I am sure this has been resolved by now, but I am just wading through the thread.
There are lots of ways to pre-do something, but I went back to the first page and looked... you can't pre-craft Forgefather because you can't craft him until you have both parts, and the next step after getting the second part - is to craft him. Once crafted, the directions let you raise him as high as you want, whenever you want, in this tale. I took mine to level 14 after hatching him. Must have been a glitch. That is awful... Hope you were able to recover and make it to the end!