Strong Iron Axe

Strong Iron Axe rests on a weathered workbench, its head a block of iron the color of midnight steel, the edge gleaming like a thin blade caught in lamplight. The surface is mottled from years of beating and cooling, pockmarked with tiny craters where hammer blows found their mark. The beard of the head flares slightly, as if the iron itself is stubborn, refusing to be tinessed into a perfect line. The handle is ash, smooth from long use, the grain running like a stream that has been walked by countless hands. A leather thong wraps the throat, threaded with a few bead charms that locals claim were traded from caravans that crossed desert or drowned rain. Along the neck run shallow incised runes—tiny sigils of the Maker, a nod to a craft that respects the tool as much as the task. In the hills outside town, the axe is said to carry a memory of a hunter who carved his path through a drought-dark forest, leaving markers in the trees as if to tell a story to any who would listen. When you lift it, you feel the balance shift—weight forward enough to power a swing, not so heavy as to drag your shoulder down. The Strong Iron Axe is not a mythical weapon, but in moments of need it reads like one: it cuts saplings in a single breath, splits kindling for the morning fire, and in a pinch turns stubborn knots in a rope into something useful. For a woodcarver, it’s a partner; for a caravan guard, a sturdy ally; for a hunter, a reliable tool that can turn bone-dry terrain into shelter. The town’s markets hum with the square’s wind and the scent of oil and resin. People bargain not just for blades but for stories—how a tool has traveled, who forged it, what weather it has faced. The Saddlebag Exchange becomes a kind of ledger laid bare, a place where a Strong Iron Axe might drift across a table in exchange for a hard-won coin or a barter of leather, wax, and dried tea. The vendor’s fingers measure its heft, test the edge with a quick scratch of stone, and sketch a rough price in chalk on a wooden tag. In the end, the axe moves on the market floor, to a carpenter who will trust it to plane a door or a hunter who will trust it to clear a trail. In the world it inhabits, this is more than metal and wood; it’s a quiet oath: the promise that when the road forks, there will be shelter to sleep, a fire to cook, and a way to shape a future from a stubborn, stubborn piece of iron. Some evenings the axe rests again, watched by the harbor lights. If a traveler asks how it found its path, the answer is simple: a tool keeps faith with hands that remember how to work, and the world keeps faith with tools that keep working.