With shaky hands I take the box of almergris to the anvil and carefully sit it down. Maybe I should have a sleep before doing this, rest up to minimize the chance of making a mistake. Yet at the same time, I feel that I have to conquer my fear right now, or I’ll keep on putting this off until there’s another murder and Runethane Yurok sends us down the Shaft whether we’ve finished our crafts or not.

I don’t think he’s quite that crazy, but you never know.

I need to plan how I’m going to manage this. Almergris burns extremely hot and makes an extremely thorough graft, which is part of the reason it’s so prized and dangerous, so once I weld a flange there’ll be no second chances. We were warned by the senior runeknights against stripping it away using salterite—the reaction between the two is much fiercer than with incandesite.

So I better get the angles right. I place a flange against the hexagonal cap and adjust its position until I’m satisfied. Then I close my eyes and concentrate intensely on my hearing. I listen to where the flange is; the exact position and angles are revealed to me by the way minute vibrations in the air pass over the two pieces of metal and my hand. I let go, let the flange balance, and tread around, hearing the shape from all angles.

Once I’m convinced I remember exactly how it's positioned, I open my eyes and take the flange off of the cap. I walk around for a bit, then shut my eyes and practice pressing it into place. I repeat this many times over.

Once I’m confident in my accuracy, I open the box of almergris and take a pinch of it in my fingers. The smell is strong. It reminds me of when I was inside the beast scraping it out, yet there’s another dimension to it now: a maliciously acidic undertone.

I remember the senior runeknight in the meal hall giving his nephew tips on how to use it—didn't he say something about the almergris being from something that died painfully, by our hands no less, and being able to sense fear and hesitation? Did he also say that it would use those moments to seek revenge?

He left that last part unsaid, I think. Doesn’t make it any less true.

I grit my teeth and sprinkle it onto the cap. I insert a thin rod into the furnace and wait until it’s white hot. Even though almergris is sensitive and will flare into blinding life on contact with even dull-red heat, for best results you’re meant to use a white-hot heating element.

I wrap a cloth around my eyes very tightly, withdraw the heated rod, and walk back to the anvil. I can hear the shape of the almergris lying on the side of the cap. I see no color now, only a texture like sand. Innocuous. I understand how some dwarves let their guard down around it—but I won’t.

With my free hand I pick up the flange. There’s no rush, I remind myself. Almergris stays burning hot for a while after being heated. I tighten my wrist to stop it shaking, and before my will breaks and I give up, thrust the white-hot metal into the sand.

There’s a flash of heat. The almergris grains turn to a thin puddle; the air above them shivers violently. I move the flange closer to the cap, turning it to the correct angle as I do so. The shivering of the air makes it a little harder to hear what I’m doing, but not as hard as I feared.

My fear increases as I move the flange closer. The heat is intense; my skin feels like it’s starting to crisp like meat over open flame. Suddenly I worry that I’ve used too much almergris, so much to be incredibly dangerous.

I’ve faced dragonfire, I remind myself. This heat isn’t so bad as that. With a swift and confident movement I push the base of the flange onto the molten almergris and press down. The heated air twists around my wrist, almost like fingers, then the heat slowly begins to fade.

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It might still be glowing, so I don’t yet take off my blindfold. I count five hundred seconds before I judge that the craft is cool enough for me to take a peek. Sure enough, there's no bright light, just two pieces of titanium neatly welded to each other. I pick it up for inspection.

It’s not perfect: there's a slight gap around the edges of the weld. This can be fixed, though.

I weld the next flange, then the next. Piece by piece the mace-head comes together. I examine it. A few angles are off by half a degree, and the welds are all a little rough, but there’s nothing that can't be fixed with a bit of heating and hammering. I turn the temperature of the furnace up a little and put the mace-head in.

It's heating up quickly. Red, orange, already yellow. Something's wrong—I shut my eyes tight and still see the flash through my eyelids.

I wrench the mace-head out the furnace with my tongs and collapse against the wall of the pit, my breathing heavy. The glow is darkening—or am I going blind, my vision disappearing?

The glow vanishes.

I open my eyes and breath a long sigh of relief. I can see the familiar shape of the anvil before me. The mace-head atop it is glowing with white heat and difficult to look at, but its shape and colors and details are perfectly visible. I am not blind.

The almergris in the welds, when heated, must have reacted with the metal, though this phenomenon was never mentioned to us by the senior runeknights. Maybe there’s no logical explanation: maybe the reagent is simply malicious, out to revenge the creature it was so brutally torn from.

Whatever the case, the metal is undamaged. I hammer the misaligned flanges into place, weld where there are slight gaps by pouring over titanium off-cuts melted in a crucible, using a tungsten splinter to poke the liquid deep into the gaps. Once the piece is cooled I file away any rough parts and get to polishing.

The titanium, already a pale metal, looks paler still after the almergris welding. Some of its power has leaked into the metal already, it seems. I’m not sure whether this is promising news or if it heralds more difficulty and danger in the forging to come. For now the cap is done; I must weld it to the haft.

I stand the haft up vertically—it comes up to just past my waist—and place the cap over it. I push down and it quickly meets friction and becomes stuck. This is a good sign—if the fit had been too loose it would have been a big problem. For the fit being too tight, there’s a simple solution. Where metal contacted metal with the most force, there are scratches.

Lightly I file away at the scratched portions. Each plane ends up filed about the same amount in about the same place, proving I did a good job of making everything symmetrical. Once more I jam down the mace-head. It goes a little farther this time; I pull it back off, file. The next time I jam it down it’s nearly fully on. I file away a touch more and it fits perfectly.

Now it just needs to be heated. I turn up the furnace and stick the head of my new mace in. I’m taking no chances this time—my blindfold is wrapped tightly around my face, and my eyes are shut tight behind it. I listen closely to the slight whine of the metal, barely audible for the roar of the furnace-flames.

When the whine reaches the auditory equivalent of white-hot, I pull out the mace and hammer the parts of the cap below the flanges to join head and haft securely together. Once the metal is cooled, I reheat and repeat the process—I don’t want my weapon to fly apart in the midst of a life-death struggle against the darkness.

Finally finished, and the titanium only slightly warm to the touch, I take off my blindfold and admire my craft. There’s a few dents and bumps created during the welding process, but they should be easy enough to fix. On the whole, it’s an impressive piece of metal, and a brutal looking one.

Maces are rightly feared as armor-killers, and though Nthazes recommended I make the flanges as wide as possible, mine are thick too. I see no reason why I shouldn’t consider taking this into battle against dwarven foes. Blind them with my runes of light, while I can hear exactly where they are—then bash them with no resistance. A mass battle would likely be too chaotic for my runic ears to be of use, but perhaps a skirmish in a wide cave with room to swing could be an appropriate arena.

Yes, it would’ve been narrow-minded of me to make this weapon purely focused on defeating the darkness. Light can be just as fearsome as fire—the tenth degree staring up at nothing in the infirmary is proof of that.

Of course, my mace emits no light just yet. My next task: make it do so.