The Markwell Misunderstanding II: The Blackboard Invitation

by **Aedifalse** on March 25th, 2015, 11:35 am

Previous episode here.

515-SPRING-03

Aedi made his way yet again into the academic confines of the University of Zeltiva. This time, he had a defined goal, and that was the cryptic location uttered by Garath Markwell the day before after dismissing him brusquely upon his failure at the anvil. The entire incident was weird in the first place, which arose from a simple misunderstanding, but somehow the whirlwind of events led him here. He was determined to find his answers.

After getting lost several times due to his unfamiliarity with the campus landmarks, he finally found his way to the room that Markwell described, and entering he could hear the familiar voice droning on.

The door creaked as he cautiously made his way into the room, and the rumbling voice stopped. There was a small collection of people seated with their backs toward him, facing the large giant of a man known as Garath Markwell. The sudden interruption in the lecture, combined with Markwell's pointed stare, caused the classroom to swivel around and look curiously at the Isur.

Aedi sighed and began looking for exit points to run to.

"Being late is a bad precedent, Mister Aghanim," Markwell intoned, "Especially for someone who isn't even my registered student."

Okay, there was completely no need for him to say that, the young student thought desperately as he tried to make himself as unnoticeable as possible, drawing up the chair nearest so that he could sit down and avoid standing.

"Ahem as I was saying," Markwell continued, "the hammer, the anvil and the tongs are the implements that you will spend the most time around. And this is because you will need them to conduct the basic operations that make up the art of smithing. The tools don't make themselves, obviously!"

"The most simple action a blacksmith can take would be punching. Might anyone care to venture what that means?" The giant asked the class.

One of the students, a rough looking adolescent began to snicker, and he raised his hand.

"If one of you gives me a silly ass answer," Markwell began, and the boy quickly withdrew his hand. Evidently the decades of teaching had wizened the blacksmith to the antics of youth.

"Well then. The simplest thing to do is to create a hole in the malleable metal. Theoretically speaking, that should be simple. However, you don't want to punch off the metal and wasting the material. You want to create a hole instead, pushing the metal outwards to widen the hole."

Aedi listened diligently. Though he had received fragmented practical training while back in Sultros, he did not learn such methods in an organized manner the way Markwell taught. Feeling that it would be important to internalize these ideas, he made mental notes as Markwell continued lecturing.

"You can punch without making a hole as well, when you want to make indentations for whatever reason. However, you will have to do so with a chisel, like how a sculptor would do so. Not unless you can handle molten steel with your hands," Markwell finished, pointedly looking at Aedi again.

The young Isur mentally swore.

That git is going to keep bringing attention to me again, isn't he.

by **Aedifalse** on March 25th, 2015, 5:32 pm

Aedi pointedly ignored the teacher's provocations, instead choosing to keep a stony, neutral expression as he waited.

Seeing that the bait was not taken, the human continued without skipping a beat, "Next up, we have Drawing. You aren't going to be painters, so listen carefully."

The class sat a little straighter as they leaned in unconsciously.

"When you draw on a piece of metal, you aim to lengthen it by reducing its width and depth," He began, taking the chalk and scribbling unnecessarily on the board behind him. His drawing was completely illegible anyway, so it served more as a way to keep his hands busy as he talked and 'illustrated'.

"You have a cube of metal, and you want to make it longer like a pole. Using the edge of the anvil and a hammer, you can force the metal to go through the passage."

As the blacksmith continued talking, Aedi began visualizing the result. A cube of metal of similar dimensions, when pushed through a forced passage, would naturally have to grow longer if its other dimensions were reduced. In fact, a good analogy would be that of a crate of water.

When poured into a hollow cylinder, the water would no longer occupy the shape of the larger crate, but instead reduce its width and depth. The excess mass would have no choice but to go further down and occupy the length, thereby drawing it into a pole-like object.

While the teacher had an overly technical way of describing it, he found that he could understand it better than drawing analogies from easily understood concepts.

Markwell glanced across the class as he spoke and gestured, his eyes briefly flitting past the Isur. They held eye contact for a split moment before the surveying continued, and Aedi began thinking about where he went wrong the day before.

The main problem after his mistakes and the follow-up corrections was that the straight blade became a scimitar, then an imitation of a wavy blade. If he reheated the metal sufficiently, he could treat it as a fresh block of metal and draw it into a straight shape again.

However, he remembered learning that it was highly objected to, because doing so would weaken the material and cause it to lose some sort of structural strength.

Reforging at lesser hands will merely cast yet another flaw.

While he knew of some Isurs who took pride in reforging and adding enhancements, the student did not possess enough hubris to know that such techniques were far from his level of proficiency. To that end, it was best that he avoided doing so. If such a method would not work to help fix his mistakes yesterday, what then could it be?

Surely, this lecture held the answer.

by **Aedifalse** on March 26th, 2015, 12:49 pm

"The next operation I will talk about is shrinking. Essentially it's the same as drawing, but instead of pulling out the metal, the aim is to make it thicker by conforming its dimensions."

Markwell carried on talking as he scribbled more diagrams on the blackboard. Aedi firmly believed that they looked like surrealist art, and he wondered if the other students thought so as well. From how the teacher was explaining, it seemed that shrinking could have been used to correct the uneven texture of the blade. He thought carefully of how the hammering went yesterday, and concluded that perhaps he might have indeed been attempting to shrink the wavy edges, but doing so the wrong way.

Based on Markwell's description, the student attempted to inscribe not the words into his memory, but the imaginary reconstruction of it. He had always been a more visual learner, and in the end words seemed kind of meaningless to him; it was but only one of the mediums of expression.

From the lecture, he reconstructed the image of the setting from yesterday again. The blade's edge was wavy and its depth was uneven. If he was able to maintain the appropriate amount of strength when pounding the wrong protrusions, as well as aiming the angle towards the indentations in the depth, he would be able to effectively shift the mass of metal from the width to the depth, from the protrusion to the indentation, solving two problems effectively in one go instead of creating one problem after fixing another.

"Similar to that, you can upset by making a metal thicker in one area through shortening in another. If that sounds like similar to drawing or shrinking, don't worry. The main difference lies in the use of heat."

Rather than using pure force as a passage to push the malleable steel around, upsetting made use of heat to direct the shape of the object. By heating the end of a rod and hammering it flat on, it would flatten out like a mushroom. Alternatively, one could choose to place the hot end at the curve of the anvil and hammering the cold end to force the hot end through it, essentially mimicking the operation of drawing metal.

Aedi took the moment to think carefully. These operations all sounded awfully similar, and each of them seemed only slightly different in their utility. It might just be possible that any of them would be able to help fix his problems. He cursed at himself, as his blacksmithing knowledge was so basic it was laughable, mostly due to his insistence when young to directly learn how to translate blueprints of weapons into reality instead of learning the important, albeit boring, fundamentals right.

It was a pity that his parents did not force him to do so, because they were more focused on him learning magecrafting right that they unintentionally neglected his competency in shaping steel. No matter, he felt that the answer was close at hand as the lecture was wrapping up.

by **Aedifalse** on March 31st, 2015, 11:00 pm

"Finally, the fifth basic operation is to bend. While simple in practice, it requires the most care to avoid it all coming to naught," Markwell droned on.

Aedi took in the knowledge like a sponge. He knew that metal could not bend at overly crazy angles, but it was reassuring to hear a more precise description of the allowable angles, since that had not been communicated to him before. Due to his preference for making weapons, the products of his craft tended to require little bending, since blades are mostly straight, and even the few exceptions only needed a slight slant.

The use of an anvil would help to secure the metal in place before one used a hammer to bang it into curvature, but as an Isur he had the benefit of simply using his left arm to force the metal into a slope if he desired.

From his experience when young, he also recalled that by using his arm he could bend the metal while maintaining better structural integrity than if he were to do it with tools like the humans did. He suspected it might have to do with the holy properties of the Isurian arm that might have influenced such behavior.

"While each of these methods are important and fundamental, the real magic occurs when you use any combination of them," The teacher continued.

Aedi's ears perked up when he heard that, and suddenly everything became much clearer to him. While he had been hammering and crafting in the past purely from intuition and by repeating motions that he learned by observing other blacksmiths, it was refreshing to hear the methods being categorically stated. It was even more illuminating to be reminded in a precinct manner that the true difficulty lay in knowing which methods to use and how to combine them.

That had been his problem yesterday! Due to the incomplete nature of his education, he had been attempting to correct his mistakes with one method at a time, and on hindsight he realized now that other than keeping calm, the correct solution was to use a combination of methods to get the best effect.

It was as if a bulb lit up in the Isur, and he understood now why Markwell had gave him the opportunity to attend this lecture. The experienced giant had spotted the fundamental deficiency in his knowledge, despite his intuition and past experience, and knew that laying out the basics properly and clearly was what he needed to jolt the answer into the student. It was not that Aedi did not know how to do it, it was that he did not know what to do.

Aedi jumped up suddenly, bowing apologetically to the other students for the commotion, and quickly led himself out of the room. He was inspired, and he finally knew how to fix it. While the professor asked him to come back to the smithy the next day, the Isur concluded that he could not let such a travesty to remain in the workshop even for a day longer. He was going to fix it, and he was going to fix it now.

Garath Markwell watched his newest not-apprentice leave the room amidst the shadows of murmurs and he smirked to himself as the Isur left.

by **Aedifalse** on April 1st, 2015, 2:35 pm

The hasty student rushed into workshop, and found his mistake left in the same condition as he left it yesterday. It seemed that Markwell had not touched it and had kept it in its previous condition. He now knew what had to be done. First, the blade was now too curved and wavy, and it had to be first shrunk into a more stout, bar-like size before being properly drawn out into a slimmer, blade-like shape.

He got to work immediately, gripping the cold bar with the tongs and inserting it into the roaring central forge that had already been prepared by other apprentices in other workshops that were all sharing the same system. It was a slow process waiting while turning the unfinished metal as if he were roasting game over a pit, but it began incorporating the heat to glow red hot, signifying that it was ready to be tempered.

Using the tongs securely position the blade atop an anvil, he turned it so that the wavy edge would be on top. He used his impervious arm as a hammer, forming a fist and pounding the protruding wavy edges to push it down. By consistently holding the bar onto the anvil, the metal that was smashed downwards could only fill in the missing wavy edges below, as well as sidewards.

Time passed by as he moved the bar up and down the anvil, pressing it down while hammering his fist on the edges. When the edges were sufficiently flat on both ends, he flipped it such that the flat of the blade would face the top, and continued the same process of shrinking so that he could even out that dimension.

When those edges were sufficiently trimmed to his satisfaction, he embarked on the process of drawing out the blade, which was now more like a rectangular bar of iron. There were three main steps to do. Firstly, the rectangular block would be flipped ninety degrees to rest on its neighbor dimension. Secondly, it would be pushed slid up or down the anvil to ensure that its entire length would get equal contact with the anvil. Thirdly, he would pound upon the metal with his blessed arm.

Usually this step would be done in pairs, with the more experienced blacksmith positioning the metal and doing the first two steps, while the less experienced apprentice would execute the third step with a sledgehammer. In other words, exactly like how he and Markwell did so yesterday.

Doing it solo was more difficult, but he had the benefit of his gift from Izurdin, and its powerful and magic properties gave it a similar force and utility as that of the supporting sledgehammer and he continually repeated the three steps of drawing out the blade.

It was only a matter of time when the blade was drawn out to the appropriate length, and he let it down to rest on the anvil, using his arm to pinch the end of the iron bar so that it could serve as the sharp tip of the blade. After letting it cool, he ran it silently across a grindstone, sharpening the edges so that the blade would actually be capable of cutting and not just causing blunt trauma.

The majority of the day passed by but the passage of time was unnoticed by the Isur, and when he finally took the finished blade away from the grindstone and placed it triumphantly back on the anvil, he heard a slow clap coming from the entrance of the workshop.

Markwell grinned.

by **Aedifalse** on April 4th, 2015, 4:23 pm

Garath Markwell clapped slowly as he stepped forward from the entrance, breaking the Isur's engrossed spell. Wordlessly, he strode towards the anvil where the finished blade sat, inspecting it with his keen eyes as he noted its completed shape along with its other imperfections.

The blade was slightly crooked, and the metal likely structurally weaker than desired, but the basis of a blade was there. Forged welded and ground to a keen edge. While not holding up like a proper blade should, it was more than capable of taking a life, or protecting one's own. It was a blade in its own right, despite its flaws.

"Congratulations, Mister Aghanim," The blacksmith rumbled, directing his attention to the watching Isur. "It looks like you did take in what needed to be taken in."

"Actually, Professor Markwell, I - " Aedi began, suddenly remembering how this entire saga came about, and was insistent on making things right.

Markwell waved a hand casually, interrupting, "I know that you aren't a student here, that's why you were at the Inquiry Counter weren't you?"

He chuckled at the student's widened eyes and continued, "But I just thought that you had the look of a smith of great potential, and it would be quite wasted if you did not further your competency in it. I take it that smithing is not your original skill?"

Markwell's observation as astute. Aedi nodded and replied, "My primary motivation has always been that of the arcane enchantments. However, I believe that your esteemed establishment's College of Djed is no longer in operation...?"

As the Isur's voice trailed off, the blacksmith grunted in confirmation, "There was a certain, ah, incident. For the time being, the University won't be matriculating any aspiring magi. Still, I felt that you were sorely lacking in one area where you have potential in, and I really hate wasted potential."

There was a pause as both parties thought, and Aedi broke the silence, "So what now, Professor?"

The human giant bellowed in laughter and clapped a hand on the diminutive apprentice's shoulder, "Now you're going to explore your potential with me, aren't you?"

He sized up Aedi for a moment as he tweaked his beard, then finally observed, "I see that your interest lies in making lethal equipment. Why don't you take a course on weaponsmithing from me, and I'll teach you what I know of weapons, eh?"

Aedi certainly agreed with that thought, seeing as he had experienced first-hand the professor's teaching ability. However, he voiced an objection, "What about my fundamentals? I feel like I did not have a strong background in the foundational skills of blacksmithing."

"I will teach them to you along the way as we explore the variety of weapons in Mizahar," Markwell replied easily.

He thought for a moment, then nodded to himself and continued, "Why don't we try it out tomorrow, eh? Same time same place. Remember to deposit the thirty nilos at the counter before you make your way here."

"It's a deal," Aedi declared firmly.

Next episode here.