Elian polished destinies. It wasn’t glorious work. He sat in a dusty antechamber of the cosmos, buffing the faint glimmer on the mass-produced star-cores that were assigned to mortals. Each one was a small, tepid light promising a life of manageable expectations and a 401(k). He saw thousands pass through his hands, and the repetition was grinding his own spirit to a fine, gray dust. This was his soul’s commission, and he was in the midst of quietly quitting it.
He could feel the cosmic burnout setting in, the same way a star-charter knows the scent of ozone before a nebula collapses. All around him, other functionaries did the same, their movements listless. They spoke in whispers of a fundamental vibe shift in the celestial ether, a weariness that had settled over everything. Elian listened, but he yearned for more than just a commiserating sigh. He coveted the searing light of what the mortals had started calling Main Character Energy, a brilliance he had only ever seen in the oldest, wildest constellations.
His own star-core, assigned at his creation, pulsed with a dull, predictable rhythm against his ribs. It was a sensible, low-risk destiny. But lately, he’d taken to unsanctioned celestial side-hustles—pinching motes of stardust from passing comets, weaving strands of raw dream-stuff into his smock. He was trying to manifest something different for himself, but it was like trying to start a bonfire with damp wood. He was ready for a new era.
One cycle, while sorting a shipment of particularly bleak destinies—the ‘suburban ennui’ collection—he found a crack in the floor. From it leaked not darkness, but a sound. A rhythmic, titanic *CLANG* that vibrated through the marrow of his light-form. It was a sound of making, not of maintenance.
He followed it. Down he went, past the archives where abandoned timelines moldered, through the echoing caverns where echoes themselves went to die. He saw strange things. He passed a nebular stream where countless spirits stared into a single, distant, blazing star, lost in a strange, parasocial devotion to a life they would never live, convinced they understood its fire. He saw fields of half-formed concepts—goblincore forests next to dark academia libraries—flaring up and fizzling out with the speed of mortal whims.
Finally, he came to a chamber so vast it had its own horizon. The air was thick with the heat of creation. In the center was a figure, broad as a galaxy, silhouetted against a furnace of pure potential. The figure raised a hammer made of solidified night and brought it down upon an anvil of impossible density. *CLANG*. A spray of incandescent motes flew out, each one a possibility, a nascent star.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the blacksmith rumbled, his voice like grinding continents. He didn’t turn around. *CLANG*.
“I want a new one,” Elian said, his voice a tremor. “My destiny. It’s… insufficient.”
The blacksmith finally stopped. He turned, and his face was a map of cosmic exhaustion, pocked with craters of dead quasars. “Insufficient,” he sighed. “Let me guess. You seek authenticity.”
Elian nodded, emboldened. “What you make now… it’s cheap. It’s hollow. The raw material is diluted.”
The blacksmith let out a short, bitter laugh. “The stardust supply chain is a mess, kid. Do you know what it’s like sourcing primordial hydrogen these days? And the demand… there’s an inflation of ambition like I’ve never seen. Everyone wants to be the protagonist. No one wants to be the sturdy bedrock that holds the story up. I’m doing what I can.”
“You’re gaslighting the cosmos!” Elian burst out, the words tasting like ozone and rebellion. “You make us believe this is all we get. That this faint flicker is a ‘sensible’ life. It’s a trick to keep us polishing the pieces while you hoard the real fire.”
The ancient being stared at him, and for a moment, Elian thought he would be unmade. Instead, the blacksmith gestured with his hammer toward the anvil. It shimmered, a slab of reality so pure it was almost invisible.
“You think I give these things out?” the blacksmith said, his voice softer now. “You think I forge a star and hand it to you? That’s not how manifestation works. Not the real kind.”
He pointed the hammer at Elian’s chest. “You bring me the metal. I am just the smith. I shape what is already there.”
Elian looked down at his own faint, pulsing core. “But I have nothing. Just… this.”
“Nothing?” The blacksmith’s voice rose again, but this time with a thrum of power, not anger. “You have your burnout. You have the grit from your failed side-hustles. You have the burning acid of your yearning, the weight of your quiet quitting. That is rare ore, kid. Most spirits just let it dissolve them. You carried it all the way here.”
He gestured to the anvil again. “Step up. Lay it all on the anvil. Your disillusionment. Your hunger. Your foolish, glorious hope that you could be more than you were told. Bring me your authentic mess. Let’s see what it’s made of.”
Slowly, Elian approached the impossible object. He hesitated, then reached into his chest, not to the pre-made core, but deeper, to the raw ache behind it. He pulled out the gray dust of his boredom, the sharp edges of his frustration, the heavy, leaden disappointment. He placed the formless, ugly mass of his true feelings onto the anvil.
The blacksmith nodded once. He raised the hammer of solidified night.
“Now,” he boomed, “for the making.”
And he struck. The clang was not a sound but a wave of pure creation, a light so bright and so uniquely shaped—so Elian—that it did not just spray out into the new-made stars. It turned inward, forging him anew.
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