Tome 2 When the Hammer Falls

The hold is built. The gates are open. The forge fires are lit. Ironvein is alive again. Drackore Spyritfyst has his home back, his wife, his clan, and a purpose loud enough to shake stone. The mountain that was a ruin is now a sanctuary, and every outcast, refugee, and cast-aside soul in the region knows where the gates are and that they stay open. For the first time in a long time, things are good. Then the ravens come. Children are disappearing across the region. Cinderborn. Scalite. Divinarii. Every race the realm has decided is expendable, taken by cult networks operating in the shadow of cities that prefer not to look too closely at what happens to people no one will miss. Drackore and his party ride out the way they always do. Without hesitation. Solar Smasher already off his back. What they find in a barn changes everything. She is small and starving and terrified, with white horns and gold wings and a wooden toy hammer she has carried so long the handle is worn smooth. She has been dreaming of a hammer man coming to save her for as long as she can remember. Her name is Dawn. As Ironvein grows and the rescued children fill its halls with noise and life and the particular chaos of people who are learning they are allowed to be safe, something old and patient watches from the dark. The god of hunger has a champion who does not fight with armies. She fights with wounds. She finds the grief people carry alone because they think carrying it is a form of strength, the guilt that never fully healed, the doors left unlocked by years of refusing to ask for help. She has been watching Drackore for a long time. The hammer that has never failed him cannot protect him from himself. When the Hammer Falls is the second tome of the Drackore's Forge saga. A story about found family, the cost of love, and the kind of stubborn refusal to quit that gets harder the more it costs you. About what it means to be chosen by people who had every reason to trust no one, and what that choice demands in return. The forge is still burning. The clan is still standing. But this is where it gets tested.