The stock racks of the royal smithy’s lowest tier held everything the mountain worked with, and Kaelira walked their rows with three hundred dwarves tracking her every step.
What stopped her sat in the open, because down here it didn’t need guarding: a short rack standing apart from all the others, holding a handful of metals that drank the forge-light and gave nothing back. She drifted toward it with the tour forgotten, and when her fingers stopped a polite distance from the nearest core, Brokk answered before she could speak.
"Adamantite. Raw cores, unrefined." The First Hammer’s voice took on the flat tone of an old wound. "The best of our mines only give up a ton of it in a good decade, and the crown reserves every gram, by the same council that counts anvils. A master petitions for the right to attempt a working the way you’d petition for a duchy. Old Dain there has asked the crown every year for the last twenty years."
"Twenty two," Dain corrected, from his bench.
"It is the rarest of metals..." Kaelira’s fingers hadn’t moved. Neither had her eyes. "Parts of Quin’s armor are made from adamantite."
"Oh...?" Brokk raised an eyebrow. "So you know how to wield it... Since you’re about to show us what you can do, why don’t you take some? It’s not like the king or the council will punish us now, will they?"
"Nope," Quinlan confirmed. "They won’t."
"..." Those words sat funny with quite a few listeners. It meant they lost the war and their conqueror made it clear the old powers no longer had the authority they used to, but it also meant that...
The greedy fuckers on the council no longer had the authority they needed to force them into using their talents for unreasonable requests.
"So, Kaelira?" Quinlan asked nonchalantly, picking up a hefty ore and tossing it high into the air. A hundred dwarves went wide-eyed, resisting the collective urge to lunge at the metal and protect it with their very bodies.
"Is this what you’d like to use?" he finished, catching the ore without difficulty.
The words brought the smithy to a standstill all over again.
Brokk had offered it herself, but this... This was the rarest metal on Iskaris. He showed zero humility and even took the offering from the dwarf to make it himself.
He said it the way he’d offer fruit from his own orchard, already turning to look for where the crucible tongs were racked, and the sheer, breathtaking entitlement of it rippled up the tiers in real time. Crown-reserved adamantite, handed to an elf, in front of three hundred dwarves...
But nobody stopped him. That was the point, and everyone understood it at once. Nobody could.
’The whole mountain is his now, as far as he’s concerned,’ Brokk thought as the giant rolled his shoulders loose. ’His entire body language screams it.’
It should have enraged her. She’d expected, when she finally met the mountain’s new master, to grovel or to burn. She had not expected him to hand out the crown’s treasury like table bread.
And the elf refused it.
Kaelira stood before the rack that held her people’s every written dream about the deep metals, hand hovering an inch from a core of raw adamantite, and the hall watched her want it with her whole body. Then her fingers curled closed on nothing, and dropped back to her side, and she stepped away.
"Not today," she said. "I promised you that it’d be a quick little session."
Quinlan set the core back on its rack with a small smile, and three hundred dwarves quietly started breathing again.
She walked past the crown’s rack, past the orichalcum stock and the coiled mithril drawing-wire, down to the mon racks where the hall’s daily working steel lived, and began flicking her fingernail along the bars.
*Tiing. Tiing. Tonk.*
She pulled one out.
The murmurs started on the second tier and died of confusion halfway down, because nobody could build a sentence out of what they were watching.
The elf had been handed the mountain’s holiest rack, and she was down in the cheap stock, choosing hearth-steel by ear like a housewife thumping melons at a market stall.
Two bars of plain hearth-steel.
A length of old cart-spring iron, the kind apprentices ruined their first punches on. And a single dark bar of starforged steel, the meteor-metal the hall kept for mid-grade missions, the only thing in her arms worth more than a good dinner.
One bar she flicked, frowned at, and slid back with a click of her tongue. Later that night, a master would pull that bar out, cut it open, and find the cold shut hiding at its heart, and would sit alone with the discovery for a long time.
Quinlan, meanwhile, was done with his shirt.
He never touched a button. The weave stirred against his shoulders like something waking from a nap, poured down his arms and chest in one silken sheet, and gathered itself around his neck as a plain grey work towel, because [Synchra] had been listening and knew forge work when she heard it ing.
The Primordial Villain stood in the red-gold light of the royal smithy in nothing above the waist but the towel and a necklace of woven leaves, two meters of scarred, sculpted primordial physique.
"Holy Son!" Elowen’s cry cracked across the hall. She had been holding her posure with both hands for what felt like an eternity in this dusty, smelly, heated place meant for filthy midgets, and this was the blow it broke on. "What are you... that is LABOR! Forge work! There is soot, there are sparks, it is beneath you, you are the Holy Son of the First Elf, nobles do not..." Her voice achieved a pitch that made two apprentices wince. "Your hands!"
"I’m afraid my hands are a lot dirtier than you presume."
"N-no, that..." Her protest sailed on, but the hall had gone deaf to it, because the upper tiers were having a crisis of their own.
The female half of them hit the railings as one, three tiers of apprentices and more than one master leaning out over the drop for a better angle. On the third tier a rail groaned in honest warning as an apprentice went half over it and had to be hauled back by her apron strings.
The male half saluted the shirt.
A hammer-butt knocked twice against an anvil’s horn, then a second answered from the racks, the smith’s salute offered in perfect sincerity to a garment, to the shirt that had cleared itself off the instant real work came calling.
"Now that," an old master declared to the tiers at large, sooty eyes wet with feeling, "is clothing made for real men."
Brokk looked at Elowen’s stricken face and smiled for the first time since the sealed door had opened, slow and deeply satisfied.
"Dirty hands are what legends are made with, lass," the First Hammer said. "Sit your delicate little butt down and be a good girl, okay? Pay attention to your Holy Son instead of screeching. I have the feeling you’ll learn something interesting about him today..."
"Hah?! Watch what you say, you dirty little-"
"Sit," Quinlan spoke up all of a sudden, his tone carrying zero tolerance for refusal.
Elowen sat down.
On a dwarven bench.
Without checking it for soot first, which by her standards constituted a spiritual crisis, but there were larger ones underway.
Kaelira had claimed a forge. The first bar went into the coals, and the shy, stiff-shouldered elf who had walked into the hall an hour ago disappeared, and the smith came out.
The population of the royal smithy of Elvardia arranged itself around one forge like a theater, masters in front, apprentices hanging off the rails, and the dead standing silent guard by the door.
She worked the hearth-steel alone first, breaking each bar down, driving the grain straight, and the muttering began on the second fold.
"She shortened her stroke."
"Watch the elbow. Watch the elbow. She felt the shear plane."
"Who taught her that? Her technique is unorthodox..."
"She’s self taught, lass. That’s the point. Were you even paying attention?"
"Umm... It’s hard..." a young apprentice muttered bashfully, sending the shirtless giant a quick glance.
On the second tier, Vorn discovered his arms had e unlocked somewhere around the fourth fold. He locked them back. By the fifth they’d e loose again on their own, and this time they stayed that way.
As for the Primordial Villain, the conqueror, the terror of the age, the man Brokk had promised would teach Elowen something: he had stationed himself directly behind his smith lover, wrapped both arms around her from behind, spread his palms flat over the ridges of her abs, hooked his chin over her head, and settled in to watch her hammer, content as a dragon on a hoard and exactly as shameless.
The hall stared.
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