The Hobbit: The Long-Lake Smith
A Hamburg mill-foreman drowns saving a girl from a canal and surfaces in Lake-town as a fisher-orphan, a Khuzdul word he never learned still cooling on his tongue. The Doctrine that woke in him does not speak in menus or numbers — only a humming under the molars, a sour taste on a fraying oath, a low chord when something dying is willing to be eaten. He can teach stone to remember the smith who swore to it, forge iron that knows who paid and how to come home if stolen, and bind a man's word until breaking it costs him a piece of himself. His memory of his old life is the currency the forge demands, and it spends his mother's face first. Smaug is coming on a calendar only he half-remembers, a burned-village warlord is moving children south under Morgul-iron, and something in an empty tower far to the west has begun, very quietly, to hum back.