As Dwatrall lowers the hytrigite sphere into the magma with his tongs, it begins to burn. Not with an ordinary flame that flares and tapers upward, but a skin of white-green flame shimmering hotly in symmetrical geometries: it hurts my eyes to look upon it.

It disappears into the molten rock. Dwatrall grimaces as the rising heat of the magma begins to cook his fingers.

“We hold for three seconds,” Hayhek says.

The magma bubbles slightly.

“Now we take it out,” Hayhek says, “And place it on the anvil.”

Dwatrall does so. The shimmering green flame remains, and just like the books of the guild library said, the spark in the hytrigite’s center is softened and spreading outward.

“Then I hammer,” Hayhek continues. “Gently.”

I watch as he taps the glowing sphere with a steel hammer he’s forged. Tap by tap, the sphere flattens. The bright green flame intensifies, as does the fuzzy glow within. I glance at Hayhek’s face and see his brows are furrowed in tense concentration. His eyes are focused intently.

“Going better this time,” Dwatrall says excitedly. “Nearly flat.”

He speaks too soon. The hytrigite suddenly flares to blinding white. Hayhek drops the hammer and ducks down. Dwatrall shields his eyes. I leap backwards.

An instant later the hytrigite blasts apart. Most of the shards slash through the air in Hayhek’s direction, but there’s plenty left to jab into my skin.

“Ah!” I shout; I hadn’t expected it to be this violent.

“You see the problem?” Hayhek says, standing up and wiping sweat from his brow angrily.

“Yeah.”

“One errant tap too hard and the damn thing can’t take it. And I know it has to be thin as paper before you can do anything with it.”

“Thinner, some books say.”

“We’ve got no hope in that case.”

“Do you want to try?” Dwatrall asks. “You feel you have the strength?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Go on then,” Hayhek says sourly, holding out his hammer by the handle. “See for yourself how it is.”

I take the hammer and nod to Dwatrall, who goes around the back of the stacks of armor to collect another piece. The globe he selects with his tongs is a smaller one.

“Small is best for practise, yes?” he says.

“We’ll see. Heat it like you did before... But for slightly longer.”

“Longer?” Hayhek asks. “Why? It’s smaller than the one we just tried.”

“Just try it. The one that cut your hand up didn't blow apart in the magma, right?”

“No," Dwatrall says. "After I took it out.”

“Hold it for four seconds this time.”

He obeys. The green fire catches around the sphere just like last time, then he submerges it fully.

“One,” I count. “Two, three... Four.”

He lifts it out. The white spark within has transformed into a roiling cloud of brightness. Hayhek hurries further away. I raise my hammer.

“On the anvil, Dwatrall.”

Tentatively he places it down. I raise the hammer rather higher than Hayhek did.

“What are you doing?” Hayhek shouts in panic. “You’ll—”

I bring it down hard. The sphere flattens out slightly, and the roiling white brightens with a flash that makes me blink. I hit again, just as hard; it flashes more brightly.

“This is dangerous,” Dwatrall points out.

“What’s life without danger?” I ask.

“A long one,” Hayhek says, from as far back as he can possibly get.

I hammer again, and again. Again! The hytrigite sphere becomes flatter than Hayhek managed to make his piece, and brighter too. I sense tension in my shoulders and relax. If you’re tense, that means you can’t feel—your mind is on yourself, on what might happen to you, rather than what is happening on the anvil.

The hammer is a bridge between me and the material. An emotional bridge, almost spiritual. This is where Hayhek was going wrong. He didn't let himself understand the material. As the most regal of the reagents, hytrigite will not respond to caution and cowardice. This is why I heated it for longer, hammer it harder.

I can feel the hytrigite’s haughty irritation at being disturbed, then fear at the violence of my strikes, then finally respect, understanding. I am going to make it into something greater and it is thankful.

I misjudge one of my blows and the thankfulness turns to irrational anger. I shut my eyes as the sphere explodes out at my face. Cyan shards jab into my skin in a dozen different places, one just over my eye.

“Ah!” I shout.

“I knew this would happen,” Hayhek sighs. “Help him, Dwatrall.”

I don’t need help; I wave Dwatrall away and pick the shards out myself. I feel blood run in thin streams down my face. I must look a terrible sight: pockmarked now on top of my missing eyebrows and red-striped lips and stripe-singed beard.

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“Next one please,” I say.

“You should rest,” Dwatrall says. “Dwarves don’t heal as fast as us trolls. You’re pushing things.”

“Next one please,” I repeat.

He shrugs and obeys.

“Four and a half seconds,” I say.

“Even longer?” Hayhek says, aghast.

“I nearly had it. Go on, Dwatrall.”

He lowers the sphere into the magma, and counts to four and a half. He places it on the anvil, and I smash my hammer down, once, twice, a hundred strokes. Each is perfect, with just the right amount of force. The hytrigite has no reason for anger.

“Oh,” Hayhek says, stunned. He approaches the anvil slowly and looks down on my finished work. “You did it.”

The sphere has become a shimmering blue mirror, perfectly circular, surface so smooth we can see our reflections in it. I take up a pair of steel clippers Hayhek has also forged, and place the hytrigite in their sharp embrace.

“Now let’s see if I did good enough,” I say confidently.

My confidence is well founded—the hytrigite cuts cleanly and softly. Dwatrall laughs in happiness, and Hayhek nods to me in respect.

“How did you do it?”

“You just have to feel what you’re working with,” I explain. “Stop thinking, and feel.”

Now our rune making can begin. We set up a production line, where Dwatrall and I prepare the hytrigite and Hayhek turns the abyssal salamander scales into thin rods we can shape easily into runes.

There’s a few explosions—from both sides of the forge, for salamander scales aren’t easy to work either—but in less than a week we’re finished.

I leave Hayhek to explain the basics of rune-writing to Dwatrall so I can focus all my energy onto my craft. First order of business is fixing up my gauntlets and Heartseeker, which I do with the aid of steel and aluminum from some of the recovered armor. A couple days work and they’re unscarred and straightened out.

Not only do I fix the metal, but the runes too. Ordinarily that would be impossible, except we have the salamander skin available to us. I chisel out tiny flakes of scale and rub them into the scratches on the runes, and apply heat.

Feeling the magma, the incandesite blazes and accepts the fresh material into the runes. Soon Heartseeker’s black glow is as strong as it’s ever been.

I rub my hands together at the start of the fourth day, or rather session. It’s time for what I’ve really been looking forward to.

I spend only three sessions shaping the runes. While I’ve been working the past few sessions, and even as I was lying in the grotto recuperating in pain, in my head I’ve been constructing the poems I’ll write. They flow from my fingers into the salamander scale rods, taking physical and magical form.

“What script is it?” Dwatrall asks as I hammer one of the shaped rods flat.

“Just one of the classical ones. Number IV from the Yttrite caverns, if you’re curious.”

“Sounds like a tricky one. How do you keep all the letters in your head? I can, but you say you dwarves can forget things, no?”

“I don’t keep them like they’re in a cupboard,” I answer. “They’re... It’s not like a library. More like a river I place them in, and they flow out when I need them.”

“I don’t quite get it.”

“I read them, then they come out naturally, is what I’m trying to say.”

He scratches his blue-green head with a talon.

Onto the crescent crest above the eyes of my helmet I carve a poem of far-seeing and close-seeing, a duet of two styles in two different scripts. The hytrigite reagent adds some much needed restraint to the runes so that my eyes do not ache when I have it on.

These runes are to further improve my accuracy, which I’ve decided to double-down on, since Heartseeker clearly has no trouble inflicting enough damage.

The rest of the armor I graft with a mixture of all the runes I think I’ll need for the fights ahead. Fire resistance of course, for the lava trolls, plus general enhancements to speed, strength, and lightness. To fight the dwarves of Broderick I add a long extension to the poems of my gauntlets: down my forearm plates I create metaphors for gap-finding, plate-cracking, and chainmail cutting.

The whole process takes a couple weeks. All the while, Hayhek and Dwatrall have been working their hardest too. Hayhek has stopped weeping at night, stopped complaining. He’s fully focused, almost exhilarated to be working with such fine materials. He’s taken in by the wonder of it, he tells me.

“An eighth degree, forging with abyssal salamander and hytrigite. And tungsten and titanium. It’s a miracle.”

“It is,” I agree.

“What degree would your armor be judged, Zathar? I’ve been thinking. About fourth.”

I laugh and shake my head. “I couldn’t even make five a few months back. I’ve still got ways to go.”

Dwatrall, listening to us from the other side of the forge, shakes his head. “Not so,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about your dwarf society, and your culture of runeknights. Your degree system isn’t based so much on skill at forging. It’s about time, and this networking you tell me your guilds are all about. The ones who get money get the best materials. Naturally those at the bottom, or who are ill-connected, cannot get the jobs that pay the best. So they cannot afford to buy the best materials immediately.”

He gestures grandly to the hytrigite, the stacked armors of every metal, and the abyssal salamander scale runes.

“Now you have all you need for not an ounce of gold. Those exams you tell me about, Zathar: I don’t think they’d be so hard for you now.”

“My armor’s still steel,” I counter. “No matter how good the runes are, the metal of my armor is simple steel.”

Dwatrall shrugs his huge shoulders. “Well, you know more about that than me. But I think you’re stronger than you were before.”

“You will be too, once all those little plates are finished.”

Dwatrall grins. “Oh yes, I will. We will,” he says cryptically.

The reason for the cryptic we comes after he’s finished grafting the runes for his current armor. I thought the little plates would go over the gaps between the regular plates, but I was wrong. He enrunes them, then nails them onto three massive suits of leather.

“That’s taboo,” Hayhek murmurs to me. “One’s crafts are for oneself alone.”

“He’s not a dwarf,” I remind him. “Our taboos don’t apply to him.”

Finally, we’re all done. We return to the room of the silver waterfall to admire ourselves.

The shape of my equipment is the same as before, yet it now has a dimension of power and magic to it. The hytrigite-grafted runes feel different, more noble, more restrained than incandesite-grafted ones. They give the dark red from the salamander scales a tint of violet iridescence bordering on the very extreme of the visual spectrum. In terms of actual combat effect, they’ll be more resistant to damage, and respond to my needs when they come rather than being tuned to maximum power all the time.

Now I understand why hytrigite is nearly twice the price of incandesite in the shops of the city.

Steel my plate may be. But I think Dwatrall was close with his judgment. I would have passed the fifth degree exam in this gear, no doubt about it. I would have cut down as many trolls as they sent at me with ease, Kazhek would not have stood a chance—and as for the abyssal salamander I was so worried they’d send at me?

I beat one nearly solo with damaged Heartseeker and quality yet un-runed steel. What could one do to me when I’m in this?

Hayhek raps his freshly forged titanium axe against his tall tungsten shield. The runes on his weapons and armor aren’t quite as numerous and don’t glow quite so brightly as mine, but they still carry a sense of power that he’s never had about himself before.

“We’re ready,” Dwatrall booms, and he smacks his fist into his palm. His poems are uncreative, but they’ll do the trick—fire resistance all the way.

“Won’t take a week,” I promise Hayhek. “One week, we’ll have the hammer, have my key, and we’ll be on our way back up.”

“Maybe it’ll take longer,” he says. “But I don’t mind. We... I’ve never felt so strong. Yezakh would be proud." He swallows. "So proud!”

“He would be,” I assure him.