Back in the forging pit. It doesn't feel like home any more. The air is stifling in my throat, the ring of hammers sore in my ears, and the gold wire and boxes of reagent I have left in my storage, for when I looked upon them they seemed to twist and shimmer, and I became dizzy.

Nevertheless, I am a runeknight and that means I must persist with my forging no matter the challenge. I take up my hammer, lay down the great sheet of titanium that’s to become my breastplate, and begin work.

I fold it down the middle first, making a rise like a mountain range. A flat breastplate would take the full force of a frontal impact, so making its front angled ensures that even the most devastating frontal strike will become but a glancing blow.

It’s not easy to form this shape. The curves around where my arms will be, the scalloped part where my three frontal plates will fit, and all the other irregular regions must be carefully bent so no flat regions appear. Once the basic shape is complete, the central rise tapering in a pleasing and a practical manner, it’s time to smooth it. Chime, feel, examine, hammer, repeat. It seems to me that despite the breastplate’s size I finish this part of the process quicker than ever.

Heat treating proves trickier. I manage to fit it into the furnace, just, but once in I can’t turn it, which I need to do to heat evenly all around. Briefly I consider taking it out then putting it in backwards halfway through. I dismiss this idea: in order to get a properly even heating I also want to be able to turn it sideways.

This means I need to pack up all my materials, leave this forging pit, and wait for one with a larger furnace to become available. I wait near the top of one, sweaty and tired from all the hammering, until the dwarf within finally finishes and lets me claim it.

I put in the breastplate and watch and listen carefully. The half nearest the flame turns yellow before the other has even turned orange. I curse—this forge heats even more unevenly than the others. So I can’t sit there and wait as it heats; instead I have to use a long pair of tongs to manually turn it around and around, and the rough stone surface is definitely scratching it up badly.

Once I judge it’s been heated enough, I pull it out and let cool. The middle, unfortunately, has not heated as much as the rest, and as a result the whole piece has warped, the edges curling up a little.

I have to hammer them out slowly and carefully. It’s a challenge—hammering hot metal has a completely different feel to cold hammering. The metal bends almost too easily, and sparks fly at me.

After a good few hours I’m satisfied. Then I notice that turning it in the furnace has indeed scratched the metal, so I spend another hour—what I think might be an hour—polishing it.

A sleep, a meal, and one more sleep later, I consider myself rested enough to start on the runes.

Nervously I open up the box of salterite. Gazing at it brings back memories of mine and Yezakh’s thievery ten years ago. It looks just like the stuff we stole—several ugly, sharp-edged, greenish hexagons. I take one out; my skin stings a little despite the thick gloves I’m wearing. I hammer one end to chip some off, then begin to break that chip down into sand. The shards twist apart after each blow. They emit high-pitched notes, halfway between the screams of a distressed child and the shriek of tearing metal.

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I lay my steel-iron breastplate on the anvil beside the reagent. The runes of abyssal skin gleam blackly upon it. When the light of the furnace’s flame catches one just right, there’s a spark of violet from the hytrigite beneath.

I shake my head sadly, recalling the terrible effort that went in to forging this armor. The journey to get the hytrigite which I am now going to betray in the most awful manner.

Although salterite is generally used to simply erase runes, it can also be used to remove them. Again, the reuse of materials was frowned upon in Thanerzak’s realm, so I’ve only ever read about this technique, never seen it demonstrated.

Hopefully I remember it correctly.

I turn over my old breastplate and rub it with a damp cloth. Then I take the salterite sand and scatter it over. It dissolves into the water. The iron immediately turns brown and begins to flake away—I hear a scratching, rustling sound. The fine brown powder turns to thin brown smoke that curls up and wafts away into nothingness.

The salterite reaches the original steel that the runes were grafted to. The entire breastplate begins to vibrate, screeching at a pitch too high for ordinary ears to hear, yet I can hear it—maybe half the forging hall can hear it too, for it’s loud. Violet sparks leap when the salterite reaches into the hytrigite, destroying it, killing it.

Twisted lines of black scale begin to show through. I slap my wet cloth over the breastplate and hurry to wipe the salterite away. The first two thirds I’m in time for, but the salterite is more powerful than any acid, and I reach the last lines too late. The abyssal runes crackle and blast apart. Chips of darkness fly upward.

“Fuck!” I shout, not caring who hears me.

I snatch up the remains of the breastplate—a ragged, hollow square of metal now— and toss it to the ground. It snaps and crumples.

One by one I turn the freed runes over and examine them for damage. There’s plenty. Most are chipped and pitted in some way. At least abyssal scale has the useful property that scraps of it can be used to repair other runes of the same, so my poems aren’t a total loss. Even so, I’m bitterly annoyed. That material was precious.

I sit down on the steps and breath deep to compose myself. Maybe this is an opportunity—after all, the poems were hardly my best work, very inelegant in places. But I’ll need to be very clever to compose something that works with a mixture of two completely different runic materials, two different reagents, and that’s already partway written with half the runes already decided by a less experienced version of myself.

Not an easy task at all. I rack my brain, and cannot come up with even the first clue about how to start.

I return to the meal hall, sit down to eat, and still cannot think of anything.

I sleep, hoping some rest will fire my brain up, and the solution still eludes me.

I take a long shift in the kitchens, try to free my mind from puzzling so that when I return to the forge I’ll have some fresh ideas, yet my mind refuses to bend to my will, and the steam whirling from the pans looks like runes.

I sleep again, half-hoping the solution will come to me in a dream, yet my only dreams are of being chased by long shadows, and I wake up in a chill sweat.

Deciding that there’s nothing for it but to return to the forge, I head down. I stand over the anvil, shifting the abyssal runes around on the steel, filling in the blanks with my mind. I apply salterite to my old belly and waist plates, only losing a couple runes in the process, and add them to my drafts.

Nothing I compose seems quite right. I sit on the steps and hold my head in my hands.

I feel my body tremble: deep down, I know exactly what to do.

I must let the runes flow. Let my poem pour from me, unrestrained. Let my hands shape the runes as they will—change them into something new.

Yes, there’s nothing for it but that. Hand trembling, I ready the gold wire, the incandesite, the raw hytrigite. And with only the vaguest idea of what the poem’s structure is to be, what metaphors I am to use, how many stanzas of how many lines of how many runes I’m to create, I begin.