Five Keys.
One count.

The Anvilbound Keys

When the First Smiths struck the World Anvil, they did not seal the Guild with a wall.

They sealed it with five Keys.

Each Key was forged in a different heat. Each one carries a piece of the original oath. They were never meant to sleep in one vault. They move. They change keepers. They test whether the hand that holds them will still be there when the Anvil calls the roll.

A Key does not make ye a Smith.

It marks that ye stood close enough to the Anvil to be counted.

When the snapshot falls, the Guild will look only at who holds the Keys. Not who held them once. Not who meant to keep them. Only who still has them in hand.

• Iron. The first heat. Honest metal. It cooled slowly and kept its word. Most hands that were counted held iron.
• Verdant. Left too long by the quench troughs, and the metal took root. Grown as much as struck.
• Starforged. Quenched under a sky the hall should not have seen. It hums on clear nights.
• Veil. Gold that drinks shadow. The forge record for this heat is one line long, and half of it is scratched out.
• Emberlord. The last heat, drawn from the heart of the Anvil itself. Already warm. It has never fully cooled.

They are tradeable. They circulate on purpose. That was always the design. The oath travels with the metal, not with a single name carved into it.

They are not a promise of class, title, or destiny inside the collection. They are proof of proximity: ye were close enough to the Anvil to hold one of the five original seals when the Guild took its count.

After the snapshot, a Key remains what it always was, an Anvilbound artifact. It can still be kept, sold, or passed. It simply no longer changes who was standing at the Anvil when the roll was called.