After my drink with Braztak, I head to the forge myself. I'm renting a small one just a few minutes' walk from the guildhall. It's nothing fancy, and the furnace is a somewhat primitive design, but that's no issue. The heat comes more evenly than it did from the fort's antiquated furnaces, and it's certainly better than banging on rocks beside a pool of magma.

Most of its relatively high rent is because of the locks. I don't want anyone sneaking in to look at my runes.

I take out my half-completed craft. It's a tube of aluminum, elliptical in cross-section, shaped to fit in my hands.

The handle of my new war-pick.

The war-pick I created during the trial was a masterpiece, one superior to Heartseeker by a good way. The poems were perfect—even if they do fill me with bloodlust, I'll need that bloodlust for the coming challenge. However the metal itself has several shortcomings. The steel head was not worked as well as I'm capable of, due to the time constraints, and the handle was especially far from satisfactory in both metal and rune.

I've already reforged the warhead and copied my poem to it rune for rune, so now my only remaining job is to complete the new handle.

I take out my smallest hammer—lead cored and expertly balanced, it and its larger sisters cost me a good few gold wheels—and start to work. There's a few parts that need to be evened out before the handle's ready for polishing and enruning.

Tap, tap, tap. I work very gently, listening closely to the metal with my runic ears. I examine where I've struck using a thick lens—which also cost me a good few gold wheels. Still not perfectly even. I continue to tap. The metal is changing shape, but never quite in the way I want it too. I scowl. I'm missing something.

I've had opportunities since the trial to learn from the work of other dwarves. Senior members of the guild hold regular demonstrations, and there are lectures I can pay to go see as well. The words said by a second degree of the New Dynamium Guild, the guild in charge of the magnetic caravan tracks, stuck with me:

“You must understand this metal not as a material. It is more like bone. Now, most dwarves think bone is like stone, dead and brittle—though of course stone is not at all like this either—but bone is alive. Blood runs through it. Neither is it brittle. Living bone bends in accordance with the strain you place on it. This metal is the same, is it not? It bends, and like a living thing it responds to outside forces: to heat, magnetic force, light, sound, and of course to our runes—it is alive.”

She was talking then about neodyne, which is a kind of metal with strong magnetic properties. Yet her words apply to all metal. I can feel that the aluminum is alive in some sense, just like reagent is. I could sense the steel's pain as the initiates beat on it.

Knowing how to get the metal to respond to me is another matter. Only once have I really felt like I had an understanding with it: when I was turning scrap to steel for my shield of destruction. Then, I could sense real gratitude. But usually it just feels like stone, or paper, or wood. Just plain stuff, nothing alive.

I continue to tap away at the aluminum. Gradually the slight warping I'm trying to level out disappears. To the eye of a lesser runeknight, the handle would look perfect. I know it's not. A trace of imperfection remains. A trace that wouldn't be there if I was a better smith.

I glance at the clock. I've spent more than a short-hour here already. I turn the handle over in my hands. Everywhere I examine I see traces of imperfection. Right now, however, they're beyond my ability to fix, and my time is limited.

Soon I must graft the runes. I open my drawer and pull out my poem drafts. Although there were no improvements to be made on the poem for the head, the one on the handle must be completely re-written.

I read over the drafts. They're nothing close to complete: a random assortment of ideas, of chaotic stanzas and mismatched runic flow patterns. I've tried out a dozen different scripts, none of which seem to work. I've even tried to recreate the script I used for the runes of destruction on my shield, with no success at all.

Tonight's the night, though. I have to come up with something, or I'm out of time. I've only got a dozen or so long-hours left, and I need that time for grafting.

I choose the best structure I've yet thought of: a spiral of three long stanzas. Which script to choose? I go for one I've learned recently: Volot. It's a bit tricky to use, since the differences between runes are very small and precise, but it's a popular choice among senior runeknights for anything to do with speed and accuracy, since it's easy to communicate precise measurements of acceleration and angle with it.

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I get to writing. My writing stick blurs—it's an expensive piece of equipment as well, and moves fast and smooth, making barely a sound on the paper.

The runes of the Volot script define the speed and angle of a swooping hawk.

Runic dictionaries aren't the only thing I've been reading recently. A couple dozen long-hours ago, I paid a hefty fee for access to the human library of Allabrast. It contains many fascinating texts about the surface, translated into runes for the interested runeknight. I wanted access because I intend to visit the surface at some point, but in the meantime, the descriptions of weird animals and unbelievable landscapes have provided rich inspiration for my poems.

A hawk is a kind of bird. Birds are creatures a little like bats, except they have branching hairs called feathers all over them. Hawks are the most renowned of the birds. They're predators which swoop down at incredible speeds toward their prey. And as luck would have it, Volot script, being one of those rare ones hailing from a mountain peak, has some runes for it.

I will imbue my craft with the speed and accuracy of a hawk. Across three stanzas it spots its prey, swoops down with steel claws outstretched, and bursts from the clouds—clouds are banks of mist hanging in the vast expanse of blue surface air called sky.

Done. I read through it, check my runic flow calculations, make a couple of minor edits, and I'm ready to graft. I glance at the clock. I really lost myself; another full short-hour has passed. I stretch and walk around the anvil. I don't feel tired in the slightest. I'm slowly getting used to Allabrast's strange sleeping schedule.

If I'm not tired, it's time to twist the runes. I unlock the safe where I keep my most precious materials and take out a long coil of platinum wire. It's very fine, very pure, and cost me a good twenty gold wheels, equal to several long-hours' work troll-wrangling, one of the most risky jobs available for fifth degrees.

They were only stone trolls, not iron, or lava, but still.

I uncoil the wire and, clippers in hand, ready my mind. I breath deep.

My metal-working isn't going so well, but my runes... I feel that I'm on the edge of a breakthrough. Each time I work them, I feel that I'm growing closer to something. My body grows warm, like I'm standing on the shores of the magma sea again.

I shut my eyes. I imagine myself moving downward through the stone. My skin is nearly burning now, and sweat is soaking my clothes. There's power near me. I can feel it. I'm on the verge of something. Something is below the magma.

I sink toward it. I hesitate. Can I go further? I've reached it before, but never have I touched it.

This time though, I dare to.

I remember the sphere. I'm inside it! Its mirrored interior gleams with runes smaller than grains of sand. Suddenly the metal cracks. Magma floods in. Power bursts out.

I open my eyes.

I work furiously. The runes of Volot script flash silver in the furnace-light. They twist and change—and for once I have some degree of control over how. I whisper that the hawk needs to be fiercer, and it becomes sleeker and sharper. I whisper that the wind should scream, and my ears are filled with a piercing sound that mirrors what the prey-creature makes in the final line. I desire that the angle should be more accurate, and the Volot script twists into runes that communicate deci-seconds of a degree.

I gasp and pull my hands away. I draw in great gulps of air—my vision is darkening around the edges to match the scar in its center. How long did my breath stop? There's no way to tell.

But I've done it! I dared to touch the sphere, and my delving has been rewarded. I could control my power; I chose what runes to make. I shaped them! I'm still not too sure how, but certainly it was my conscious mind at work for the first time, not my unconscious.

I sink to my haunches. I'm exhausted, but, doesn't all forging exact a toll on the body? Sore arms, thirst, even collapse. Only two long-hours ago I had to carry one of the initiates from the forge while he gibbered, delirious, from heatstroke.

I shut my eyes again, and see an after-image of the sphere. This worries me a little. I still have no idea what it could be, how it relates to my powers. Is it something real? If it is, is it of the past, the present, or the future? Or is it something more symbolic, like the Runeking suggested?

But shortness of breath and slight unease are small prices to pay for such a brilliant poem. I've improved every aspect of it. I can see the hawk swooping as I read, feel the terror in the prey-creature's heart as the steel talons touch its skin and bring forth bright crimson blood.

I frown. I never intended for that line to happen. I debate if I should get rid of it or not, and decide not to. It adds a certain amount of fierceness, which is something every weapon needs, and it links nicely to the bloodiness of the poem on the warhead.

Next, to graft, but I really am tired now. I put away the handle, my papers, and the rest of my wire.

In the safe something glints redly. I wince, and slam it shut, lock it.

I walk to the door.

I turn back and reopen the safe. I draw out the red gem, the one of unaging that I forged just after Fjalar's death. The one that tells of a terrible dwarf laying waste to all he sees for all eternity.

Vitality glows from it. Just holding it in my hand, I feel invigorated, like I could continue crafting for another full long-hour with no rest.

Yet I worry about what I might become if I equip it, if I set it into where the sapphire is now and hang it around my neck to rest over my heart. Will the bloody battle rendered in its facets become my fate? I'm out to help my fellow dwarves, I decided during my trial. Not commit bloody murder against them.

But at the same time, I need power to help them, and power this amulet certainly contains. More than my sapphire one, which is shivering against my skin like some small, scared animal.

I need power! Power to craft. Power to work, to swell my earnings for better forging equipment and materials. Power to become strong enough to defeat the black dragon. And after that, maybe the power to find my brother, if he be alive.

Most immediately though, I need the power to ascend to fourth degree.

My examination is less than a dozen long-hours away.