Caeden could barely think. He’d never actually just asked for something while he was here. He’d never thought it would work. Why would he? Nothing so far had indicated any level of comprehension from the domain. Caeden had been trying to interact with it in the way he interacted with all his shrouds, force of will. That, and actual, physical expression. As in, punching things. But that was more out of frustration than an actual belief that punching the walls would somehow break him out.
“I want a way out of here!” He yelled into the air, glaring wildly around. Nothing happened, but still, he waited. He tried rephrasing the statement, asking questions, anything. Nothing happened. The hammer hovered in front of him, unmoving.
“I don’t want the hammer anymore.”
It vanished.
“I want to leave.”
Nothing.
“Haa,” Caeden sighed, slumping in the air as he floated above the swirling metal. “Of course, it couldn’t be that easy.”
All the building energy bled out of him, and Caeden laid on his back in the air as if there was a platform he was on instead of empty space. In that position, he let his mind wander, processing the overwhelming disappointment. The first time he’d gotten any reaction out of this place, and he still couldn’t leave.
“Well,” He sat up after a while, having let some of the pain and loneliness go. “I guess I’ll just have to follow through, huh? I did promise an actually good sword.”
“OK,” Shaking himself, Caeden stood up, or floated up. It was hard for him to tell anymore. He was so used to moving in this space now that he couldn’t tell the difference between his normal motions and when he bent his will to move his body. It all blended together.
“I need a hammer, an anvil, and a forge. Do I need to give specifications, or can you just pull my preferences from my memory?” Caeden spoke, hoping this would work. He might not be able to get out, but forging something would be a welcome distraction.
As he’d hoped, the hammer returned, quickly followed by an anvil and an entire forge, including a pile of coal, bellows, stack, hearth, and even quenching buckets. More than that, an entire set of tools appeared in front of him, neatly ordered according to his personal preference. So, the domain could read his mind.
Not surprised in the least, Caeden plucked up the hammer floating before him. Mentally, just to see if it would work, he gestured for the forge, anvil, and invisible tool rack to move into the appropriate positions. They all obligingly drifted to his desired locations, setting up a complete, non-ether smithy floating in the air.
“I need a ten-pound rectangle of unalloyed steel,” Caeden said, watching as the requested material rose from the molten mass beneath him. “Great. Time to get to work.”
Caeden flexed and stretched, even if his body didn’t need warming up. Then he started shoveling coal into the forge, getting the fire going. Working the bellows, Caeden frowned. He was used to using his shrouds to gain information on his forge fire, as well as manipulate the metal and a dozen other things. Here, he couldn't do that.
He didn’t need protective gear, considering he was invulnerable, but he would have a harder time judging his heat and placing his blows without investigative sense. At that thought, Caeden actually smiled. A challenge. He had nothing better to do, so why not improve on his craft? Unc had taught him the Opening and Closing hands, and while he didn’t have the ether to truly practice them, he could at least work on his technique.
“Actually…” Caeden mumbled. It was a long shot, but worth a try. “I want a chunk of pure fire ether.”
A burnt orange crystal the size of his fist appeared near his anvil. Caeden couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, looks like I’m going to become a proper Grandmaster.”
He had nothing better to do.
{}
The first sword was no good. Caeden tossed it. Same with the second, and the third, and the twentieth. Abandoning any hope of leaving, Caeden completely subsumed himself in his craft. He could acknowledge that he essentially had no personal control over whether or not he ever got out of here, so he kept working.
In that new freedom, unconcerned with time or resources or anything other than his forge and his anvil, and his hammer, Caeden was allowed to pursue the height of craftsmanship. Perfection. A blade forged exactly as he intended, with no flaws or shortcomings. A weapon that was forged in perfect reflection of his mental image.
Never growing tired in this place with no day or night and no longer counting his breaths, Caeden quickly lost all track of time. There was only him and the smithy, him and the burning metal resisting every blow of his hammer. Caeden had never felt more involved in his forge, never more at one with his creations.
Again and again, he failed to bring out the absolute perfect reflection of his intentions. Again and again, his product had a series of small flaws marring its form. And so he continued. Repetition after repetition until he created something he could not find any flaws in. A weapon that was, in essence, as perfect as he could make it.
“There, one flamberge, the absolute best one I can make.” Caeden sighed, leaning back against the anvil, his hammer resting on its surface. It was his third anvil and his seventeenth hammer. Even if Caeden was unbreakable, it seemed his tools weren’t. The repetitive strain of neverending drafting had broken his tools over and over again as Caeden’s relentless pace wore them down.
He was looking at the culmination of his past who-knows-how-long working. A simple flamberge, a two-handed sword with a wavy blade. Perfect for causing massive bleeding and a difficult weapon to conventionally block or parry, considering its odd shape. But overall, a more basic sword design.
“As promised, now you know how to do it; I better not see any more crap floating around in here.” Caeden chuckled. He was definitely giving the domain too much personality. But he was lonely. So, fuck it.
Looking around outside his smithy, Caeden took in the domain once more. His focus had not drifted in at least a hundred attempts, making a visual that didn’t involve his forge rather jarring. More than that, Caeden started seeing all the other poorly made blades drifting in and out of the domain’s walls. Having spent so long perfecting a weapon, their shoddy craftsmanship practically screamed out for him to fix.
Taking a second look, Caeden noticed several flamberges out of the thousands of blades constantly rising and falling. Every single one of them, big or small, was flawless, a perfect replica of his own creation. Turning back to his smithy, he saw that his own flamberge was gone, disappearing in the moments he’d looked away.
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Taking everything together, Caeden couldn’t help but feel that this was what the domain wanted from him. That he was here to somehow teach it. Or maybe that was just him giving an unthinking, unfeeling mass more personality to feel less alone. Maybe he was slowly going insane.
“Ok,” Caeden made a decision. “Show me all your blades, all the ones you don’t know how to forge.” This was Blade Forge, after all. Maybe it just wanted to learn?
Instantly, Caeden was buried, surrounded in a sea of blades, weapons and tools of all varieties, anything that could be considered to have an edge or blade. “Well, it looks like I have my work cut out for me.”
Caeden shook his head. What had he been expecting? “Let’s start smallest to largest, I guess. Show me the daggers.”
Instantly, most of the weapons vanished. It still left thousands of blades around him, the variety and scope of ‘dagger’ being a broad category. But at least this was manageable to a certain degree. Reaching out, Caeden grabbed a simple stiletto from the mass, bringing it with him to the smithy.
“Here’s what I need…”
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Caeden worked his way through the dagger selection, refining each until it was as good as he could make it. Over time, he could feel the process speeding up, his skill showing as it took less and less time to reach the level of perfection he was striving for. It helped that all the blades he was working on were daggers. Every new insight had at least some overlap with the next project, leading to an exponential increase in his speed.
The first took almost a hundred attempts. But by the twentieth dagger, he had that down below eighty. By the fiftieth, he was down to forty attempts. His hundredth dagger took less than ten tries. At that point, his gains seemed to plateau. No matter what, each dagger took somewhere between five to ten attempts to perfect, as their individual differences were always enough to require adjustment.
Despite that, his speed still increased as he simply got faster at forging. Here too, there was a hard limit, as metal took time to heat properly no matter what he did. Trying to speed up his hammer blows was a recipe for applying entirely too much force. Still, he managed to remove wasted movement, increasing his understanding of himself and his own techniques.
After he plateaued, time truly started to blur. He hadn’t even finished two hundred daggers at that point out of thousands. From there, everything started to blend together; the only thing sticking in his memory were the insights he made along the way.
Finally, they were all done. Caeden had perfected every dagger Blade Forge had shown him. All of them, done. That was, until he decided to peruse his own work. In that first dagger, he found a dozen mistakes he’d refined out of later versions. Things he had only noticed after dozens, hundreds of designs and removing thousands of imperfections from his own crafting.
So, he shrugged and started over again. This was far faster than the last time, as he was merely bringing old models up to his newly heightened standards. It felt good, to see the tangible increase in his abilities, even as he winced at old failures, invisible to him before, that seemed so obvious now.
And on he went. Swords, spears, axes, cooking utensils, gardening tools, implements of dozens of different trades in all their highly specialized glory. An endless sequence of permutations and variants that extended on and on. Caeden saw them all. Forged them all. Perfected them all.
And he got better. Correlations and insights connecting things he never would have seen the relationship between without endlessly forging them all in sequence. Not content with confining himself to just blades, Caeden used the supplies granted to him by the domain to forge other weapons and items, simply because he could. Hammers, clubs, staves, tables, chairs, cabinets. Each offered a new experience, a new insight into the metal, into himself.
At some point, he had surpassed the arsenal Blade Forge could produce. But he wasn’t done. He could do more. Everything the Forge produced on its own was made of unalloyed steel. But that wasn’t always the best material for a given weapon. So, Caeden started over.
This time, he made hundreds of versions of his first stiletto design, all created from different metals and alloys. He was seeking the perfect material. The exact right combination to compliment the dagger’s design, as he saw it.
This process continued, producing orders of magnitude more variations on the weapons Caeden had seen from the Blade Forge. Eventually, he found something that perfectly suited the design of the weapon or tool in front of him. Eventually, he was, once again, done.
But he wasn’t. Because he hadn’t even touched ether. All the endless variations of ether, added to the weapons, stacked with the material. And magical materials to act as a base. All the lessons he’d learned about matching ether to material from his uncle but never had the opportunity to put into practice.
Another rotation began. Sometimes, Caeden felt like he was losing his grip on reality, smithing consuming him entirely as designs and ether formulas and resonance patterns and material interactions smothered his mind.
But eventually, another round was complete. Infused versions of every weapon and tool, all in the most optimal combination he could find. It was as done as it could be. In fact, Caeden went back and double-checked everything; rooting out his own mistakes and misconceptions was the single-minded determination of a fanatic.
At some point, there was nothing more for him to do. He’d long ago fully mastered the Opening and Closing hands, tested and retested every ether and material combination with every weapon design. He’d done it all. A deep, heavy weight settled on him.
At some point, this journey of forging and discovery had become everything to Caeden. He had nothing else. Any hope, any memory of leaving, was washed away by the endless tide of time. He could not even imagine how long he’d been here. How much time had it taken to explore the depth he had? Centuries, at least. Likely full millennia. Now what?
He had grown as much as he could, taken ethersmithing and the Hammer of One Hundred Hands to the limits of what he could imagine. And he was still right here, still stuck in this domain all alone. What was he supposed to do? How could he even function when there was nothing left but the endless span of eternity to fill with nothing at all?
There was a long time that Caeden spent staring across the Blade Forge. Its walls were now populated not with crude, malformed weapons but the product of his endless push for perfection, which had now ended. What had, at first look, seemed like an impossibly massive task, had been conquered, broadened in scope, and conquered again. All falling under the weight of endless time.
So, what was he supposed to do? Caeden fell into a bottomless pit within himself. He picked up his hammer once more. But rather than producing masterworks, his forge created abominations, weapons deliberately created with as many flaws as possible. Caeden scorned his training, deliberately distorting his resonance and rhythm to produce something worse than garbage.
For a time, Caeden went mad. Things he couldn’t comprehend flowed from his forge, seeping into his domain and spreading across its expanse. He couldn’t find it in himself to care. What was the point? Time had made a mockery of his pursuit of perfection, so why pursue it?
He was finally broken from this dark prison by one of his own creations. A mad mixture of ether and magical materials produced something he never would have believed. Caeden found himself holding a sword, malformed and hardly worthy of the name. He would have discarded it into the sea of churning metal below except for one thing.
It moved. The weapon shifted in his grip, resisting his hands. At this point, Caeden had mastered absolute control of his domain, except for the ability to leave. Everything within it moved to his will. But this sword did not. It ignored his commands, denied his will. Caeden had made something so far beyond himself that he could not control it.
Instantly, thoughts thundered through his mind. How was he supposed to fill an eternity? In this, Caeden only had one example that counted. Dave was immortal, but he had filled his endless life with exploration of existence, something denied to Caeden.
The only other reference was the researcher. The entity that had made his world, built it from the ground up. All so that he could answer questions about shrouds. For that small reason, he had made an entire universe. At the time, Caeden could hardly understand the amount of time and effort that went into something so small. Now, he got it? How else were you supposed to fill eternity?
Caeden’s mind inverted, his prison shattering. Every thought focused into a single point. He had so much work to do.