[Ironworks] To Bend Steel

[Eanos]

Fall 21, 510 AV The preliminary preparations had been made; the design finalised and the blade crafted. Care had been taken in producing the tool which would impart a charge into the blade, a catalyst for the magecraft which would then follow. The blade had been crafted such that the djed of the piece was already aligned as best he could to produce a blade which was strong in the plane it was designed to be used, a strength which had been reinforced by the gnosis mark which he wore on his arm. All that remained now was to start working on the glyphs which would create the altar upon which the final work would be done. A boundary to create a ward against external influences and then a pathway to realign the djed to create the effect he desired, an effect in this case to give the dagger additional speed. Speed seemed to him the obvious companion effect to the weapons strength for it was a thrusting weapon which relied upon a successful strike not battering its way through a defence and also because the speed would help it penetrate through lighter armours. It was not the only possibility and there were certainly other ideas which had occurred to him. Stealth would be one he’d like to try, though he wasn’t quite sure exactly how to achieve it, for it would make it hard for the strike to be parried or avoided if the strike was not easily seen. A small desk sat in the centre of the store room which he had appropriated for this experiment, a room whose heavy door was now locked with him inside. On the desk sat a rather inelegant block of wood which was scarred, scorched and battered from various uses around the forges, but driven into it was a small anvil, one whose spike was normally used to slip into the hardy hole of a larger anvil so that a small raised platform was created for finer work. This striking surface of this small anvil could not be seen for it was covered with a carefully folded but still rough cloth on which the dagger blade lay. The cloth helped to make sure that the blade stayed in place and was not quite so easily knocked askew as it would have been on the iron surface below. Various implements and writing paraphernalia were carefully stored around the edges of the room; pen, ink, parchment, but also buckets of fine and dry sand, the sort which was used for castings in the forge. The smith stood back from the door, having checked one more that the door was indeed locked and glanced around the room running a mental inventory of the contents as he did so. For most the room would have been a dark and murky place at that point for only a single candle was lit, and the flame on that one was only just starting to nibble down to create a pocket of molten wax. Alongside it on the shelf where it stood where four more just like it, though as yet unlit; each designed to burn for one whole day.

[Eanos]

For the Isur though the place was well enough lit that he didn’t bother to go over to the candle in order to study the parchment which he carefully unfolded, his fingers tracing each rune which had been carefully inscribed upon it. Quite what his Masters back in Sultros would have made of this he wasn’t quite sure, but then they were there and he was here so really it didn’t matter in the slightest what they might think. Of course it would have been nice if they had been here for then they would likely have pointed out certain key flaws in his design and concept, but such was the price of pride and circumstance that it would work or it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t then he hoped that he would still have left a blade which would serve the purpose of such blades even if it did not actually do what he’d hoped of it. It would be a long and complex work, this task that lay ahead of him, but the thought did not worry him overly for the crafts which were worthwhile all took time. A hurried job gave him no satisfaction and there was no point to such a thing. The most time consuming tasks would be the glyphing, which was an art with which he was still far from familiar. Indeed for an aspiring mage smith it was more than a little embarrassing that he was hardly a mage at all in terms of actually being able to use magic. Fortunately though the glyphs relied upon world magic and so did not place an additional drain on his own djed, that was some comfort because there would be a drain on that because he’d need to rely up his auristics skills in order to have any success at all with the proper construction of the glyphs. He did intend to experiment a little with the glyphs for he suspected that he might need to draw them more than once. But he also needed to start he realised with a jolt for he’d been standing there musing and not doing. Heading over to the carefully laid out supplies he grabbed a handful of the sand and made a careful circle around the desk, allowing the sand to trickle out to mark his progress. When he was done he had a guide for where to start drawing the first set of glyphs, and while it wasn’t necessary for this boundary to be exactly round or anything like it, still it allowed him to be sure that he’d have enough room inside the circle to work at the desk and not worry about standing on a glyph and smudging it. He took up some more sand and made a second circle a little bit further out and ran close to the walls of the room as he did so. With a final afterthought he removed the blade and cloth from the anvil and used sand to create a bed for the blade rather than use the cloth. Now he’d wasted all of the time that he could and it was time to start on the glyphing. He knelt on the floor by the outer circle of sand with charcoal in hand and considered the glyph before he started drawing it. Of course his glyphs were unlike those of almost anyone though they were much like those he’d been taught back in the Silver Tower, but it was the meaning of the things that mattered, not so much the form and so he’d already started to modify the forms to fit better how he saw it in his mind. This first ring of glyphs would be like the outer ring of a castle wall and its purpose would be much the same. The work he’d be doing inside the ring was a delicate reshaping of the djed of the blade and as such he wanted no random intrusions of djed coming in from outside. He couldn’t imagine what such might be or what might cause them, but if he was going to spend the next five days in working on the blade he wasn’t going to risk some outside influence creating some different and possibly random effect. He wanted a dagger which would be fast, he didn’t want to end up with a dagger that was fast in some other direction than in stabbing.

[Eanos]

He drew swiftly the first glyph, working with sure strokes to create something about the size of his head. It was simple enough in form and in plan it was much like the castle walls which had inspired his thoughts, with two lines for the wall and a curved line for the tower. Leaning back on his heels he took a moment to draw on some of his personal djed and transform it into a different form of vision and as he did so the aura of the glyph flared into life, standing slightly proud of the stone flag on which it had been drawn. He made a small adjustment to link the outer curve to the top line and nodded in satisfaction at the change in the aura which now stabilised a little. He shifted over to the next flagstone and drew again where the line of the sand guided him. Slowly, glyph by glyph the outer boundary came into being, each glyph checked both with normal eyesight and with an auristic one. Of course the glyphs themselves only really represented what he had in his mind, that much he knew. When the glyph as a whole was activated only then would the individual glyphs come together in the framework of his mind and become real. His notes carried the key to the construct in his mind, but until he put his mind to the activation and linked it all together then the glyphs were merely symbols. Likely experienced mages didn’t have to keep reminding themselves of the basics any more than he had to think about how to hold a hammer when smithing but for now it was useful to run the mantra through his thoughts in the pause between the concentration on actually drawing the glyphs. The outer boundary was complete and he ran his mind over the glyphs one by one, seeing them flare into life, a life quite different from that of mere marks and then die down as he flicked on to the next. The glyph as a whole might not yet be realised but still there was a power in the individual glyphs which would comprise the whole. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to have two barriers, one facing in and one facing out and now that he’d completed the first it seemed unlikely that he did. On the other hand though there seemed no harm in it either and it was all good practice. Still though, he paused before starting work to consider if it was necessary for there was no magic to contain and even if there were it wouldn’t affect him if there was some djed leeching outwards. It might even be beneficial otherwise it might rebound back into the work with just as disastrous effect as stray djed coming from outside. That decided him and he moved his mind on to the efficiency of the barrier already drawn.

[Eanos]

It was a truism that the barrier was not just two dimensional for all that it was drawn that way. Paper after all where glyphs were often drawn only had the two dimensions and yet the focus that it protected was also only in two directions. He’d covered this in his planning and yet it still it was something he wanted a few moments thought about before completing the barrier in his mind. As with the inner boundary there was still time to reconsider but this time he could see no reason to change his mind. As a smith he was used to working from plans and so understood the difference between two and three dimensions. So to now simply assume that it would work to only have a two dimensional construct defining a three dimensional space wasn’t something which sat comfortably with him. He was sure it wasn’t necessary, for it could be done in his mind but since it made him feel more comfortable there were two more glyphs to be drawn, one on the ceiling and one on the floor under the table. These were not the same as the runes which decorated the floor, these were round circles with careful markings inside marking the underground dungeons and mountain top towers of the citadels of his home city. Now he was comfortable with moving on to draw the trigger which he did out by the doorway and then it was done for the boundary. With the boundary drawn he was careful to move the tools he would need inside it. It was something he hadn’t tested, but he would feel a fool should his own boundary prevent him from bringing in a tool or a glyph when it was needed. With the charcoal he marked off the boundary as done and then rested it on the next two sets of glyphs that needed to be done. The anvil would be the focus point of the djed manipulation so needed a pathway constructed to help channel the djed in the direction he wanted, and then there was the fire, though that would be just a token. The pathway would be the hardest of the things still to be done and while he knew that it was always best to do the hardest things first when he was still at his most fresh, it was easier to know that than to do it. He rationalised that he needed more time to think, time to reflect and perhaps time to refine what he had in mind. In that light it made sense to leave it until the end though he knew in his heart that it was not the right thing to be doing. Still though, any experience with glyphing was something which he looked forward to and leaving the store securely locked behind him he headed back to the workbench and forge which he called his though in it was of course only borrowed. At the back of the workbench was some shelving and from it he drew a recently scraped sheet of parchment and a stick of rather finer charcoal than he’d been using to write on the floors before. He wanted to use as much of the space as possible for the focus so the first thing he did was to quickly sketch the shape of the hardy anvil in the centre of the parchment. With that in place he worked round it with the same boundary glyphs that he’d used back in the store. Outside it he added the curled glyph of the trigger and finally turned his attention to the focus. This was a part which often reminded him of a well for when the interlinked glyphs were completed then something very odd happened. He’d heard of off magic disciplines such as voiding and he had to wonder if this did something similar for he intended to place something within, something which went somewhere else and without damaging the parchment.

[Eanos]

The trigger activated the barrier which in turn controlled the focus. Now that the glyphs were all drawn he drew against some of his own djed and transmuted it to activate his auristic vision. Carefully he reviewed each glyph in detail and made a few minor adjustments as he did so. Each glyph glowed with its own power, infused into as it was drawn and completed but until the design was completed in his mind they were merely parts and not a whole. He ran his eye over it once more and drew the final glyph of the focus. As he did so the whole became one and to his auristic vision there was a marked change to the djed. What had been merely passive now become a thriving whole. Djed ran around the boundary, leaping from glyph to glyph, but it was still a passive throb. Likewise the trigger sat with a glossy sheen to it now. But the focus now had an extra dimension to it, a slick darkness which to his auristic vision lapped gently at the edges where the glyphs were still visible as bright hot spots feeding into the darkness in the centre. He carefully carried the parchment over to his anvil and laid it out on the surface, pinning it down in place with two small hammers. He took a step back to view it with some pride and then reached over into the forge and worked the bellows for a short while. When he was satisfied with the heat he reached in with his left hand and took hold of a coal from below the surface. He drew out the yellow hot coal and dropped it into the focus. The djed of the focus rippled and then calmed as the coal vanished into the inky darkness as though it had never been. He repeated the process with another half dozen coals and rebanked the forge so that it would retain its heat until it was needed by him the next day. As he locked the door of the storeroom behind him he realised that it had been a good idea to leave the pathway until after the fore had been created. It probably would have worked well enough the other way round but this way he did not have the worry about messing up the glyphs for the path as he messed about with the anvil. It was a bit of a remote risk but it made him feel happier, or at least a little more justified. He avoided thinking about it too much because that might reveal some holes in the logic and he knew in the back of his mind that the next time he’d do it differently. Lifting the blade off of the anvil, he removed also the sand, before placing the fire parchment carefully down in its place over the anvil. That he’d now changed the arrangement on the anvil three times wasn’t lost on him and he made a mental note not to forget this and to try not to make impulsive changes. That last he suspected was something of a forlorn hope because he was impulsive by nature, but now he was nearing completion of the preparations and he felt an excitement building inside him. Carefully he built a pile of sand around the edge of the focus which had been drawn on the parchment, but the result was somewhat irregular since he’d drawn the focus to what he recalled of the size of the anvil. He suspected that much of the sand would slip down into the focus when it was activated and he could only hope that the blade did not fall off when that happened. Muttering a prayer under his breath against that eventuality he balanced the blade once more on the sand.

[Eanos]

Now there was just the pathway to create and this he did swiftly on the desk underneath the anvil. Two boundaries he drew, one side of each running parallel to the length of the blade and then looping back on themselves and with just the one trigger. He transmuted djed again, feeling the first stab of the fatigue it caused as he did so. It wasn’t serious but enough to warn him that there were limits to his djed and that overgiving was an ever present problem. Fortunately the following days would be much simpler. It was time to set the whole thing in process now and for that he allowed his vision to flicker along each set of glyphs in turn and then back to the blade itself. All seemed well and so he took a deep breath and started to activate the glyphs. First came the warding glyph which would isolate this space from stray djed energies for the work was delicate. Standing by the door he made the small mark which completed the trigger glyph, for that was how he’d chosen to activate it and then he watched the boundary flare into life. It wasn’t instant, but in a matter of a heartbeat, the djed of the glyphs had linked and flowed into a new form. He waited a moment to see that it remained stable and then took the few steps needed to reach the desk. Once more he made the small mark to activate the trigger on the fire parchment and as he did so the focus came back to life, no longer mere marks on a parchment. The sand shifted and he had to reach out to catch the blade as it shifted. Heat reflected itself up to him from the focus and he balanced the knife as best he could on the sand. Clearly this was far from an ideal solution and next time he’d need to get himself a proper stand, that much was obvious. As the heat from the coals warmed the blade, and there was not enough of them to do more than that, for he’d not risk the temper of it, so the djed of the blade came to life, flowing more visibly in reaction to it. With a final tap of his charcoal stick the pathway was activated and the three glyph sets that he’d constructed were all now operational. He glanced over at his candles and noted that the first was now burnt down half way. It was a good thing that he’d completed nearly everything already for he was starting to feel fatigued. All that remained now was the most critical part. It seemed somewhat ironic to him that the part which defined whether or not the whole process was a success of failure was also the part that took no more than a few heartbeats to do. But like throwing a rock off a cliff, the initial action was simple and quick; the ending of it took time to finish and could be somewhat unpredictable in its effect. From under the table where he’d put it earlier in the day he took out the hammer which had been the very first part of the process of this task. It should be charged with the energy he’d planned, and indeed his still active vision showed that its aura was stronger than mere iron should have been. He handled it gingerly and brought it down lightly on the blade near the hilt. There was a muffled chink of iron on iron and then he dragged it down the blade to the point and lifted it off.

[Eanos]

The blade seemed unchanged and his heart rose into his mouth but he pushed aside the moment of panic and repeated the process. Still it remained the same and so he did it the final time and put the hammer back under the desk out of harms way. Still the blade was unchanged and its djed remained as it had been. Would it work? Had he done something wrong? He pushed the doubts away for he knew that the changes were not always visible. Closing his eyes he took a deep breath then opened his eyes and stepped away. It was time to leave it overnight and see what the morning might bring. The morning brought change with it, a change which was obvious as soon as he transmuted djed to activate his auristic vision. There had been a change in the djed of the blade; that much he could see from the doorway for now it had expanded beyond the confines of the metal in much the way that the aura of a man might do. Constrained by the pathway of glyphs it extended outwards by a hand span from the tip of the blade and djed sat in odd pathways around the blade and the glyphs which defined it. He walked closer cautiously, not that he was in any dread of the djed but because he wasn’t paying too much attention to where he placed his feet as he studied the changes. He marvelled at the way that the djed had become changed and how it had been triggered by the hammer, for clearly there had been an interaction for all of his doubts of the day before. He spent a good chime in contemplation of what had been created on the anvil, noting as he did so that the blade had cooled now almost enough for an ordinary man to take it up without burning his fingers. A flicker in the candlelight broke him free of the trance into which he’d fallen and while he could have worked in just the muted light of the dying coals and the brightness of the aura it seemed sensible to light the next candle and to allow it to add its feeble glow to the room. Was there something which he could do now that was going to be different from the day before? The question had vexed him to a good degree because he was sure that the answer ought to be yes! It had to be yes. But his mind said no. He was sure that he was missing something at this point, that there should be some change, some new ritual, something! Perhaps it was subtle was the only conclusion which he could reach. There ought to be something, something which would define the change, something he should be reading in the results of the actions so far which would guide him in the actions he should take today. If ever there was a time when he felt the lack of his own knowledge then this was such a time. Now was when he wanted to be able to go to a mentor and ask for guidance, and he felt considerable frustration for the lack of that ability.

[Eanos]

He was left to be doing the best that he could and hope that what he aimed for was simple enough that in fact the lack of finesse, the lack of understanding would not matter. He re-engaged his Auristic senses and checked all of the glyphs that had been drawn to ensure that they were all still operating as they had been. The changes in energy were there to be seen and some of them confused him a little, but his previous contemplation had not been able to make sense of the changes in the energy flows created by the world magic. He drew out the hammer from under the desk and once more struck it lightly against the blade where the hilt would sit and then drew it down the blade to the tip. He repeated the process again twice and set the hammer away safely. He felt excitement at having achieved something and could only hope that in magic was working as it should. It had to be surely? He convinced himself of it and left the storeroom for the day. He was back the following day at much the same time. This day was going to be different, for this day was the day of finalising the changes and for that purpose he carried a bucket of water. Not too much had slopped out as he carried it along the passages from the forges and he was sure that enough remained to complete the ritual and to lock in the changes. All it needed he decided was to soak the hammer in it for a cycle while he examined the blade and then it would be time to soak the blade in the water. One glance as he entered the room told him that something had happened in the time he’d left it alone, a change which meant the first he realised that he’d dropped the bucket was when water splashed up his leg and soaked down into his boot. The shock of the cold water caught his attention and he closed the door and turned the key. He couldn’t believe it and he certainly didn’t need his auristic vision to know that something had gone wrong. During the night the blade had acquired a curve to it, and a curve in the wrong direction. It wasn’t unusual for a blade to have a curve, many were intended that way, but none in his experience ever curved sideways, not daggers at least. A breath finally gasped its way out of his body and he walked forwards with his shoulder slumping to retrieve the blade. No point now in attempting to lock in the changes, not only was the magecrafting worthless, so was the blade. Irritation piqued in him and he was tempted to throw the worthless lump of steel at the wall. He restrained himself with an effort and instead took his anger out on the remaining glyphs, breaking their enchantments and returning the room to its mundane state. He was at a loss as to what might have caused such a change. Was it the way he’d used the hammer? Was it leaving the hammer there? Was it something else? Despair threatened to engulf him but he pushed it away with the anger that erupted afresh and this time he did throw the blade down on the floor as hard as he could hurl it. Iron sparked and the edge of the blade chipped as it rebounded from the stone flags and bounced noisily against wall before skittering to a halt across the floor. He strode from the room, kicking the bucket over and slamming the door behind him. It was time to find some work in the forge; hard heavy work to take his mind for now from the failure of this room.

[Baku]

Thou has written, and thou has completed, so I award thee the following.... Eanos: +4 Glyphing, +2 Auristics, +3 Magecrafting, Lore: Final Preparations for the Dagger, Glyphing and it’s Purposes, The Differences Between the Masters and Student, Knowing What You Want the Dagger to Do, Taking Glyphing One Step at a Time, Weighing the Necessities of What’s Needed in a Glyph, Keeping the Door Locked and the Room a Undisturbed Work Environment, How Glyphs Appear Under the Vision of Auristics, Examining the Results of One’s Work, Finding Frustration in the Lack of Guidance, Finding Anger in Failure(Stupid Unpredictable Magics) Additional Awards: 1 Side Curved Dagger - Useful for Tragic Comedy Plays, this dagger may be sharp, but will be more useful mainly as a means of distraction, causing a giggling glee of your foes in being threatened with it while a cohort comes from behind to gank them in their lungs. Additional Notes: An intriguing read, your descriptive writing is very good. Though Eanos tends to question and second guess himself a lot. Perhaps he should get a little of that “Just Do It” attitude. Of course, with Magecrafting, it’s sort of an expensive demeanor to take on. As such, do not forget to include the cost of materials and deduct such from the ledger of your CS for this project which has been figured to be 5 GM.