Author’s Note:
This chapter has a LOT of alright swordmaking description in it. If you want to skip that, it’s all good, you’re not missing anything except the creation of a pretty cool sword that’s important to the story far, far into the future - its creation less so, I just wanted to write it. You can just skip from the first division to the second one. Also, flashbacks!
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“Hm, me?” Angra questioned, his voice brisk and irked. ‘What a pain,’ he thought to himself, his eyebrows turned downward and his lips forming a thin frown.
“Who else but the problem child promoting war and death?” The old man in front of him spoke quickly, urgently, and with finality. This wasn’t a discussion, this was a public execution. Angra was infuriated that they’d take away his two only joys in life. “Your crooked ways will plague us no longer. Any more concessions to you and we will be in famine!”
‘Concessions my ass, you’ve never given me anything.’ He thought in annoyance. He couldn’t let these people affect him. If what they wanted was to disturb him, he would go down completely dispassionately. “If that’s all, I still have work to do. If you’d kindly not bother me, I’ll be gone in a week, and you’ll never have to deal with the ‘curse’ of me again.” He projected his voice coldly, spitefully. He knew full well that going down to the dangerous, unknown surface was a death sentence. All he could do was hurt the only person he had left as little as possible.
Thus, he strolled off, hands in his pockets as he trundled back along the gray, unstable stones to his forge and began hammering and folding metal.
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Finally, Angra pulled the heavy blade from the furnace it had spent the night in, and he immediately swung the flat of the blade against the nearest table. As he had hoped, nothing affected it in the slightest. Immediately, he sat down at a bench that faced a circular stone, one that he had cut and shaped by himself. Its surface was white and rough, and shavings of metal littered the floor around it. Moving the handle that protruded from the side using a circular motion, he set to work, ignoring the sparks and metal scraps that flew across the room as he continued to spin the stone and press the blade angled against it, some of the debris assaulting his own face. Over the course of tedious hours, he moved the blade up and down the grindstone, annoyed with the fact that the metal was so hard that it took so long to make even a slight difference in the shape of the metal.
His arms sore from rotating the grindstone, he finally stood, admiring his work that had approached completion by yet another step. It was finally read to be polished. The blade was now covered in scratches, as if it had seen a whirlwind of debris tearing at it. It lost its silver luster, taking on a weathered quality. However, none could mistake the extreme sharpness of the thin blade.
Standing from the grindstone, he held the blade in his hands, turning it over and analyzing it from every angle possible, squinting at the powerful glint that reflected even off of the scratched blade. He accidentally caught his thumb on the edge, just touching it slightly before turning the blade away.
His laugh in surprise and anticipation made him sound like he had gone mad. Even just a light touch had left a sizeable wound in his left hand. Though only surface-deep, the sword was still able to tear through his hardened skin without so much as a little abrasion.
Sitting down at a run-down wooden bench, he looked at the three blocks that sat on the surface. Each was a different color: one had the pigmentation of fresh cream, while one held the rusty pallor of clay left drying in the sun for some time. The final one, and by far the most unusual, looked like a flawless block, and it was dark blue in hue.
Without another glance, he picked up the red block from the table. It was noticeably rough, some equivalent to sandpaper.
It took only an hour for him to finish using this block, and the scratches that littered the blade were now much finer. He set to his last few strokes, pushing the block into the flat of the blade and sliding it from the base to the end, clenching his teeth to endure the annoying scratching that ground upon his eardrums ruthlessly.
Once he had completed the same process using all three of the stones, the sword looked much more like a rapier than a stick. Its extremely sharp edge shone, seeming to reflect light so powerfully that it seemed to give off its own.
“The next challenge… the hilt, huh?” He mumbled to himself, his eyes narrow as his hand brushed his chin, wondering what he would do for a crossguard and hilt.
“One hand, since the blade is light and built for thrusting instead of slicing… the crossguard then would be… round?” He deduced the most useful hilt he could make, and set about creating it.
The first addition to the base of the weapon was his crossguard’s base. A simple bar was enough, though it was thinned out and he added a slight curve to it. The crossguard itself was just slightly wider than the blade itself, and a thin, yet stable curl of metal split from it, forming a prolate half-ellipse that would cover the knuckles. It was an incredibly simple design, but effective for its ambidexterity.
Next, he spun those same wide wires of metal above the crossguard, making an erratically designed guard that would keep blades from reaching the hand, while maintaining the characteristic lightness and balance of the sword.
Only a single element of the sword remained: the pommel. Immediately, an idea struck him. “It’ll be unstable, and it generally is a terrible pommel. Otherwise, though, it’s perfect!” Angra exclaimed excitedly as he dashed over to a chest. The wood and iron that bound the contents were archaic. He could fit in this chest without bending his legs, and it was a miracle that such a sizeable chest hadn’t yet decayed. He pulled from it a crystal. It had been cut into a perfect sphere.
He held the crystal up out of the window, the powerful midday sun’s rays barraging it. The light refracted through the crystal, following a few minute paths as all of the light that invaded it shot back out in small, intense beams. Faced with one such pathway leading straight into his face, Angra held up his twitching right hand to block the light, retracting the gemstone. “Perfect.” He spoke, satisfied with his ingenuity. “...Kind of.”
Yes, there were many dilemmas involved in attaching a crystal pommel to a sword. It was a work of craftsmanship the boy had not once attempted. Thus, he fell back upon his one tool for these situations: visualization.
Holding the sword by its yet unfinished hilt, he touched the crystalline structure against it, unprepared for what happened next.
Immediately, Angra recoiled in shock, and the light that permeated his workplace was not the normal red, rather replaced by powerful, bright blue rays, the same color of the crystal. Turned away, the boy’s arms shielded his face from the flash.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
As the intense luminescence faded, he heard a clang reverberating in his ears, and he winced in response. Looking at the floor below where he last held his project, the sword looked unusually complete. The length of pure white metal between the guard and pommel looked as though it had been frozen over. The crystal had seemingly grown up the body of the sword up to the crossguard, forming a jagged, many-faceted hilt. Surprisingly enough, holding the weapon in his hand, it was not uncomfortable. Though easily explained by the destroyed nerves of his hand, the point still stands since it was stated by the third person narrator.
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Angra stood far from the main Milaelerion, only a long wooden bridge behind him. The ropes often would be thrown about by the intense, uninhibited winds, but somehow, it had never broken or fallen apart. The warm air around him was calm, and had allowed him a leisurely walk across with little peril involved. The ground below him now was deep, coarse sand that bit into his heels as he walked, thanks to his rudimentary footwraps doing such a great job.
There was one reason, albeit superficial, that it was rare for anyone to come to this area. Despite it being comparable in size, if not larger than the mainland, it held no life. Cold, rough stones of abhorrently monotonous gray hues and sand that disguised blades of stone that tore into his soles, leaving faint red footsteps as he continued forward, sword in hand.
The boy had gone here so many times that it practically qualified as a second home to him. Left undisturbed since times preserved only in myth, it had become a perfect place for him to excavate the ores needed. Such resources had been an immense help in advancing his processing, since many of the raw metals he found were poor and impure. Dry, thin jokes aside, it was his second favorite place, behind his forge of course.
There was one thing he hoped to test this new weapon of unknown properties on. Gripping it in his left hand, the sword sat uncovered on his shoulder, light from the midday sun reflecting onto his neck in a thin line that accentuated the abnormal pallor of his complexion.
Within minutes of arriving on the island, he had reached his destination. Before him, one outcrop of stone towered above the hundreds of others. This stone’s dull coloration was dotted with bright patches that shone almost blindingly in the midday sun that beat overhead. This boulder was filled with ore, but its unusual fortitude and its extreme volume prevented any form of recourse for the poor craftsman.
Today, with hope, that would change. He was testing this new foreign element’s power, seeing if that odd interaction of the crystalline sphere had had any effect on the weapon. “Forces unknown are always at work, they’ve just never helped me.” He laughed in self-deprecation as his left foot rose, setting itself back down and planting its heel into the sand perpendicular to his right foot, which set itself ahead of Angra, aiming directly at the center of the stone. His fingers, slick with sweat, curled around the cold hilt, as his elbow raised and his shoulders lowered. Knees extending, he lunged forward as he let out a throaty shout, the point of the rapier entering the rock and not stopping.
Finally, his crossguard rang in a high-pitched metal impact as it hit the stone, and without warning, cracks across the rock lit up with the familiar white light that had formed the sword, albeit more subdued. The rock shattered as if it were a glass bulb thrown to the ground, seeming to burst as rough shards fell all over the world, leaving one oddly unnatural formation in the center.
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The shaky, unstable laugh that escaped from Angra’s cracked lips lasted only a few seconds. Awestruck as he was by the strange effect of the weapon, what stood in the center of the rock was a pedestal. The pillar of the pedestal was long and flat, and generally, it looked suspiciously like his sword.
What surprised him, however, extended beyond the pedestal looking like a monotonous stone copy of his sword. The top of it, the pommel, was the only part not replicated in stone. Rather, it looked like an exact copy, with light swirling through it in thin wisps making the only difference.
Slowly, gingerly treading across the rubble, the boy’s footwraps tore as he approached.
Without much hesitation, he wrapped his off hand around the crystal that sat upon the weapon.
Immediately, a burning sensation overtook him as bolts of white-hot agony overtook his arm and shot up into the side of his head. The pure white light that he had almost grown used to immolated his scarred palm.
Then, it shattered.
As quickly as it had arrived, the paroxysm of his fingers ended, and they relaxed. Shards of clear, ineffectual crystal fell to the ground, quickly concealed by the sand. Angra brought his shaking hand up to his wide eyes and stared awestruck at the design imprinted in it.
The figure emblazoned in his flesh depicted two competing crescents split through the middle by a line that cut in two before rejoining itself.
“Nn?” Angra’s underwhelming reaction of curiosity was a simple mumbled syllable and a tilted head as he narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
The crest was faint, metallic white, as if mercury had pooled into the figure and flowed in soft, slow waves. For a moment, he felt his heartbeat slow, and the symbol recolored to the hue of pale gold.
Spontaneously, Angra’s eyes returned to the pedestal in front of him. He wanted to know how it had formed a perfect copy of a weapon completed not an hour ago. After all, that stone had existed for likely thousands of years undisturbed.
Putting his empty hand on the cold surface of the handle, and immediately the weapon disappeared. He frowned, evidently obstructed by this event, and he shrugged, looking down at the sand. Pieces of ore littered the ground, holding colors of everything from bright red-orange to pure black. He smiled, this was a jackpot with enough ore to last him an entire year. Of course, it’s not like he would have access to a forge for more than 2 days, so he had a lot of refining to do over the next 30 hours.
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Author’s Note:
I bet you’re curious about that emblem in his hand!
No?
...okay
Anyway, here’s the shape.
I did my best, stop laughing!
Anyway, as I thought, this chapter is less story than I would usually like, I waste over half of the chapter talking about making some sword, and the other half using it. Thus, I’ll try for a new chapter this weekend, but may not get one.
I’ll say it in advance, but in the near future, my releases may become sporadic. I hope dearly that they don’t, but I have a LOT of work.