The blackstone felt warm as he ran his palm over its rough edges, his mind already shaping it to what it could be; a sharpened edge fitted with a hilt for his own hand. The rock had fallen from the stars, a curse from the heavens. It was dark, darker than even his own chocolate skin, he'd never seen anything like it in all of his young years. Lem had been drawn towards the crash site, sneaking off to see what had frightened them so many years ago when it had first come streaking across the sky, a bright orange arc of fire. The elders had cried out that they'd offended someone, one of the gods. Perhaps one they didn't know. A lamb had been slaughtered and made an offering full of incense, and the entire village fasted. The altar that hadn't been touched in years had been scrubbed clean and made new with oil and scented herbs.

And then nothing happened in the year after and the elders breathed easily.

But not Lem. Like a moth to a flame, he'd set out in search of the site again and again. His father had beat him when he learned but it didn't stop him.

And Lem had found it eventually. The destruction was like nothing he'd ever seen. No man was capable of such a feat, surely only the gods in their wrath could have done something of this magnitude. What they, in their tiny village had done to offend the gods, Lem couldn't say.

He liked to think the meteor had found him. He'd thought of nothing else over the years. Just this call to run into the forest. The metal called to him, as it had called to his father before him to become a blacksmith. He knew he would take up his father's hammer in the forge and create a sword with a black edge. It would be the finest weapon to come out of the fires of their dark hills.

He turned the stone over in his hands again and again, mentally shaping what it would become. How the blade would curve slightly, its edge sharpened to split the finest of hairs.

A breeze stirred in the east. Without a thought, he was wrapping the metal wad up into a leather satchel he'd brought for the occasion. The breeze would be a gale, the start of a full storm and he didn't want to be caught out in its fury. He hesitated. Was it a coincidence that the gale was here? Should he return the meteor to the earth?

The stubborn part of him refused the idea on the spot. If the gods had tossed down a lumpen, misshapen piece of metal, surely it was for someone to find. He cinched the straps tight over his shoulders and started for home as fast as his gangly twelve-year-old legs would take him. He had almost the full height of his father but in his youth lacked the full-fledged musculature of a grown man.

"It came to me," he whispered, reassuring himself. "It's mine."

He walked on, heedless of the strength of the wind until it forced him into cover. He spent the storm in a cave watching as the wind tore up the ground around him, flinging rocks, branches, and trees into the darkened sky, even though it was not yet midday. His father would be furious with him. He thought of the beating he would receive. But this would be worth it.

For hours he waited out the storm, twiddling his hands inside the small cave.

He fell asleep listening to the baleful howls as they continued on into the night, heedless of the time.

When the morning came there was a new scent on the breeze. It startled Lem into wakefulness, fear, and dread giving him a boost of energy as he sprang off the floor dragging the satchel with him. Smoke poured up into the sky. Not the welcoming sign of a campfire, but the darkened burning of a building set ablaze. Not just one building he noted. But many.

He poked his head out of the hole long enough to see it wafting across the sky. He was only a few miles from home but he shouldn't be able to see that. Even he knew what that meant. On the backs of the Eastern winds, sometimes the raiders would come.

He trudged forward, cinching his prize against his shoulders once more. The miles drew to a close once more as he walked, no longer feeling the triumph he felt this morning.

As he rounded the opened gates of his home, he knew, understood with the experience of someone who lived this way of life that the raiders had come. Life would never be the same again. Fires smoldered from structure to structure, hut to hut. There wasn't a peep from any wayward child left behind. It was as silent as the grave because it was a grave.

They lay where they had fallen, pierced with arrows. Lem froze where he was. The scene was so fresh, so new, he would not have been shocked to hear the hooves of the horses nearby. He'd heard stories, and even lost a family member or two... but this...

His heart hardened and his fists clenched so hard he drew blood on his palms.

This was a wholesale slaughter. For what he couldn't fathom. Did they have such blood-thirsty gods that the only way to appease them was to bathe an altar in blood for days? The crops were still in the fields, the only building that lay untouched was his father's forge.

Lem stared at the building for a long time before walking inside. His father was slumped on the floor, his throat slashed open. It had been just the two of them for so long he couldn't fathom what he was looking at. He swallowed back the bile that was building up and reached out with unsteady hands, closing the eyelids of his father's sightless gaze, and bowed his head.

The weight of the satchel slid off of his back and hit the floor with a thud. I'm here, the thud said into the silence.

Lem looked at the still-burning fires of the forge and at his father's peaceful face. He stood and walked on unsteady feet to the forge and pushed the metallic sphere into the forge, satchel and all watching as the leather burned away with uncaring eyes. He pulled on the bellows ignoring the death all around him as he began to forge his revenge.