(DAY6)

I stood next to Durin in a stark grey stone room. The room was so hot I was sweating my clothes through in moments. My breath was coming out in short pants, as deep breaths made my lungs burn. On the far side of the room was a heavy stone door that glowed a dull red here and there along the bottom. Durin stood beside me. He spoke what was clearly a ritual phrase, all the edges and pauses worn away by repeated use “First you must harden your heart in the test of fire. Do not doubt, do not falter, for on that path lies death.” Durin opened the stone door, I swear it was at least a foot thick. On the other side of the door was the heart of the furnace where the dwarves melt iron and steel. A catwalk of a strange silvery metal, led out to a rock glowing reddish orange that stood alone in a lake of lava it’s color a mixture of butter yellow with points of white. Durin handed me a potion bottle. Not a vial, a full-on bottle. Think a fifth of Gin.

I took the bottle and asked Durin “What is this? a potion of fire resistance?”.

Durin chuckled, the rituals utterances done, “Why would ye want that? It’s a high tier potion of regeneration. This potion will keep you alive for 10 to 15 minutes. You walk in there of your own choice. You start by standing at the door and meditating. Take a sip of potion. Step, repeat. If your mind is strong, you can reach the catwalk. When you do, or you can’t handle any more, you drink all of the rest of the potion in one draught. If your heart is very strong, you can reach the stone in the middle. When you have gone as far as you can, open your character sheet. When you can’t handle it any more, or your health gets below 10% come back and knock on the door. We will let you out and you will have faced the Test of Fire. If you pass the test of fire, we move on to the next test. If you fail. We try again tomorrow. Durin pushed the door shut behind him.

I stripped down to nothing, putting everything but the potion bottle into my inventory. I walked to the door and opened it. I opened the bottle and took a sip, leaving the cap off. I reached out and grabbed the doorknob. The knob burned my hand so badly I felt the tiny poof of steam, and the skin of my palm shrank where it touched the knob, like grabbing hot black steel at the forge. It took all my will power to twist the knob and open the door. The wave of heat that greeted me was like a fist to the face. My face burned so hot it was hard to keep even one eye open. I instinctively turned my face away from the heat, fighting to look back a battle of will vs reflex, round and round. All the sweat on my front side was gone in a fraction of a breath. I was barely able to hold my eyes open enough to squint from between my lids. I took a step forward onto the rock next to the catwalk. My feet too puffed a moment of steam and then I felt the skin begin to shrink from the heat. I took another step and my foot hit the catwalk and sizzled and stuck like a steak on the grill. I could see the smoke coming up from my foot. I opened my character sheet and my health was below 50%. It was all I could do not to leap back away from the heat. Gritting my teeth so hard they ached, I stepped forward putting my other foot on the grill, err grating. The heat swam about me like waves of pain, every breath like inhaling angry flaming bees. I brought the bottle to my lips and drank, expecting to the cool comfort of healing. Instead, it felt like drinking acid, my esophagus burned from within, the potion hit my belly and began to spread, filling my body with more fire than surrounded me from without. Inside fire, outside fire… Everything was pain.

When I lifted my first foot, I felt the sole of my foot stick to the metal of the grating, pulling loose from my foot in a wave of pain that briefly eclipsed the burning of my skin. I stepped again, leaving shreds of skin of my other foot behind where it too had touched the metal. I stood there shivering with pain, my body refusing to step forward, my mind refusing to step back. I heard something screaming high animal noises, and the pain from inhaling after told me that noise was coming from me. Standing there unable to move, the burning inside me rose higher and my health began to climb. When my health got back up to 50%, I forced myself to take another ripping tearing sizzling step. The raw meat of my feet sticking and sizzling each time I put them back down. The screaming noise got higher and more shrill, inhuman in my ears. My teeth were clenched so hard I felt some of them crack. I stepped again, when I picked my left foot, I felt a tugging, and focused my eyes and pulled harder. One of my middle toes had stuck to the grid of silvery metal, pulling loose as I stepped and smoking and sizzling where I left it behind. A new pain, greater than that of my toe pulling off burned and I saw my toe begin to heal fresh and pink, then begin to smoke. I took another step, my left foot hitting the stone in the middle. I had foolishly thought the rock would be cooler than the grating. Instead, all of my foot stuck and burned, not just a grid pattern. I saw my toes turning black and the flesh flaking away where my foot hit the stone. I felt like I had been in the furnace for hours, but my health was still rising, now hitting 60%. The screaming was a ragged tearing noise, not human, not animal, and the only way I could tell when I was breathing in or out was the change in its tone as my body heaved flaming air back inside and out. My next step pulled and ripped leaving the pad of my foot and all my toes except the top of the big one smoking behind. I reached the center of the stone and closed my eyes, meditating amidst a world of fire and pain. My molars crumbled and I felt blood leak out my lips and boil away on my chin. I began to sway in slow circles, I bent my knees and tried to find my center of balance. I opened my eyes wide to help me stay upright, but I only saw a flash of light and then darkness. Soon I felt boiling on cheeks as well as my chin. I was blind, but somehow could still see my character sheet. Text appeared in a window at the bottom but I didn’t have the willpower left to look. I took a deep horse stance, trying to stay upright and not fall off the rock and into the lava. I chambered my fists at my side striving for that quiet dark place in my mind where meditation took me. I imagined a candle flame at the center of the darkness and fed my thoughts into it. I began moving my arms through the first martial arts form or hyung I’d learned, Ki Cho Il Bu familiar through long repetition, very basic, easy to lose ones self in, exactly what I needed. As my arms move through the familiar movements, I begin feeling my center grow stronger, I keep feeding my pain to the flame within. I lost myself in the simple motions of the hyung the first I’d ever learned. As my hands moved and found the simple rhythmic blocks and punches of the 1st hyung, what Japanese arts call a kata. At each move I began to make a leap up, my body staying in place, moving my feet to each step of the stance to match the arms. Doing the forms in place as I was taught when there was no room to move. I completed the hyung and began again, and again losing myself in the moving meditation. After completing it a second time I looked at my character sheet. My health was 5% and falling.

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Fuck! in my self-congratulating moving meditation, I had lost track of my health. I turned in place, feeling my feet smear and then grate as the heat pulled the flesh from my bones and my bones began to burn. Using the meditation I’d gained in the first form, I advanced punching and blocking blindly, feeling my way with the remains of my feet in a sensation more like tapping with a cane for sound than actual feeling. My health was falling rapidly, my feet smearing greasily each time I put them down. I could no longer feel the grating beneath my feet. I had no idea if I was walking straight or would fall into the lava. I was trusting the rigid practice of the form to keep me moving straight, to take me back to the door. My fist struck out and I hit something and my fist sticks in place. There was no booming noise of a door. I struck out with my other hand, feeling the fingers of the hand stuck to the wall stretch and pull and I removed them from whatever was in front of me and chambered the next punch. When I struck again, in the silence, I felt a blast of cold hit me, like drowning in a glacier. The cold slammed into me like a hammer, somehow reigniting all the pain. I took a step and felt myself tumble forward pitching into a frightening world of deepest cold. Hands turned me over and kept my face high enough to breathe, then the blackness claimed me. The last thing I heard was Durin, again in ritual cadences. “In the fire of the furnace you have forged your heart upon an anvil of your will, driving out the Dross, and making it stronger. This is the heart of a Dwarf, it shall beat in your chest all the days of your life.”