I dreamt the anvil was breathing

I was standing at the edge of a forge that wasn’t mine, but I knew it. The anvil—old, pitted, scarred with decades of hammer strikes—was rising and falling slowly, like lungs. Not in rhythm, not steady, but in some deep, unconscious pulse. I reached out to touch it, and the metal didn’t burn. It hummed. And for a second, I felt what it had absorbed: every strike, every cry, every silence between them. Then I woke up to the sound of my own breath, and the room still smelled like iron and cold ash.