I return from the forging supply shops a very, very poor runeknight. I'm impoverished, in fact, with only fifteen golden wheels to my name—and of course they're reserved for the expedition fee.

In my pack sits a long, thin coil of white palladium wire, seven spheres of unrefined hytrigite—solid blue with rippling mist inside—and a case each of powdered quizik and jasperite. It feels like quite a lot; it's weighing me down nearly as much as my gold coins did. My pack makes a healthy thud when I set it down on the table.

I hope this will be enough. If I make any major mistakes, it probably won't be.

Worrying about mistakes often causes them, so I push my worries to the back of my mind and start to draft. Since the poem for my leg pieces wasn't quite working out, I choose a different set of plates to work on: the horizontal slats that'll fall over my thighs and rear. The faulds and culet.

There's fifteen of them, five for each part, the rear ones wider than the thigh ones. They're riveted together in a fairly loose manner for flexibility and mobility.

I consider carefully the themes for their poem. Frozen ground. That's what I go for—it feels tough to me. Soft below but the ice makes it all but impenetrable.

Yet when I get to writing, I can't find the words I need. The runes I've created can't communicate the concepts I want. Impenetrable, rock-hard, diamond-tough... I need these words, yet in the cold world this script describes, they don't exist. I stare at the paper, tracing triangles with my writing stick, trying to create the forms I need.

My power doesn't work like that. No, if this script doesn't have those words, that means I'm trying to write the wrong poem with it. Toughness is not the route to go—ice isn't tough anyhow. That's not its strength. What is its strength? Its slipperiness.

I write a poem of a hail of rock falling on a frozen land below which soft warm earth slumbers. The stones can't strike squarely, and they slip, bounce, bounce again down more lightly, their momentum and force robbed.

For fifteen stanzas the hail continues, only ever causing minor injury, which will soon be healed as the ice re-freezes. This isn't to say my armor will repair itself—metaphor and reality blur in runic magic, and one does not always beget the other.

I read over it. It's nothing spectacular, but it should do the job, and in the end, that's most of what you want armor to do.

Now to twist the palladium. I grab one of the coils of wire and rest my bare hands on it as I read over my poem again and again. As I memorize, I start to feel like I'm sinking into the stone. It's turning to liquid beneath my feet. I shut my eyes. Instead of black, I see red and orange: molten rock. It's run through with faster currents of yellow. A white-yellow swell engulfs me and for an instant I'm inside the sphere.

The shadows look darker. Cold air grasps my soul—it's not the cold of ice, but something older, emptier. I gasp and force my eyes open.

What in hell was that—they seemed closer—but runes are falling into place in my mind already, cold ones, and I know I must strike. My fingers grapple with the palladium coil and unravel it, bending it into jags as they do so. My diamond-edge clipper makes a ping every time it severs. It's different to platinum's sound: lighter and sharper.

My poem grows stronger. Cold winds howl across the plain. Heat does not exist in this world, and there is only the barest amount of light. It's gray as far as the eye can see, not that there are any eyes—this poem makes no mention of life. Elemental forces clash, and always it's ice that wins.

It reaches a climax. The stone rain screams as it falls. The noise makes the ice sheets vibrate, bend, crack, yet they're only slight cracks. Its fury failed, the stone rain ceases. Stillness returns to the world.

I breath out slowly. My hands are shaking, yet not so much as I expected them to. Is this because my poem is not so powerful, or is my body just tougher under the influence of the ruby? I read over the poem once more. It certainly seems powerful.

I'll only know once its grafted. I take the plates apart—although the rivets are prepared, they aren't yet hammered solid. Then I lay them out in order on the anvil.

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The grafting goes well. I was a little worried, since I've never actually used jasperite reagent before, yet it proves easy to work with. It's calmer than incandesite. The trickiest thing is getting it to light without also melting the titanium.

Done. I put the rivets back in, then hammer them. Properly done now, complete. I make to grab one of the faulds and hold it up to the light—

“Ah!”

I drop it back onto the anvil; it clangs. I inspect my fingertips. They're red and burned.

Not by heat though—by cold.

I try again. I snatch my fingers away. Shit! What temperature is this metal? How far below freezing? I've never touched something so chill. I feel cold on my exposed face too, and also on my leather-covered chest and shoulders. It's colder in here than in even the darkest caves I've wandered through—and the furnace is still on.

Carefully, I press a finger on the armor's underside. It's not quite as cold, but still very uncomfortable. I hope the furs I bought for cushioning will be good enough to insulate me, or my journey across the surface is going to be an extremely uncomfortable one.

This hasn't turned out quite as expected. A nervousness takes hold in my stomach. Will it even function as armor? How much of the qualities of ice, negative as well as positive, have the slats taken on?

I tap one with a hammer. The noise is sharp, hard, only a little metallic. I think it's gone brittle. I tap it again, from a slightly different angle.

The hammer bounces right off, just like the stones in the poem bounce off the ice wasteland. I try again, at an even shallower angle. The head of the hammer glides off this time.

I sigh deeply in relief. The armor is functioning as intended.

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After a quick break, I return to the forge to create the chainmail. It's a long, excruciatingly dull process, and by the end of it my eyes are aching terribly. It did, however, go better than my first attempts at making the stuff down in the fort did. I only ended up having to discard, melt down, hammer out, draw out into wire, and finally reform about one fifth of the rings.

Then I had to slide them all together and close them. It took nearly as long as making the plates did. I inspect the silvery fabric—I can't believe some dwarves make their entire armor out of maille, then enrune each ring with its own minute stanza.

Maybe I should try one day. It would be an interesting challenge. But now is not the time to imagine future crafts, but to focus on the present one.

I spend the next few long-hours drafting, turning to metal, and grafting the poems for all the parts of armor that won't have any special function: the leg-plates, the greaves, the tops of my boots, the pauldrons and arm plates. I keep the themes unified. All are about a frozen landscape resisting the blows of stone rain, though I focus my powers to create a little more detail about what lies beneath the ice—slumbering power. This'll increase the vitality in my muscles below, giving them strength and flexibility. As for speed, the armor slides through the air.

The subject of my poems may be immobile, but the qualities they give to the metal make me more mobile. Metaphor and reality blend. Runes are art and physics both.

I take stock of my palladium and reagent. I still have three quarters left, including all my hytrigite spheres. I have enough for the most important poems, just.

I'm nervous to create them. I go to Braztak for advice:

“Good morning,” I say when he opens his door.

“Good morning to you also, Zathar. Dusting off the old greetings?”

“We'll need them once we're on the surface.”

“Very true. Come in.”

We sit opposite each other. “How long have we got left?” I ask.

“Seven long-hours.”

“And how many are coming?”

“Out of the guild, forty or so. About a fifth.” His lip curls. “Your tenth degrees shame the rest of the Association, Zathar. You'd think runeknights would grow more courageous the more skilled they become, but no, usually it's the opposite. They don't want to lose what they have.”

“They're not my tenth degrees. They're their own dwarves.”

“You're their inspiration."

"I don't know if I'd go that far."

"I would. And they're not the only ones who respect you. I happen to know that quite a few in the guild, even some of the older members, have changed their opinion about you over this past month. They don't see a cowardly traitor anymore. They see a dwarf willing to take action. One who doesn't make boasts he can't prove and oaths he can't fulfill. A dwarf superior to most.”

“I hope I can fulfill it."

"I know you can."

"Not if I can't get this armor right. I've come to ask your advice on runes, Braztak.”

“Oh?” He laughs a little, then lowers his voice. “I don't know how much I can help with your runes, Zathar. But I'll give what advice I can.”

“It's nothing to do with my abilities,” I say, dropping my voice even lower than his. “It's just that I'm about to attempt some very difficult poems. Their functions are going to be unique.”

“You've made poems like that before.”

“Yes, that's true. But for these ones...” I shift in my seat. “I feel that maybe I'm overreaching. I don't know. Your armor is legendary in the guild. Did you feel the same when you were making it?”

He scratches his beard. “A little,” he says. “In the end though, it went perfectly. I say to stop doubting yourself. Get it done.”

“But if it isn't perfect, and I break my oath because of it...”

“If your armor fails you when you face the dragon, you won't be breaking your oath. You'll be fulfilling it. Nothing's ever perfect, Zathar. Write your poems. I look forward to seeing them.”

A wide grin breaks out on his face. It disturbs me a little.

“Then, finally, we'll begin the dragonhunt.”