The Bear Forge: The Broken Anvil (pt. 2/3)

In loving memory of my cub (1997-2023)

Author’s Note: July 4th, 2025, was the second anniversary of my cub’s passing, which is why I’ve decided to start sharing this series. There are three parts and each is written in an entirely different style. This part has never been published before. I’m not sure if he ever read it, though I think I sent it to him. I hope you enjoy this trip through the five stages of grief, and remember, not all grief relates to death.

Fun note: “Anvil” was a red flag word that my cub and I used to call out when we were fighting over nothing and needed to cool off. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the chance to use it more than once.

Read The Bear Forge pt. 1 here.

PS - This is from the world of Islands of Nightsea, a children’s book series with an extended world that’s less child-oriented (though not necessarily child-unfriendly). The overall series is currently on hiatus, but you can find two Tales from the Nightsea on Amazon for a few coins.

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The Broken Anvil

The bearsmith and her cub apprentice sat in a sizzling silence. The element lay between them, blazing a hole in the stone floor in its opalescent brilliance, though the Forge’s heat had long since ebbed. The day’s glow from outside was beginning to fade and the tension was too thick for even a smith to cut with their sharpest blade.

The bearsmith staggered to her feet unsteadily, keeping one paw on the bandage on her shoulder, wincing as it shifted painfully. She passed the water and a clean cloth to the cub, along with the cinnamint soap. The cub snatched them away ferociously, without looking up. As he began to scrub at his wounds – a bit more aggressively than was good for them – the bearsmith’s eyes began to flare with an angry heat. Rules had been broken. Standards had been set. So much work had been done just to make sure that this sort of thing did not happen.

She took a deep breath. And yet here they both were: scorched, angry, and hurt. Trust had been broken, and badly.

She stayed silent, because there were no words that would make the situation better now, hot as things were. She had already learned – or at least had been in the process of learning – to choose her moments with the cub wisely, and this was very clearly not a good time. She knew that warzone in his eyes and had felt its wrath before.

So instead, she began to tend to her own wounds. She left the herbs out, in case someone else was to need them for his own injuries, put on her gear and contained the element, and then began to sweep up the broken glass and shattered pottery. The cub didn’t look up the entire time, eyes glaring into the ground, scrubbing his wounds until they looked raw. It pained the bearsmith all the way to her core to leave him in silence as she closed up the Forge. Still, she left the door cracked, in case he wanted to follow.

The next morning, when the bearsmith went into the Forge, the cub was nowhere to be found.

Everything was exactly as it had been before. His woolen hats were still piled in the corner. His apron was on the hanger and his gloves were in the basket. His books were on the shelf. His little box of treats was in the drawer by the window. The secret stash that she wasn’t supposed to know about was even still there. The cub was simply gone.

The bearsmith seemed to freeze for a moment, as if the world had stopped moving, and she slumped into a chair, her legs weak with disbelief. The cub had vanished, left without a word, taking none of his things with him. Why on earth, after what had happened the day before, would he have simply upped and left? She did not understand.

At first, her thoughts were disbelieving, muddled, and confused. She was certain that the cub would come back soon and this would all be cleared up right away, just like always. They were the type of bears that talked through their troubles. It had been agreed upon, together. However… the more time that passed, the harder it became to deny that this was not one of the cub’s usual blow-outs. This realization turned her thoughts to rage again, wondering how dare he just leave without a word!? After putting in so much effort to tiptoe around his quirks and stay calm when he could not? After dedicating so much time and energy to helping stabilize him and get him on his feet? The sheer and utter disrespect from that ungrateful cur! How many promises was he breaking by just walking away?! She began to roar, fury and anguish coming out. It hurt. It hurt more than any burns she’d ever gotten from the Forge.

When the anger from the hurt waned, she thought back to the previous day. The bearsmith had been aware that there had been more accidents in the Forge lately than normal and they were starting to lose track of progress. There was no denying it. The element that the two of them had been crafting together was mesmerizing – more powerful and magnificent than perhaps any she had crafted before. That hypnotic quality was the main reason that even the most skilled smiths often burnt themselves. Even she, experienced at her Forge as she was, had clearly gotten far too close to the project than was safe.

But – and she began to seethe again – that did not explain his behavior. Why would he just leave?! Many times before, he had lost his temper and roared at her. Many times before, he had gone outside for air and space. But never before had he simply abandoned the Forge. Was he just going to leave her to clean up this enormous mess by herself? This mess that his tantrum had created!? The bearsmith began to feel overwhelmed and dizzy from the spiraling thoughts. Her head was spinning like a runaway wheel. He had promised her… promised! How could this have possibly happened?

The bearsmith took another deep breath and looked out the window, and then looked back at the Forge. Though she had cleaned up the broken glass and debris, the place was still a complete mess. The anger returned again, anger at him leaving without a word. Usually, when his temper overtook him, he would shout at her for a while, but then he would calm down and apologize. She was still learning not to take it personally. For a moment, she let the rage and unfairness overwhelm her and slammed the Forge door shut, letting out a massive roar of frustration. Once it was out of her system, she looked down rather numbly for a while, trying to understand the fact that he was gone. Why? Why, after all they had done, all that they had built, was he just… gone?

She again thought back to the previous day, but realized quickly that this had begun far longer ago. He had been pushing her limits for some time and seemed to only be getting more and more resentful, no matter what the bearsmith did or said to mollify him. She realized that she, too, had been completely stressed out by constantly being on edge with him, regardless of who was antagonizing whom in the moment. They had agreed that things were tense between them and in order to try to fix the situation, they had chosen to do some work on the element and had met the day before. However, when they were getting started at the Forge together, it seemed as though they just couldn’t get on the same page. Neither of them should have been standing in front of the anvil in that unsteady state, but they did anyway. Moods flared, tensions got hot, and when the cub finally lashed out, the element flew out of the Forge and went rampant around the smithy. Once it had finally settled, both the bearsmith and her cub apprentice sat in a cataclysm of broken and burnt debris, with the element smoldering brilliantly between them, reminding them of their carelessness.

The memory was not a pleasant one and the bearsmith was consumed by sorrow for a while. She had indeed put in fail-safes, but she had lost the forest for the trees. On reflection, she wondered if she could have done better, if she could have seen this coming and stopped it. Certainly, she could have made more effort to understand his struggles? Surely she could have done more to create peace for him?

After a bounty of tears, followed by an even greater effort to gather up the shattered pieces of herself, the bearsmith ultimately realized that the only thing she could do now was move forward.

And so the bearsmith went about repairing the Forge, and herself at the same time. The broken parts were repaired or replaced, the spills were cleaned, and while she was at it, she gave it a little extra tune-up that was perhaps a tad overdue, neglected because she had put so much effort into making the Forge a welcome place for her cub. As she pulled everything from the shelves and dusted them off, swept out the corners, and put a great deal of time and elbow grease into getting the Forge back into the best condition she could, she wondered if it had been too much for the cub. He wasn’t used to having a space like this, which was both safe and overwhelmingly demanding, and realized that he must have had a hard time separating those feelings of being overwhelmed from the feelings of anger and rage and stress. The bearsmith understood that they had both been far too close to the project and began to feel depressed again as she wondered if it was too late to fix it.

The bearsmith’s eye was drawn to the element chamber, and a dark realization began to sink in. She put on her goggles and approached the element that they had been forging together. She suspected that she had been looking at it under the lenses of her goggles for so long that she hadn’t zoomed out to see the whole of it in too long. One was always supposed to look at the entire element once the work was finished, but she hadn’t been doing it lately out of sheer exhaustion. This was one of the biggest in her collection, still very fresh and volatile, but with so much potential that it had always sent shivers of excitement up her spine. But when she found the strength to look at it from afar, to look at it through the lens of her own negligence, she was immediately awash with shame and horror.

The surface was covered in hairline fractures, which had clearly been spreading. Her fears were correct: she had been so fixated on working certain parts of the element that she had neglected to follow her own rules and had allowed it to become deeply unstable in many other places. She felt utterly awash in shame. She had been trying so hard to prevent the cub from falling into his traps that she had fallen into one of her own without noticing it. She hung her head and took a moment to let the disgrace smother her.

For a time, she fixated on the things she had done wrong. She was just a bear, indeed, and couldn’t be expected to be perfect, but in hindsight, she realized that the joy of having a cub had been in conflict with having someone new in her life, someone who had such a drastically different history from her own. They had a wonderful connection but didn’t know how to be around one another yet. They thought that they had trusted one another, but how could there have really been that level of trust when their lives had been so vastly different? Surely, that trust would need to be tested somehow and she wasn’t going to be the one to break it. The fact that she struggled to fully understand the cub’s mind just went to show how rough his life had been, how unlike the norm. She certainly couldn’t judge him for things that were not his fault. He was not troubled by choice.

With understanding, however, came further upsets. The bearsmith was perfectly familiar with getting hurt in the Forge, but had always found the effort to be worth it. Had she really put in all of this love and dedication, time and effort, all of it, just to have him emotionally slap her in the face and ruin all of their memories? She had always promised and always backed up the promise that she was there to support him in his healing, not to force rapid change. She had always said that it wasn’t about the mistakes we make, but how we deal with them afterwards. This was still true. But how could she make up for her own mistakes if he wouldn’t give her the chance? Hadn't he told her that she was also allowed to mess up? Hadn't he promised her that he'd always be there for her too? Was he truly so willing to abandon his principles and beliefs over a petty squabble?

Had he forgotten all of the good times they had together? What about racing around in wheelbarrows, or going to watch the performers in town, or reading philosophies of the wise spirits together, which had been teaching him helpful new perspectives on his troubles? Had he forgotten the soothing nights when he fell asleep in her arms as she scratched his fur, both of them safe and content together? She remembered moments in the market when he took her paw because he was scared, and the moments when he reached out because he needed her to come help him – not something he did a lot, but that only made it all the more meaningful when he did.

And even though she had already begun expanding her perspective so she could try to imagine how he might be feeling, she began to think back on all of the stories he had told her of his life before he arrived at the Forge, and though he had told her many of these tragedies, they were still but a small fraction of his life. She could extrapolate though, and even without any similar life experience, that overwhelming empathy overtook her and she began to weep for him, realizing finally how hard his life had been before they had met, to make him throw away such a beautiful element because of one-too-many fights. She understood that it must be easier for him to hate her and convince himself that she was the enemy, rather than admit that he had lost his temper yet again. She had always wondered if there was a limit to the number of times he could handle having to apologize. She realized that she could have had thicker fur and let more things go for his sake. In hindsight, it wasn’t so hard to tell when he was being inconsiderate, versus just tired or cranky. She probably could have handled being less sensitive to his moods. Maybe that would have made her safer for him to lose control around and still recover.

She thought back to other moments. Showing him how to clean his room, which led to him asking her how to wash his clothes. Gathering and drying herbs together, to help with his itchies or for calming tea. Once, when they had been walking back to the Forge together, the weather had gotten terrible and the cub had reached out and taken her paw, keeping her warm and calm as they traversed the woods in the horrid storm, safe because they were together. They had lovely moments making tasty foods and trying new treats. He had shared special secrets with her that he had never told anyone else, and she had done the same. She had made up stories for him and about him that had made him weep with emotion, and together they had been working on a unique language of secret gestures, just for them, for when words were too hard to say. Or what about the moments – and there were many – when he would wake up scared or confused, and come immediately to her, because he knew she would help him calm down and find his center? Some of the most meaningful moments of her life had been with him. Had he really forgotten it all? Did he really think it was all worth throwing away? Was it worth tainting all of those beautiful memories because he lost himself in his frustrations and stress?

Some nights, the bearsmith sat outside, puffing on her pipe with tears in her eyes, wondering what she could have done better, wondering how she hadn’t been enough. The sad thoughts often led her to wonder if there was any point in continuing to use the Forge at all. After all, in the end, elements were volatile. She looked at the scars in her fur, the most recent of which were still fairly raw from the incident. Was the Forge really worth it?

However, with time, she realized that this was likely not the only element that she had unintentionally neglected, having been so unhealthily fixated, and so the bearsmith decided to sort through her collection.

The chamber in which the elements were kept was cool and calm, so as to best preserve the materials. The first few elements she uncovered were some of her most treasured, and she realized that she hadn't put as much effort into them since her cub had become foremost in her mind. She moved them to the forefront of the chamber with a promise to dedicate her energy to them, what with all her newfound spare time.

She then sorted through the elements that had been neglected, but not by her. In some cases, she reached out to gauge interest in rekindling their energy, often to receive little more than silence. Many of these were recycled into materials, for the bearsmith knew there was no point in only one out of two people trying to keep an elemental fusion alive.

Lastly, she opened the elements that she had forged in her youth with her mentors, from back when she was first learning the ways of the world. The bearsmith opened these very seldomly, for they were among the most volatile and dangerous in her collection, riddled with poor craftsmanship. She reached out to her mentors in an effort to fix the elements, but her mentors were not interested in learning the new techniques and methods that the bearsmith had discovered since leaving their Forge. With great sadness, the bearsmith broke down those elements into components. It was her mentors’ lack of skill and interest in learning that had driven the bearsmith to become so willing to learn and teach smithing to others, like her cub, but she found no value in keeping their elements for the sake of sentiment any longer. It was time to move on.

Sorting through the chamber was grueling work that was hard on her heart, but somehow, the pain of doing it was diminished, for the pain of having lost her cub was so much worse than anything she felt from the loss of anyone or anything else.

After she had cleaned up her collection, she went around the Forge and began to pack up the cub’s things. When she was finished with his trinkets, she went into a secret cupboard and began to unpack it. She had planned, on his birthday, to give him a gift for every year that he would have grown up with her, had the world been a better, kinder place. The last of these gifts was a set of papers, which would have made him officially a part of her family, should he choose to sign them. Papers that he had wanted. She wept as she packed it all up, filled with sorrow over losing someone of such deep importance.

Needing to find a way to calm her restless and relentless emotions, the bearsmith began to wonder if her cub abandoning her could lead to better things. Surely it was not a pleasant or enjoyable moment in time and the loss was immeasurable, but it had led the bearsmith to refocus and find herself again. She was feeling more confident and stable in who she was now. She had checked her priorities and evaluated who and what was taking too much of her energy away from more important tasks and people. She was feeling much more attentive and aware of her work in the Forge and was dedicating more time to herself as well. Even if the agony of silence was still heavy on her, she was working hard to move forward and not let herself fade away.

She only wished she could have the chance to say something. Anything. And then it hit her…

She remembered what she had been told about conflict from the wise spirits, that talking through hard situations requires a great deal of emotional stamina. She had pushed proactive action so much, in a cub that was belatedly learning how to process his feelings, in a situation where he would find himself constantly having to apologize for his behavior. How truly and utterly exhausting that must have been for him, week in and week out. Perhaps the cub had decided that the anger he was so used to was far less all-consuming than their work together, and he was once again just trying to keep himself safe, the only way he knew how. If he were to speak to her, he would have to start thinking about everything that had happened. That would be quite the monster to face on one's own. Even if the bearsmith believed it was better to face it, even if she was willing to face it with him, she understood why the cub would not want to.

Her cub was not a fool either. Perhaps there was a part of him deep down that knew he had crossed a line and broken many promises, and if he was already feeling overwhelmed, it would make sense that confronting that voluntarily would feel impossible, especially if he expected the bearsmith to put him immediately to work, as she often had before. Anger was so, so much easier and perhaps he even wanted to spare the bearsmith from his moods. He had been exhausted for his whole life, after all. It hurt that he didn’t think it was worth the effort anymore, after all the effort she had given him, but she still understood that if he was already too stressed out to handle things as they were, thus leading to this calamity, admitting to himself that he had betrayed all of his promises to her was surely far too much to ask.

Ultimately, the bearsmith began to wonder… could she forgive her cub, without ever speaking to him again? Knowing that she had not been at her best, knowing where her cub could be coming from, and understanding far better than she had before how his hard life had affected him… could she forgive him… and herself? Could she let it all go?

She gazed out the open door of the Forge, as if still hoping to see his fuzzy face appear down the street, heading back to see her. A foolish wish, she realized, but giving up on it felt as if she was giving up on her cub, and that was something that she could not… no, would not do. So many others had given up on him already, thrown him out, quit because he was too much. If he was trying to do the same to her to keep himself safe, she would not punish him for it. She would not hurt him or lash out. She had promised to be his family and a better family than the one he had known. How could she live with herself if she broke that promise? How could she live with herself if she behaved the way his family behaved? No, she would not forsake him, not for any reason.

It would be impossible for them to go back to the way things were before, but the bearsmith understood that this was for the best, as both of them had surely realized that the way things had been was not working anymore. She had learned so much from this fight, learned so much about herself and her cub, and had a very strong idea of how things could work better going forward, given the chance.

What she could not do, however, was wait for him forever. It was unhealthy to be endlessly sitting at the door, wondering if and when he would ever find his way back to her. He had to want it as badly as she did for it to work again, anyway. She missed him desperately, but she knew that it could take a long time or a very terrible incident for him to start to miss her, and she already knew that there was no point in trying to force an unwanted lesson on an unwilling apprentice. She hated to admit the reality to herself, that he might never give himself permission to miss her.

Maybe someday her cub would come to realize that there was one bear out there who saw him at his very worst and still loved him and wanted to be his family. If there came a day when he wanted to talk again, to work things out, she would welcome that conversation in a heartbeat, without a second thought. But for now, she had to respect his wishes and let him go and be who he needed to be, until he was ready to come back.

With tears in her eyes, she lit the lantern outside. At very least, the light would be on if ever he was ready to come home.

Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash

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Note from the Author: Thank you, deeply, if you read this.

If you enjoyed this bit of writing, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where balance and deep healing journeys are central to the narrative. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs.

Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is coming in August, and Volume I is available FOR FREE during Smashwords’ summer sale!