Time resumed.
“Where is-” Zel choked out, but the Forgemother was already gone. She noticed that the gigantic antlers which had formed upon her brow were gone. Another individual stood in the Forgemother’s place.
In a split-second, Zel scanned its form.
It was a form of black metal and shining edges, of strong figure, curvaceous with the silhouette of an hourglass, and exactly the same height as Zelsys. A long, tapered tail of numerous blackstone segments extended out from her hind, flickering electric arcs connecting each segment, cylindrical ridges replacing sawteeth as the things that ran down its length. It tapered down until the final segment, which was just shaped like an L, with the long side being the tip of the tail. Her head was somewhere between that of a human and a predatory beast vaguely adjacent to a Thundergod or perhaps a False Drake, with forward-facing eyes within which blue lightning burned. A forward-pointed blade jutted from the top of her head, forming a mohawk-like ridge, immediately followed by a row of familiar sawteeth that ran all the way down her back as well as the length of her limbs; her fingers and toes both possessed hooked talons. The shape of these talons and her bladed mohawk was identical to the hook on the frontmost, seventh of the Butcher’s new segments. Six lines segmented each of her limbs; one each at the major joints, one between the shoulder and elbow, and two between the elbow and wrist.
The manifestation raised her hand and looked at it, the arm’s segments floating apart and back together.
FANGS OF DEFIANCE
BARED AGAINST THE SKEINS OF FATE
GODFORGED BRAND OF RIGHTEOUS VIOLENCE
CARNIFEX FULGURIS
Carnifex Fulguris; that name had been dragged to the forefront of her awareness at that moment. It was just a translation of "Lightning Butcher", and Zelsys took this as the blade spirit choosing its own new name.
At the instant immediately afterwards, the spirit's gaze snapped back to meet Zelsys’ own, and the manifestation crossed her arms, whipping her tail toward Zelsys. Its final segment was, indeed, the unmistakable blackstone handle.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
One word. That was all the weapon-spirit uttered. A question spoken in a voice that sounded like the idling of an engine twisted into speech.
“Us?”
“Us.”
She reached out, the platform starting to crumble beneath her feet. St. Elmo’s fire grew from the tips of her fingers and the manifestation’s tail, soon growing into contiguous arcs between the two. When her fingers grasped that hunk of blackstone, there no longer stood two figures on the crumbling mass of glacierglass.
The First Thundergod’s ghostly form rushed down her arm, biting the cleaver’s handle. At that moment, the light of Conqueror’s Mantle surged within her and she felt a strength which had eluded her since that fateful day at Ubul’s Tomb, yet one which surpassed even that brilliant light. That day it had been a desperate gambit, carried through on grit and raw magnitude of the source from which she had drawn. A self-destructive endeavor, burning herself in the hopes that her foe would give in sooner than she did.
This had none of those flaws.
And the Butcher- nay, Carnifex - was perfect. Between its new shape, material, and increased girth, its separate parts had weighed easily thrice as much as the original. Yet now, in her hand, it felt nearly weightless. With a spark of will, Carnifex split apart, twin arclines surging between its segments. The sound of lightning arcing was surprisingly absent; the cleaver’s metal merely hummed and vibrated in place with a faint high-pitched buzz as proof of the arclines’ presence. The huge blade was purring in her grasp.
Even with the platform crumbling beneath her feet and careening into the pit, Zelsys still felt not an iota of alarm or urgency. She whipped her arm upward, using Carnifex as a grappling hook against the broken walkway’s edge. With a surge of Fulgur and a physical pull, she retracted its arclines and sent herself flying upward. Soon she landed at the pit’s outer perimeter, her cleaver’s segments rejoining into one solid mass.
Zel let the Conqueror’s Mantle dissipate. The Mantle would have its time in the sun.
The Impelling arm’s bindings burned, and its talismans clattered to the ground as worthless hunks of metal one after the next. Even what metal remained of them crumbled to dust, leaving no trace. The sleeve’s distorted form buckled back into its rightful shape in moments, one horrible metallic groan after another. It almost sounded like the sleeve was sighing in relief. Nonetheless, she felt that the Impelling Arm had been inextricably changed in some fundamental way, a change which would probably take some time to manifest upon the metal.
Despite the urge to examine her reborn weapon more closely, she spun it into a reverse-grip and continued back into the giant warrior’s antechamber. He neither greeted her nor spoke a single word at her return, but she felt his gaze upon the blade nonetheless.
As she moved to begin dressing herself, she felt a powerful aversion to letting go of her cleaver. That spot on her back burned once again. Following her gut, she raised Carnifex to that spot and focused her thoughts on that burning feeling… Only for the cleaver to vanish from her hand. Nonetheless, she felt the presence of its spirit; that figure of segmented dragonsteel.
Then, that metallic voice echoed inside her skull.
“We are as one. Call me; I will answer. I am our fangs.”