I took the crown and walked over to the kiln, flipping the switch that fed kerosene and ethanol into a cubic meter-sized box. The box’s thick glass cover lit up with an orange glow.
“This is slightly higher than the temperature that causes iron to enter a liquid state. In theory, this should melt the gold in Law as well as the platinum in Heartsflame. If the dagger is made of steel, as theorized, this should melt as well if given sufficient time in the oven. With the Pure Crown, my hypothesis is this unknown material will combust within seconds of exposure to the heat.”
Thick gloves over my hands, I took a set of rough iron clamps and opened the kiln. Intense heat nearly burned up all the oxygen the photosynthesizers could produce. Quickly, only dropping the crown once, I set the Pure Crown in the kiln and shut the door.
I flipped off my goggles and ran over to the window to, presumably, watch the Pure Crown burn to a puddle of goop or ash. Instead, I saw the white crown sitting in the flames, not a mark of damage on it. The inferno licked at the crown but seemed to not touch it, flames dancing around the misty-white swirls and the sparkling diamond. After cataloging these results, and letting it sit for a five-minute period, I used the clamps to retrieve the crown.
When I removed it, the Pure Crown appeared undamaged. It didn’t even smoke when I set it on the heat pad on my table. With a gloved hand I set my glass, mercury-infused thermometer against the surface of the crown. Room temperature in Prosperity 9 was three hundred- and three-degrees Kelvin. The Pure Crown’s temperature read as two hundred and ninety-eight degrees.
“Impossible,” I stated. “It appears that all the heat from the kiln has not affected the Pure Crown in any way.” In shock, I took hold of the crown and raised my lens to it.
I then realized I’d just grabbed an object that had recently been placed in a two-thousand-degree oven. “Yow!” I shouted, and dropped the crown. “Oh, crud.” My hand, however, was not harmed. And neither was the Pure Crown from my dropping it.
Furiously scribbling down notes and procedures, I repeated the heating and came to the same discovery. “Object appears of an impossibly durable yet light material.” I shook my head in disbelief, throwing out nearly all my hypotheses on the crown’s construction.
Then it was Law’s turn.
Again I placed the weapon inside the kiln. Unfortunately, I couldn’t shut the door due to the size of the sword, but I was able to get all but the tip of the handle inside. Flames and intense heat soaked into the gold of this weapon. The heat was obviously striking the sword, unlike with the crown, and I waited eagerly to watch it melt.
As I stared at the window, I noticed with confusion that the sword was becoming harder to see. Sweat formed on my forehead. “That’s strange,” was what I said when I realized that the hairs on my legs had singed and that my kiln was glowing. “Oh crud!”
Quickly grabbing the tongs, I yanked Law out of the kiln. It clattered against the hull of the ship before I could step around it and shut the kiln door. The temperature meter on the kiln read four thousand degrees, more than double what it should have. The kiln wasn’t designed to ever produce more than two thousand. It was inconceivable that it would be able to burn with that much heat on its own.
When I looked at Law, I noticed that it didn’t smoke or appear hot. Predicting the same occurrence as with the Pure Crown, I touched the sword with a cautious hand. It was cool, not warmer nor colder than it had been when I’d put it in the kiln. However, its presence in the kiln seemed to have reflected the energy of heat off its surface and back into the kiln, effectively doubling the temperature.
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A repeat of the experiment proved this hypothesis correct. It also nearly broke my kiln. Still, not a mark showed on Law’s golden surface. This couldn’t be gold. But what else could it be?
Finally, I put Heartsflame in the tongs and, with explicit care, set the dagger in the kiln and shut the door. “If these three objects are made of similar materials,” I said into the recorder as I watched the flames glow around the crimson blade, “then the platinum should not melt despite its normal melting point of…”
I trailed off as I spotted something strange going on in the kiln. With the Pure Crown, the fire didn’t reach the object. With Law, the flames were reflected. With Heartsflame, the kiln glowed with a bright red light as all the energy was absorbed into the red dagger. Heartsflame seemed to suck all the heat inside the kiln. The temperature monitor read only three hundred degrees Kelvin.
Cautiously, I reached in with the iron tongs to retrieve the dagger, which glowed like molten steel but held its shape completely. Smoke wafted off its metal surface and it set my hot pad on fire when I set it on the table. “Heartsflame appears to have had the complete opposite reaction of the other two weapons. It has absorbed the heat yet maintains its shape.”
Not wanting the burning dagger to eat up all my oxygen, I grabbed a pressurized water container and doused it. A cloud of steam erupted from the table as I cooled Heartsflame’s surface. This was a pretty stupid idea, as within moments mist cloaked the interior of half the ship. “Hmm,” I said, standing in the blinding steam as I felt sweat form up and down my back. “Ah! I have an idea.”
Smiling with the simplicity of this plan, I flipped open the airlock controls and allowed a minute hole to open. Steam flew out into the vacuum of space in seconds, leaving me with a once again clean lab but with significantly less oxygen.
“That should do it,” I said as I closed the airlocks. “Now… that’s strange.” When I turned back to the table, I squinted at the still glowing Heartsflame. Bits of steam wafted from its surface, and it had yet to diminish its glow.
Thinking it was still hot, I poured more water on it. This steamed a little on contact, but not nearly as much as before. After a few seconds of exposure to the liquid, the dagger didn’t even evaporate the water that pooled around it. When I used my thermometer on it again, the temperature read only slightly above normal.
I picked it up, looking at the warm dagger with keen interest. The handle was not glowing, I realized, only the blade. In my grasp, I could sense the power stored inside Heartsflame, ready to burst at the slightest influence. Reds stored energy in their weapons and could unleash it as needed. It was logical that even without a user Heartsflame could absorb energy. Still, no metal of any type had this characteristic.
“Without marks of human imperfections in its crafting, the Prophet-taught hypothesis that these weapons are a gift from Infinity seems to be holding up,” I said into my recorder. “Still, the existence of Infinity is not a scientifically provable fact, only a very well-grounded theory. Since there are no markings of crafting on them, it is impossible to learn any further insight into how they were created. I’m afraid my only conclusion is that my initial hypothesis that these are man-made objects was flawed. There is no way humans could have crafted such objects.”
I stared at Heartsflame, warm in my hand. Still, the dagger glowed brightly as if the slightest tap from a blacksmith’s hammer would forever alter its shape. That image gave me an idea.
“The only way to prove they are made of materials found in this universe would be to damage them. If they can be made, they can be destroyed.” I was blinded by curiosity. I wanted to understand how these things worked, crack them open like a nut and look at the meat inside. I pictured breaking Heartsflame’s hilt and finding its true nature.
“Since Heartsflame seems to have responded to heat,” I said as I returned the dagger to the kiln and turned up the fuel to as high pressure as possible, “I shall attempt to replicate the conditions of a blacksmith’s workshop. My new hypothesis is: if the dagger was crafted by forge and hammer, forge and hammer should be able to damage it.”
I burned the dagger till the kiln ran out of fuel. Several minutes went by and I watched with increased urgency, and decreased pupils, how the dagger glowed. “I am now removing Heartsflame and setting it on the experiment table,” I said as I used the tongs to place the dagger on the sturdy section of the lit table. It hissed when I set the blade on the marble.
I made sure that the Pure Crown and Law were stationary on the table. I could be a little clumsy and didn’t want to knock them over, and readied the largest iron-headed hammer I had.
“Heartsflame appears to be steady at two thousand degrees,” I said as I raised the hammer. “Attempting experiment: first swing.”
I brought the hammer down.
Prosperity 9 exploded.