroy worlds." The blacksmith shook his head. "No." "They build them." His scarred hands rested upon the table. "I've forged thousands of blades." "But I've also forged plows." "The fire was never the enemy." "It depended on what we chose to create." The musician quietly touched the strings of the silent violin. No sound emerged.

I screamed as I cut another rogue down. The Blackstone warriors are using their gifts to restrain the rogues with vines and cut each one down. Others are sending blasts their way and causing them to snap their spines against trees, and then I see Aiden pummeling through the sea of rogues that are trying to overtake Ironclaw.

The bills for her mom’s meds weren’t gonna pay themselves. She’d heard the rumors about Damien Black. Everybody in the circuit had. The man who turned broken riders into something else. Something that won. Something that *belonged*. The barn door creaked open before she even knocked. He filled the frame—six-four easy, shoulders like a draft horse, black hair cropped short, a scar slicing through one dark eyebrow. His eyes dragged over her like he was already pricing her out. Black jeans, black shirt stretched across a chest that looked carved from fucking stone. Boots caked in dirt.

The skin there was smooth, my pulse thudding fast against it. Outside the tiny smeared window above the foot of my bed, the training yard stretched in hard-packed dirt and leaning wooden dummies. Late afternoon light painted everything gold. In the center of the yard, a boy swung a practice sword, sweat darkening his shirt. Dark hair fell into his eyes; he shook it back impatiently. His footwork was a little showy, a hair unbalanced. His jaw hadn’t fully taken on the hard lines of the man on the balcony. Damon Blackthorn.

I'm just an escort. Yarsi turned around, measured the blacksmith with a calm look. Let this person feel his essence. He even wondered how someone who could understand who he was would react. “I have heard about your skill, blacksmith, I hope you will not refuse to help me,” he bared his fangs in a smile, examining the man with curiosity. The blacksmith was not young, but still quite strong, with a face without wrinkles and a completely bald head. On his face smeared with soot, very bright, understanding eyes burned with feverish lights. It was better to talk to such a person directly, without hiding your intentions.

# Bonus Chapter 24: Full Circle Mia Park was seven years old and had been begging to ride on a motorcycle since she was old enough to understand what they were. "Everyone else gets to," she complained to her mother on a Saturday morning, watching through the kitchen window as Duke prepared his bike in the driveway for a routine ride to the garage. "Uncle JJ had his own bike at sixteen. Grandpa Duke rides every single day. I'm the only one who doesn't get to."

It was easy for experts to estimate her raw power. Then, there were these two freaks. They were on a different level from everyone else, including Ben. The blacksmith worried that he couldn’t craft a weapon good enough for them. Unlike his idiot apprentice, who needed a weapon to survive, these people were living weapons. What kind of weapons should he craft for living weapons?

I raised an eyebrow. Damiean shrugged, like it didn't matter. “I don't care about that. I needed a blacksmith and he is very good so I took him. I haven't seen your blacksmith to be able to compare them,” he answered. I parted my lips to speak only to be stopped by the loud sound from John as he suddenly started hitting the red hot lead from the fire. He moved closer to me and I shuffled backwards a little. “Take that thing away from me,” I hissed at him.

Yet one day, they would be her subjects. The blacksmith stood dutifully at the anvil, his massive frame silhouetted against fire. His ashen, both by colour and the ashes of the coal, made some sense as to why his hair was tied back. Revealing a face lined with soot and scars. His arms, corded with decades of labour, swung a huge hammer, as though it were weightless, in a rhythm that seemed to shake the very ground. Sparks leapt like dying stars around him, but he didn't once flinch. This forge, like all forges, was run by the Wingless.

The village blacksmith waited for the farmer to inspect the newly healed metal, accepted payment with a courtly bow, and watched the tractor growl away. Ancient though the equipment was, the blacksmith was even older, and more machine than man. Marcus Doug Douglas had played many roles throughout his long and rather productive life, including those of son, brother, husband, father, uncle, friend, industrialist, politician, strategist, artist, and for the last six decades, village blacksmith.