I fall to my knees just inside the forge's entrance. My whole body is cold, and my vision is dimmed, as if some of the light in my eyes has been permanently devoured. The deep darkness! It's been too long. I'd forgotten its true terror. I glance around Runethane Yurok's old forge and, for the first time, begin to understand what being down here for so long did to his mind.

How heavily must the responsibility have weighed upon him? Failure here would mean being the one to let the darkest terror loose on the upper world—it's no wonder he became so harsh. It's no wonder that he refused to believe any other explanation for the murders other than that the darkness caused them. When I picture that terrible column of cold lightlessness tilting down toward Nthaze, I too find it difficult to believe that any mere dwarf could equal its potential for calamity.

I gather myself together and rise. This is no time to be kneeling on the floor and shaking in terror. I am a second degree! I am a guildmaster! My duty is to help Nthazes. Thus, I will work harder than I have ever yet since coming to Brightdeep.

I heat the titanium sheet again and return to hammering. At first, there's a desperation to my smashes. The clangs are loud, discordant. Doubt is impeding my accuracy and precision. Should I not be creating a weapon first? I didn't want to use almergris on the true metal just yet, not until I'd gotten around to reading Runethane Yurok's works on the substance. Perhaps that reason is just an excuse for my fear.

More distracting than any doubt over my craft, however, are my thoughts of the darkness. I imagine Nthazes being overwhelmed and turned into naught but a cold corpse. I imagine the dwarves around him being slaughtered. I imagine the darkness flowing out and up, filling the fortress, then bursting out into Brightdeep, extinguishing lanterns and life alike.

I'm insulting Nthazes by imagining this. He's just as strong as I am, more so when it comes to battling the force that just sent me fleeing. I must trust him. I must have the patience to wait for his victory.

I concentrate hard on the glow of the metal. Depending on the thickness, the color is different. I must get everything exactly even before I begin to bend. The metalworkers who prepared this sheet were good at their job, but I am better. I resume my beating; this time it's slow and even.

After some length of time and many re-heatings, I am satisfied that the glow is even. My next task is to bend the metal into shape.

I use the horn of the anvil for this task, and I do it cold. It bends easily enough, but never into the exact curve I need. I curse, realize I'm getting impatient again, and cool my head with a drink of beer—at some point I brought a barrel and some dried meat up, or maybe a member of my guild was kind enough to bring it down. Whatever happened, it doesn't matter. I refocus fully on the task at hand.

The back part of the helmet begins to take shape, the slow pressure of my hands and bodyweight alone curving it. Every few minutes, I hold the piece up and examine the reflections. By this method, if I gaze long and close enough, I can tell if the shaping is done or not.

Not quite, is always the answer. It's never quite done. Eventually, I resign myself to the fact that it'll never be totally geometrically perfect. There are still a few places in which the light bends a little oddly. It's very close to perfect though, very smooth, and because of the immense care I took with the hammering, it's as reflective as a mirror.

A mirror helmet? A lump forms in my throat. I place the craft back on the anvil and take a step away. Am I trying to imitate Vanerak? Has my fear of him reached so deep that even my forging is affected?

No! I curse myself. I am making armor of light. It will glow brilliantly, and as for the poem I will create, although its theme will be reflection, the reflection will be metaphorical.

Besides, all armor is somewhat reflective, isn't it?

Now for the final annealing and the quench in freezing water, and then to weld where different sections meet. After these processes, the first part of the helmet will be complete. The second is what I'm more worried about—for it is into the visor that I will incorporate the true titanium.

I'll come to that when I come to it. I turn the furnace on, though not to its highest setting. I insert the helmet and watch closely as it begins to glow. As expected, due to the complex shape, some parts, especially the edges, are heating up more quickly than others. It's become bright scarlet outlined in brighter yellow—not at all the kind of coloring I want to see.

With a pair of long tongs, I turn it over. I wait a while, then spin it into a different orientation, wait, and then adjust once more. The coloring is still a mess of different shades. I turn the furnace down lower. This should let the heat spread more even.

It seems to work. I only have to turn the helmet around a few more times until the color becomes a perfectly uniform orange.

Now for the real test: the quenching. I've readied the bucket already. I stick a finger into the chill and focus, calculating how long the metal must stay under for maximum toughening. Not long at all, I don't think.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The maneuver is going to be tricky—but the metal will heat up too much if I keep wasting time. In one quick and decisive movement, I pull it from the furnace with my tongs and plunge it in, open part down. I count half a second, manipulate the tongs underwater to turn the helmet upside down and angled diagonally.

I wait another half second and pull it out. Water drops run down, turning to steam and floating away before they can reach the edge to drip. I widen my eyes, sweep them around and over the metal, looking for any imperfections, even the merest hairline cracks.

I breath out a deep sigh. There are no flaws. I take up my welding-rod and this part of the forging goes easily as well, the lines molding together with only the thinnest of visible seams.

The glow in the lines fades. Half of my craft is complete.

Now for the next half.

I shape the next piece. I flatten out the off-cuts, lay them on top, and heat and hammer just as before. Yet now I come to the part I've been dreading: the addition of the true metal.

Firstly, there is the question of exactly how to incorporate it. Can I just heat it to white-yellow and hammer it on? Then, there is the question of where to hammer it. If I concentrate it all in one part, will the runes I graft there have too much power? Will the runic flow be disastrously altered?

If only there was someone to ask, or some book I could read, or a lecture I could attend. But secrets of this magnitude are not shared so easily. Perhaps in the deepest depths of the Allabrast libraries there's something—but for now, I'll have to experiment for myself, hoping from the bottom of my heart that nothing goes wrong.

I heat the bead of true titanium until it's a magmatic orange, roll it out onto the anvil. To shape, I'll hammer gently. I bring down my tool with just the slightest pressure.

With a peculiar ringing sound, the drop of true titanium immediately flattens out into a wide, misshapen circle.

Panicked, I pull the hammer back. I bite my lower lip and lean in close to examine. There are cracks throughout, and the edges are wholly uneven. Just this one strike has turned the bead into a mess. I groan and hold my head in my hands. How can I have blundered already?

I take a few deep breaths to calm down. This was only my first attempt, and the metal hasn't shattered into nothing, has it? I remind myself that even mundane titanium is a temperamental metal. At first, I could never get it to deform the way I wanted it to. True titanium, it seems, has this property to an extreme.

I reheat the wrecked titanium in the mold. Once more, it flows together into a bright bead. I let it cool to a slightly higher temperature, then place it on the anvil again.

I strike with only the slightest amount of force and it deforms like a dropped egg. I curse as I inspect the flattened, ugly mess. There's no improvement from my last attempt, and my face, distorted and silvery in the reflection, is twisted into a mocking smile.

The metal is mocking me. I bite back my rage and force myself to grin back at it.

"You'll reform to my will," I spit. "I'll shape you as I see fit. Just you wait."

Once more I melt it, once more I tap. The result is slightly better this time: not so cracked, not so uneven. I try again. Worse. Again—slightly better. Again—the best yet. Tap by heat by tap, I'm improving, getting used to the amount of pressure I need to apply. It's easier than I worried, and I lick my lips.

After just about one hundred attempts, I manage to make the bead into an even circle. My reflection in it is undistorted. Now comes the crucial decision-point: how am I to cut it, and where to place the pieces?

I decide to go for an even spread. I don't want to overly concentrate the strength of the metal in one place—that's just common sense, even without considering the runic flow. A piece of armor might be hit from any angle. Unfortunately, doing it this way means I'm going to have to cut the circle into many small pieces.

Will my diamond saw even be able to do this? Like so many aspects of forging, there's only one way to find out. I place the titanium disc in my vise and lay the saw-blade against it. I draw the diamond-edge back, push it forward. The metal screeches, but it's not the same kind of screech the tungsten made when I broke it into dust.

I take the saw-blade away to inspect the disc and see the slightest of scratches.

This is going to take a long time. But of course, I do not mind. The tricky part will not be maintaining my focus but rather keeping the cut straight and even over such a long period.

Back and forth, back and forth. I slowly get used to the screeching; I can almost imagine it's a deranged kind of music. Every few minutes, I take the blade away to inspect the evenness of the line. So far, so neat. The whole process is going better than I expected. My reflection remains undistorted. The metal seems to have calmed down.

It could just be biding its time, waiting for me to make some lethal error. Suspecting something, I slow. Eventually, after what feels like many short-hours, my saw-blade reaches the vise. I unscrew it and turn the near-cloven disc upside down, begin to cut from the other side. One short-hour later, it falls in half.

I hold the true titanium up to the light and see that the cut is perfect. This only makes me grow more nervous. There's something wrong here. I can feel it.

But what choice do I have? I can only continue. Over the next many hours, I make several more cuts, turning the disc into eighths. As the pieces grow smaller, the screeching sound they make as they vibrate grows more harmonious, until it's almost like they're singing.

Finished. The disc is in sixteenths. I lay them over each other and there is absolutely no visible difference in size. I press them together and hold them up to the braziers' flames, and the reflection along every side is like a mirror.

I lay them upon the regular titanium inside the furnace, placing them carefully along the top outside edges and also upon the center-line of the piece. I spend a good half-hour making sure each is exactly aligned, exactly symmetrical. Then, I turn the heat up to a little higher than I usually would, and wait.

The mundane metal glows red, orange, yellow. The true metal takes a little longer. Once it has reached yellow, and the mundane nearly white, I pull the sheet from the furnace and lay it down on the anvil. With utmost gentleness, I tap. The true metal sinks into the mundane instantly—the color evens out, the regular brightening slightly. I tap with the same amount of force on the other pieces. They meld too.

I breathe out a long sigh of relief. The part I was most afraid about is over. Now, all I have to do is shape it.

Once the metal has cooled down to shiny gray, I place it over the anvil's horn and push down. It does not bend. I push harder. Still, it does not bend. I hammer, gently then hard. No change.

Of course the metal would wait until incorporated before opposing me. Of course it would do that.

I nearly want to spit on it.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.