He had no idea how many attempts it took. How many permutations of ether and materials and resonances he tried. During that time, Caeden discovered hundreds, thousands of new ether types. He created new magical materials. Anything and everything was attempted to reach his goal. All was subject to testing, to change.
His initial starting point, that one malformed sword, ended up being a dead end. It was more a fluke than what he was actually looking for. Nevertheless, Caeden kept it around as a reminder of why he was doing what he was doing. Somewhere along the line, he’d discovered how to stop Blade Forge from absorbing his creations. That alone was an immense help to his process.
No, that initial sword produced nothing on its own but frustration. But it was a seed of a greater idea, the beginning of something wholly different. For that alone, Caeden would give that broken, malformed sword pride of place in his growing collection of innovations.
Because the journey did not have a single destination, as he plumbed the depths of possibility, Caeden encountered things he never expected, creations he never thought he could make. It made his depression, his anger, and futility feel childish and simple.
He thought he’d done everything there was to do. But in his bid for perfection, he had placed himself within the confines of what he knew to be possible. Now that he was attempting something impossible, he was showered in new discoveries in an endless downpour that soaked his mind and revitalized his spirit.
It was a long, long time before he succeeded in even the smallest measure. He had to return to the drawing board, metaphorically, a dozen times. But instead of becoming frustrated, each failure was only an indication of how shallow his knowledge was, how little he understood things he’d thought he’d mastered.
Blade Forge was more than he ever assumed. He was ashamed that he had, at one point, thought he’d found its limits. But whenever Caeden asked it for the impossible, it produced without pause or difficulty. This was how Caeden’s final successful series of attempts began.
He’d learned along the way that a physical vessel was not enough. At best, he could achieve a shadow, an echo of his true goal. If he wanted to reach further, he needed to touch on something more fundamental, something beyond the physical.
Caeden began drawing heavily on his experiences and insights from his time in the soul plane with the researcher. It was a jumping-off point that led to many discoveries; many impossible things made achievable only through the miracle of the Blade Forge and the incomprehensible amount of time Caeden had spent pursuing his craft.
Finally, after hundreds of stumbling steps along his path, Caeden had done it. In his hands, fresh from the forge he had reinvented and recreated a thousand times to reach this point, Caeden held a sword. It was a simple, unadorned, and straight-edged weapon. Something Caeden had made more times than he could count.
Except for one difference.
This sword was not made of any metal or other magical material. It was created from something impossible, something Caeden never would have dreamed of using. It was one of many reasons his hammer, anvil, and forge had to be changed just to forge this material.
This sword was formed of raw soul.
It was a Blade Soul.
In only moments, with hammer blows so fast and precise they defied reason, Caeden created a vessel to match. A blade forged of a steel alloy he’d specifically created for the purpose of containing a Blade Soul. Another fruit of his endless failures along the path to this point.
Here, when the two needed to be combined, was where his resonance training showed its fruits. Unbeknownst to Caeden, and possibly his uncle, the Zero and One Hundred and First Hand of the Hammer of One Hundred Hands were so powerful, so valuable in the creation of Grandmaster works because they just barely touched on something more. They could, through pure physical effort, affect even souls.
It was a minor effect, barely worth mentioning. But it was still enough to gain near total control over ether. Not that souls and ether were related. As far as Caeden could tell, they weren’t. Not in any particular way. But the Opening and Closing Hands could affect nearly all forms of energy, from souls to ether.
They had been designed to control ether flows, but that fact alone was enough to give them the smallest influence over souls. Caeden had discovered this by accident during his experiments. From there, he took his understanding of souls and his resonance technique and combined the two. This produced a series of resonance techniques Caeden had decided to call the Unseen Hands, as they affected the ethereal, rather than physical materials. It was these Hands he used to fuse the Blade Soul into its physical vessel.
Why a blade? Why not a hammer or something else? Caeden had found that, while he could easily make anything he desired in the Blade Forge, it truly was a place for the making of blades. Anything he made that was not a blade would degrade over time, and the domain would not remember or replicate them.
Luckily, it seemed the domain defined a blade as any object with a sharp edge. Blatantly abusing this, Caeden had gone buck wild. Now he could see sharp-edged tables and chairs sprouting from the walls of the domain alongside the more traditional bladed implements.
The Unseen Hands delicately, slowly, brought the spiritual and physical together until they finally fused. Caeden had to take a deep breath. This was the closest attempt by far. There was only one thing left to do.
Caeden lifted the blade and ran the edge along his palm. It cut deep, blood running liberally along the surface. Caeden’s face broke into a massive grin. It had worked! This was what he had been looking for all this time!
The first broken weapon had led Caeden down this path toward making something from his domain that he could not control, that could harm him. Not out of any darker impulse of self-harm, mind you. No, he pursued this because he wanted to create something beyond himself. If he could, he hoped that he could make something from the domain that could exceed it and bust him out of here.
It seemed he succeeded. But this was not the only reason he’d bled on the blade.
Watching closely, Caeden saw the sword quiver, and his blood rapidly absorbed into steel. Caeden had spilled his blood on the sword because he had theorized that it would be the final step he needed to take to bind the Blade Soul to the vessel.
This was because of how the Blade Soul had been created. Long ago, during his time before he even discovered the forge, Caeden had found out how to feel his own soul. In his pursuit of the Blade Soul, Caeden had found that the Blade Forge could make the base materials of a soul, but Caeden had no idea how to craft that into a working soul.
Thousands of attempts, and he felt no closer to reaching that goal. He seemed to be missing a key ingredient, but nothing he tried actually worked. So instead, he decided to take a shortcut. He used his own soul as a base and forged additional material on top of it.
He did this by peeling a single scale of his dragon-shaped soul with his own talons and the bloody blade it gripped. It was a pain worse than anything that Caeden had ever felt, but it hardly mattered. The domain regenerated the damage instantly. It was the same reason Caeden could bleed actual quarts of blood onto the blade in his hand and feel none the worse for wear. He was truly unkillable here, even in the face of whatever damage he managed to take. Caeden theorized that his form here could be atomized, disintegrated to the smallest level, and he would still reconstitute. So long as the domain survived, so would he.
The quivering of the blade in his hand graduated to a constant vibration, which shifted to a low thrum that rose and fell. Like a heartbeat. From within the Blade Soul, Caeden felt the thing he’d been looking for this whole time. A spark, a flame taking root. And his masterwork, the culmination of everything he’d built, was complete.
And yet, this was still only the first step.
“Hello, child of my soul. We are going to do wonderful things together.” Caeden smiled down at the living weapon he had forged.
{}
“Father, we’ve managed to reach the third depth. You asked to be called when we did.”
Caeden rose from his forging trance, looking across the space his children called the Birthing Smithy toward the floating column of blades bound by arcs of blue and red energy. “I see; well done, Takano. I’ll just be a moment. Your new sister is almost done.”
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“A joyous occasion, as always. I shall not bother you any longer.” The energy pulsed and flickered in a Bladeborne gesture of respect uniquely used in his presence.
“You know you’re not bothering me. All of you are welcome in the Smithy any time.” Caeden insisted. He’d done his best to curb the respect and admiration of his children. A task that had become difficult, bordering on impossible, once they learned that Caeden carved off pieces of his own soul to form them. He still regretted letting that slip, but lying to them didn’t seem like a better answer either.
Despite his words, Takano left him to his work. Minutes later, Caeden was done, handing off the newly-formed dagger-sized Bladeborne to a Sharpener for proper care. Caeden did his best to be a light hand in the lives of his children, and that included letting them educate and govern themselves. He simply answered any questions they had to the best of his ability and did his best to discourage bad actors.
Despite the fact that he’d created his children for a specific purpose, he wanted them to live beyond that scope and become their own people. A task in which he felt he’d succeeded. The fact that his children mostly left him alone was a testament to how independent they’d become over time.
Exiting the Birthing Smithy, Caeden looked across the rooms the Bladeborne had made for him. He had no need, considering he was immortal and mostly immutable, but the thought was deeply touching. It was an extravagant, massive space. The furniture wasn’t suitable for a human, mostly being floating shards of metal connected by white lines of power. They were designed for Bladeborne to rest their fragments on, basically docking with the furniture to relax and let some pressure off their energy matrix.
There was a bed, one of the few things Caeden had managed to create with any level of permanence that wasn’t a blade of some kind. He had done it by calling fabric from the Blade Forge and soaking it in his blood. It seemed to be the only way to make things stick was to add something of himself to them. Luckily, some clever application of ether had removed any smell, and now he had a comfortable place to rest.
Aside from the bed to the left, and the furniture set in the middle of the space, the right side of the room, including the whole wall, was a collection of everything Caeden had forged on his path to the Bladeborne. A sort of testament they had made to all the effort on his part in bringing them into existence.
Everything, from floor to ceiling, was formed from interlocking blades used as building materials. Basically, sharpened planks of metal in lighter colors, his room was mostly whites and yellows. Opposite the Smithy was a bank of openings leading outside. There were no windows, as these openings served as the entrance to his room. The consequences of a society where everyone could fly.
Takano was by one of the entrances, waiting for him. “Ready, Father?”
Caeden smiled. “Of course, I always love to see your progress.”
Stepping out together, Caeden was once again exposed to the molten walls of the Blade Forge. However, they were much farther away than when he had first entered this space. With every Bladeborne Caeden had forged, the space inside the domain had increased by roughly one percent its total volume.
Naturally, this had turned into an exponentially compounding factor, as one percent of the increased volume was slightly more for the second Bladeborne than the first, and so on, until each additional Bladeborne was adding nearly half of the original volume of the domain. More than that, the empty space was filling up.
Floating chunks of rock, metal, and other materials had begun to appear within the first twenty Bladeborne, and they’d only expanded in both number and size. This was fortunate, as it gave his children a way to be self-sufficient.
Caeden was the only one who could simply ask things of the Blade Forge. His children either needed to rely on him for materials to build their homes and businesses, or they needed to mine. Because the Bladeborne were not immortal, nor did the domain sustain them. Instead, they could live off Caeden’s blood or various kinds of ether. For obvious reasons, the ether was the more sustainable option.
This had led to the development of a whole society with the Blade Forge. Since they were physically so divergent from humans, Caeden had invented and refined a whole set of resonance techniques specifically suited to the Bladeborne and taught it to them, allowing them to access the depths of ethersmithing he’d uncovered during the time he spent perfecting and then exceeding his craft.
Now, the Bladeborn had their own ethersmiths, masters, and even a few grandmasters certified by Caeden of the Singing Blade resonance style. He’d even needed to design specially created hammers since the kind he used simply didn’t work with Bladeborne anatomy. Rather, they used something closer to an axe that had been infused to act like a hammer.
Flying at what was a slow pace for him, Caeden kept even with Takano so as not to leave him behind. The Bladeborne in question was a studious, well-behaved sort, if a bit overly serious. But that attitude had brought him far, becoming the manager of the most important project Caeden had every commissioned of his children. So, a certain level of seriousness seemed appropriate.
As they flew, Caeden took the opportunity to once again marvel at the floating city his children had built. Composed of blade-shaped buildings connected by shining pathways of white energy, they were beautiful to gaze upon, especially considering the wide variety of materials used, covering a spectrum of color and texture, making it more than just a shiny steel parade.
In fact, the only building in the city of Patrosmithy that was a plain steely grey was the one Caeden lived in. The First Blade acted as both his home, a school, and nursery for the Bladeborne Caeden forged. It was the final form of the very first Bladeborne Caeden had ever made. Indeed, every building here was a Bladeborne who had built themselves up until they were large enough to house their smaller kin. Each was some of the oldest of his children.
In Bladeborne society, they were among the most exacted, as they sacrificed their autonomy to better their brothers and sisters. One of the worst crimes imaginable was damaging a building. Caeden was proud of how far his children had come that they could recognize and venerate the sacrifices of their fellows.
“The third depth, already? You’re ahead of schedule.” Caeden finally commented after he’d noted several new buildings that had risen since his last time out of the Smithy.
“We hit a particularly malleable vein, and several innovations in mining techniques have significantly decreased the energy expenditure,” Takano explained, no doubt grossly understating how much of his own efforts had gone into making those changes happen.
“Either way, good work.”
“You honor me with your words, Father.”
Finally, they approached their destination. Down below the Patrosmithy, where the ‘floor’ of the domain began, there was a tunnel leading deep into the molten mass.
Just as Caeden had hoped when he first conceived of the idea, the Bladeborne, which could defy his will and control of the domain, could also do that which he could not and pierce the walls of the domain itself. This required specific equipment made especially to protect them, as the walls had a highly corrosive effect on a Bladeborne’s energy matrix if they weren’t protected.
The method to dig through had initially been discovered by Caeden’s fifth son. It was also he whose body formed the mining shaft itself. Caeden's second through fourth children had created the first governing council of the Bladeborne and had since passed on. The forms his first and fifth sons had taken had offered them a form of immortality in exchange for losing their freedom and autonomy. Though they were still conscious and living, there was no doubt of that.
Caeden ran his hand along the frame of the shaft, the sharp edge easily cutting into him. Bleeding profusely, he held his hand there so that the wound would not close. His blood was by far the most potent fuel for his children, and he gave it freely to the First Blade and the Fifth Pass, the name his son had taken on after his transformation. Both had given up much for him. One to be his home, and the other his salvation.
Together, Caeden and Takano sped down the winding passages of steel-plated walls, deeper and deeper into the depths of the domain. Finally, they arrived at the end. The third depth. Caeden had theorized it existed after all that he had learned about the Blade Forge, but he never would have been able to reach it on his own.
The first depth was the surface of molten metal that he had always been relegated to. The second was a point at which the domain became less physical and started to abstract, mixing with the mess of concepts and universes outside itself.
The third depth was the point where the balance shifted. Where the domain was at almost equal prevalence to the things it was a part of outside itself. Basically, the third depth was where Blade Forge began to lose much of its overwhelming power, including its ability to hold Caeden. Or so he hoped.
Looking around, the mining team had created a large space, just as he had requested. It was time; everything was ready. No reason to wait. Caeden took a deep breath. Everyone in the room stopped, their focus shifting to him.
“You all have done me an immense service. Just as planned, we will see if this works. If it doesn’t, digging continues. If it does, I’ll duck out and return immediately. I won’t lie. I have no idea how my leaving will affect any of you. I have no reason to believe it will harm you and every reason to believe you won’t even notice my absence. Either way, all I have to say is that I am so proud of all of you, and I hope to see you soon.”
There was no response, though Caeden could read the wild mix of emotions from all of them. Steeling himself, Caeden said something he’d been waiting a very long time to say.
“Give me the Exit Blade.”
A ring-shaped doorway composed of hundreds of materials that had taken Caeden more time to design than anything other than the Bladeborne themselves, sat in the center of the room. At one side of the ring was a spike, which Caeden readily shoved his hand onto. The Exit Blade greedily sucked up his blood, absorbing it rapidly as arcs of white energy began to jump across its open interior from one side to another. A low hum began to fill the space as power built higher and higher.
Finally, it reached criticality, and the center filled with a film of pure white that rippled like water in a gentle breeze.
Once more, Caeden smiled at his children. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he said with all the confidence he could muster, genuinely hoping he was right.
Then he stepped through.