6.2 A Forge for Two

General Summary

Day 41

The morning is quiet for all of us - tea, breakfast, Hella practicing doing her chores with magic and Alder subtly interfering just enough to make her work harder.   Shei seems lost in thought and I settle down beside her. After seeing Bran last night, I know I should be more conscious of my people’s emotional state. This must be hard for her.   Indeed, staring into her mug, she tells me she was overwhelmed in the fight yesterday. It seemed like everyone else knew their roles and reacted swiftly but she couldn’t. All the ideas she had were about stonework and it didn’t seem like they would help.   This is a sweet sentiment and a reminder to me of how everyone bears the weight of their own responsibility. I would not have expected Shei to turn the tide of that fight, not because I underestimate her but because the Ingan seems precisely constructed to oppose her magic. I try to reassure her of this, and it seems to help. I also remind her that she is not here to fight and be useful. I asked her to come because we thought she would like seeing the mine. We all have a responsibility to our own happiness as well.   She, too, feels the magical energy that now emanates from the mine. It feels special, and she wonders aloud if there are places like this on the home side of the Barrier. It’s a mystery that I hope we can unravel one day.   On this side of the Barrier, she wants to build a town at Lone Mountain Keep. It will be good for our people to have their own spaces to inhabit and make into home, instead of all moving into the abandoned Keep where oathkeepers once fought oathbreakers.   We both think of home, for a little while. Her family is from the North, and the Collective would have to get past the Empress herself to get to them. She’s surprised that I’m from the Frontier, and that my family are farmers. I guess I should be used to that reaction, but she’s the first person I remember telling. It’s kind of nice how long it takes me to elaborate that my family are not high nobles, not small nobility, not even Frontier nobles. I think I might still be a farmer at heart - tending to my people and hoping that they will stay safe, sheltered, and protected from harm.   Eventually conversation lapses and I go to find Bran, who has been silently working a ways out of camp. He has constructed a fairly complex magical circle with glyphs for change and transformation, but not quite the sort I work with.   “I can’t think, I need to know,” he tells me, “Thalien has always had a way of leaving me with puzzles to solve,”   He has decided that he needs to be more than an axe. An axe is powerful but it is slow and limiting. It takes both of his hands to wield and it is more of a weapon than a tool.   “If I were to forge myself as a tool, what tool would I be?” he asks me. He’s sketched several tool/weapons, mostly one-handed axes with a hammer on the flat side of the axe. He wants to be a builder and a protector, not just a fighter.   I’m excited at the prospect of forging again with him! I have a single memory of forging with blood - and if there was ever a time to pour my magic into a forge it would be now, for Bran.   We join our magic and he begins the process of figuring out what sort of tool he must forge from the metal in the mine; the forging must pull on fate. As I feed him energy I can feel him swimming upstream against the rapids. After a while he drops to his knees, pale-faced and sweating, but I feel all the jumbled pieces fall into place around him.   It takes us half an hour to shake the exhaustion of...whatever fateful magic Bran was working. Then, we head into the mines all together with Bran in the lead. He is hesitant at first, but becomes more sure as we continue on. Even when we reach a sealed tunnel that bears a warning of unstable structures and collapses, he pushes forward without a second glance.   Indeed, we come to a rockfall and he immediately starts moving stones by hand until Shei forcibly stops him. He is visibly frustrated, which is rare for him. He tells us that he feels blind, like fate refuses to guide his hands to move the right rocks.   Just like we’ve been teaching Hella not to always rely on her magic, this is a good reminder. Now we can rely on Shei to instruct us in which rocks can safely be relocated and which must be untouched. Partway through it occurs to me that we could try casting as a circle, joining our magic under Shei’s guidance.   It still takes us the better part of the day but it goes much faster once we have combined our energy (with the exception of Alder, poor thing). Finally we have cleared a 10m space and it feels like the mountain wants this to happen. When we’ve finished the ceiling is glass-smooth and twinkles with visible magic.   As we progress we come to a broken stone bridge crossing a chasm. After Hella and I coordinate to produce the necessary shadows, Alder simply...steps through middair to the other side...allowing the rest of us to cross using a rope that we stretch across. Especially after he has been lugging rocks by hand, it is a potent reminder of his skill.   The magic feels stronger as we get deeper in the mine and start finding abandoned carts and tools.   The next warning that we find says simply that beyond this point, only “senior journeymen” magic users should continue. This means that Alder, Hella, and Shei return to the bridge to make it more passable. Bran and I continue. There is still a lurking fear in my mind that whatever magical ranking system they had a thousand years ago means that even I should be cautious here, but remembering Kadia’s acknowledgement of my status quiets my concerns.   Five minutes later, the structure of the mineshaft becomes squared off and regular, like we are inside a building and not a tunnel deep in the earth. The darkness fades as we find sconces with dim, purple-blue magical light steadily glowing in them.   And we pass rooms of abandoned tools - pallets of metal rods, pieces of timber, all in much better condition than I would expect after hundreds of years.   At last we come to a wide open space with a nearly visible fountain of magical energy at a single anvil. Arcane circles are carved into the floor - one around the anvil and two others nearby. It is a forge for at least two people - one to shape the metal and one to weave the magic.   I can see fire glyphs on the walls and I assume that the circle on the floor has to do with transmutation magic, but it is in Dwarvish and I can’t read it.   Bran is spellbound, “It’s like I’ve stepped into a place that says ‘welcome home’. This is a place where named weapons are forged. The tool we forge here will be more than I expected it to be,”   To my complete and utter surprise, I’m flooded with another memory,  

There are five of us in a working. Me, Alwen, Tira, Mistress, and someone familiar...the person working the metal is part of Mistress’ family, not mine. We’re working in a space open to the air, deep in a jungle where we have constructed a primitive forge to do magic at a place that is sacred. The weapon we fashion is more of a scythe than a staff. The staff is set with runes into which we pour molten metal. It must be quenched in heartsblood. Each of us has dripped blood on molten metal. It is named and dedicated by my Mistress, formally. She speaks as the Fourth Hand of Darkness. The blade stops being metal and becomes a piece of solidified shadow. It brings the night and casts the Empress’ shadow wherever it is carried. It wraps its wielder in her gentle, warm darkness. It is the Dusk Reaper. I remember making it and standing with this weapon in my hands.   I remember standing with it, crying, because I am alone. My apprentices are not here, though they should be. Thalien is gone. Lyssa and Dal are gone. None of them can give me the strength I desperately want in this moment. I walk through an enemy army, alone, with the Dusk Reaper. Where my shadow falls, the enemy falls, as though my shadow is a thing of living blades. As I walk, people die by the dozen, without me so much as moving against them. When I reach the other side of the encampment, I stand before the setting sun and five thousand enemy soldiers have died where they stood. All of that death clings to the scythe in my hand, like each and every one offered up their heartsblood in sacrifice. That energy, I offer up to the Empress. It is heart-wrenching and sad, that I’ve done this thing alone. At the same time, I know that the Empress receives the energy and returns it to the people the army took it from. This is justice. But there is a part of me that knows there was absolutely nothing any of those soldiers could have done in the shadow that I cast. It was not a fight, it was a sacrifice.

  The name rings in my head - Dusk Reaper. The weapon that Alwen had named in his letter to me, along with the Day Breaker. I also remember the rite from the Second Hand of Darkness. I wonder if I had met him when he was just the Fourth Hand…   But these thoughts should wait. This is Bran’s time.