23rd Saun 717
Zipper wasn’t religious. Actually few in Etzos were, of course, but if there was a moment that came anywhere close to some kind of divine revelation from Emea below, it would be this: her in a dingy room in a guard post of the city of diamonds and stones with two of the most coveted metals, forged and pristine, in the world-
Or, in Malorite’s case, out of the world.
-all but dumped in her lap, begging to be inscribed into her Palette, begging for her to store a copy in the archive of her soul: the Corvanite crown to her collection of memorized phenomena and metaphysical trinkets.
Lord and lady holding court over their subjects.
She liked to imagine she wasn’t overly vain but… well, a girl needed her jewelry even if her showcase was within rather than without: Fire instead of rubies fire opals, Ice instead of diamonds and chalcedony, Lightning instead of tourmalines and topaz, steel instead of melanite and onyx, Wind instead of hermatite and treid gems, Raw stone instead of-
She knew too many gemstones for someone who claimed to despise excess for its own aesthetic sake.
Back to the point:
This wasn’t the first time she was seeing Adamantite. It was, however, the definite first time her eyes had chanced upon the fabled Malorite. While not a common commodity you would see on the average smith’s table, the fire steel was not some mythical thing lost to history and harvested in some lost tome. No, it’s rarity could be attributed to being, um, quite fuckin’ exorbitant. A younger her had once committed to stealing one herself before she got distracted by her sudden ability to conjure searing energy from her hands and, well, it was easy to see which was the more appealing pursuit at the time. Over the arcs, her thoughts returned to the sharpest edge of all known mundane metals, only to be distracted by some other pursuit or responsibility.
Here it was now. In her hands. No more excuses left.
And then there was Malorite: a thing so out of this world it literally came from the stars themselves.
They were in small quantities here: a dagger and a gauntlet. Hardly enough, someone else would say. But Zipper was a Transmutator: the core of her craft was built around bypassing the issue of limited resources.
Or as she had heard some shriveled old man she believed had just visited a brothel said once: size matters not.
A little was just right.
She went for the lesser thrill first: she touched the Adamantite. She raised a finger out to slide upon the flat of its edge. She remembered her first time immersing herself in steel, letting the Transmutator’s sixth sense for the world chart a path through the impurities that iron so sorely lacked. A thing mixed, in that case, was a thing strengthened. Steel held a distorted pattern: of rigid layers and trace carbon and, and, and-
She found none of that in Admantite.
They say Admantite was found in the mountains where the wretched Aukari dwelled in great numbers and the fire god that vomited them all out held court on his burning throne. Indeed, she felt a sensation of grim fire beneath the edge, as if the metal carried the ugly flame of its home Sirothelle all the way through the forging process.
The edge was… smooth and even. Even the sharpest, seemingly straightest steel blades boasted an irregular, jagged blade which Identity revealed, but Admantite was clean. Clean in a way steel wasn’t with its impurities.
Touch it then, Zipper. Touch it.
How could she forge a covenant with such an edge if she didn’t know how it felt to endure it?
Her finger slid up the length of the dagger and lifted off, resting over its tip, flesh and metal just an inch apart. Gently and with great care, she let her finger press against the tip. Steel would have required more effort, but Admantite? The fucker slid gleefully into her flesh with a suddenness she expected yet somehow still managing to catch her by surprise. She held it there for one trill, two trills, three trills, letting the edge seep into her, capturing the very real possibility that the blade could slide all the way through the roof of her fingernail with the slightest twitch, both dreading and savouring the sensation.
And that was that.
Now that the earth metal was finished…
She wiped away the blood on her finger and retrieved a handkerchief from uniform pocket, pressing it against her finger. Pressing the back of her hand down onto-
No.
Old Transmutator habits died hard.
She pressed her ear down to the Malorite gauntlet and-
Admantite was alien enough as it was, and it still was of this world. It could have been Faldrun’s shit for all she cared, for she wouldn’t be surprised that even his crap bit deep and vicious, but Malorite… she had no basis for reference and when she plunged in, she faced a stunning void of impossibility and, in that void, she saw bits of familiarity scattered across the expanse, pieces of the puzzle that didn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts: there was a breed of iron in it that she had yet touched before, twisted in with a string of unknown silicates and other foreign materials. She sunk herself deeper into the void and more familiar pieces revolved around her: nickel, cobalt… what was that? Something dense and thick and all-too...No, she lost it.
This was Transmutation’s grand hurdle: breaking down the foreign and making it hers.
Finding sense in the senseless void.
She sat there for so long that the sergeant came back to check on her and what did he think when he saw her bent over a piece of metal as if trying to listen to its inner song. He shrugged it off as some mage oddity, and she was none the wiser that he came and went.
...
She looked drained by the time she sat back down, not even bothering to wipe the chair before she plopped down onto the dirty, foreign, who-knew-where-it-went wood. When the sergeant re-entered, she was staring at the ceiling in quiet reverie, as if her eyes could carve through the ceiling and into the sky and gaze upon the cosmos all the way from her seat here on Idalos.
Maybe she could.
“Um, miss…?”
“Yeah?” Her voice dazed, almost dream-like. “Shhhhh, man, there’s eyes in the sky born without a child. Can you feel the dirge of the stars? Yes, even stars die and what’s in the cold, black heart of a dead star?”
“What did you do to yourself?”
“A great meteor from the beyond, swathed in the blood of the tiny fucklings from a distant world,” she squinted at the ceiling. “It’s like poetry. It’s like a ode song to the colliding stars smashing and smashing and smashing until one took upon the other and became the better for it-”
“Our equipment,” the old man said, clearly tired of this.
“Your-” She blinked once, twice. Then focus returned to her eyes as if she remembered why she was here. “Right, your equipment. Bring it in.”
Old leather, battered helms and… what was the name for that one? Didn’t matter. She looked at the task before her, tried to slap some life back into her cheeks, before placing her hands over the table and its contents.
Nothing confirmed mastery better than a field test. Nothing gave her assurance like action given upon an object.
She began the deconstruction phase: taking them out of the universe and driving them into meta instability, poking the holes in the ether of the object that would allow her to slither in and guide whatever she wanted into them. The objects flickered, faded, then restablized, fighting for a foothold in the world outside the field before they returned to being ghosts.
Then came the alteration phase.
She pushed the concept of Malorite into each and every major surface of their assorted armours. This was a bulk job, sloppy and unrefined, and she took no pride in what she did to save herself some time. She injected the qualities into the ghosts of the objects in the field, filling in the holes with what was now an intangible concept, soon to be made real when the field came back into being.
It took longer than she had thought and when the sergeant came in to check on her, she gave him a loud and unambiguous “OUT.” and he took the urgent hint in her shout. She was not to be disturbed.
Then came the reformation phase.
Like a midwife guiding a child to birth, she gently eased the pile of armour as a collective out and back into the world, guiding them out inch by inch as if they were the most fragile things in the world. And then they were out: looking the same yet undeniably changed.
Job complete.
… How was it night already?
Zipper wasn’t religious. Actually few in Etzos were, of course, but if there was a moment that came anywhere close to some kind of divine revelation from Emea below, it would be this: her in a dingy room in a guard post of the city of diamonds and stones with two of the most coveted metals, forged and pristine, in the world-
Or, in Malorite’s case, out of the world.
-all but dumped in her lap, begging to be inscribed into her Palette, begging for her to store a copy in the archive of her soul: the Corvanite crown to her collection of memorized phenomena and metaphysical trinkets.
Lord and lady holding court over their subjects.
She liked to imagine she wasn’t overly vain but… well, a girl needed her jewelry even if her showcase was within rather than without: Fire instead of rubies fire opals, Ice instead of diamonds and chalcedony, Lightning instead of tourmalines and topaz, steel instead of melanite and onyx, Wind instead of hermatite and treid gems, Raw stone instead of-
She knew too many gemstones for someone who claimed to despise excess for its own aesthetic sake.
Back to the point:
This wasn’t the first time she was seeing Adamantite. It was, however, the definite first time her eyes had chanced upon the fabled Malorite. While not a common commodity you would see on the average smith’s table, the fire steel was not some mythical thing lost to history and harvested in some lost tome. No, it’s rarity could be attributed to being, um, quite fuckin’ exorbitant. A younger her had once committed to stealing one herself before she got distracted by her sudden ability to conjure searing energy from her hands and, well, it was easy to see which was the more appealing pursuit at the time. Over the arcs, her thoughts returned to the sharpest edge of all known mundane metals, only to be distracted by some other pursuit or responsibility.
Here it was now. In her hands. No more excuses left.
And then there was Malorite: a thing so out of this world it literally came from the stars themselves.
They were in small quantities here: a dagger and a gauntlet. Hardly enough, someone else would say. But Zipper was a Transmutator: the core of her craft was built around bypassing the issue of limited resources.
Or as she had heard some shriveled old man she believed had just visited a brothel said once: size matters not.
A little was just right.
She went for the lesser thrill first: she touched the Adamantite. She raised a finger out to slide upon the flat of its edge. She remembered her first time immersing herself in steel, letting the Transmutator’s sixth sense for the world chart a path through the impurities that iron so sorely lacked. A thing mixed, in that case, was a thing strengthened. Steel held a distorted pattern: of rigid layers and trace carbon and, and, and-
She found none of that in Admantite.
They say Admantite was found in the mountains where the wretched Aukari dwelled in great numbers and the fire god that vomited them all out held court on his burning throne. Indeed, she felt a sensation of grim fire beneath the edge, as if the metal carried the ugly flame of its home Sirothelle all the way through the forging process.
The edge was… smooth and even. Even the sharpest, seemingly straightest steel blades boasted an irregular, jagged blade which Identity revealed, but Admantite was clean. Clean in a way steel wasn’t with its impurities.
Touch it then, Zipper. Touch it.
How could she forge a covenant with such an edge if she didn’t know how it felt to endure it?
Her finger slid up the length of the dagger and lifted off, resting over its tip, flesh and metal just an inch apart. Gently and with great care, she let her finger press against the tip. Steel would have required more effort, but Admantite? The fucker slid gleefully into her flesh with a suddenness she expected yet somehow still managing to catch her by surprise. She held it there for one trill, two trills, three trills, letting the edge seep into her, capturing the very real possibility that the blade could slide all the way through the roof of her fingernail with the slightest twitch, both dreading and savouring the sensation.
And that was that.
Now that the earth metal was finished…
She wiped away the blood on her finger and retrieved a handkerchief from uniform pocket, pressing it against her finger. Pressing the back of her hand down onto-
No.
Old Transmutator habits died hard.
She pressed her ear down to the Malorite gauntlet and-
Admantite was alien enough as it was, and it still was of this world. It could have been Faldrun’s shit for all she cared, for she wouldn’t be surprised that even his crap bit deep and vicious, but Malorite… she had no basis for reference and when she plunged in, she faced a stunning void of impossibility and, in that void, she saw bits of familiarity scattered across the expanse, pieces of the puzzle that didn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts: there was a breed of iron in it that she had yet touched before, twisted in with a string of unknown silicates and other foreign materials. She sunk herself deeper into the void and more familiar pieces revolved around her: nickel, cobalt… what was that? Something dense and thick and all-too...No, she lost it.
This was Transmutation’s grand hurdle: breaking down the foreign and making it hers.
Finding sense in the senseless void.
She sat there for so long that the sergeant came back to check on her and what did he think when he saw her bent over a piece of metal as if trying to listen to its inner song. He shrugged it off as some mage oddity, and she was none the wiser that he came and went.
...
She looked drained by the time she sat back down, not even bothering to wipe the chair before she plopped down onto the dirty, foreign, who-knew-where-it-went wood. When the sergeant re-entered, she was staring at the ceiling in quiet reverie, as if her eyes could carve through the ceiling and into the sky and gaze upon the cosmos all the way from her seat here on Idalos.
Maybe she could.
“Um, miss…?”
“Yeah?” Her voice dazed, almost dream-like. “Shhhhh, man, there’s eyes in the sky born without a child. Can you feel the dirge of the stars? Yes, even stars die and what’s in the cold, black heart of a dead star?”
“What did you do to yourself?”
“A great meteor from the beyond, swathed in the blood of the tiny fucklings from a distant world,” she squinted at the ceiling. “It’s like poetry. It’s like a ode song to the colliding stars smashing and smashing and smashing until one took upon the other and became the better for it-”
“Our equipment,” the old man said, clearly tired of this.
“Your-” She blinked once, twice. Then focus returned to her eyes as if she remembered why she was here. “Right, your equipment. Bring it in.”
Old leather, battered helms and… what was the name for that one? Didn’t matter. She looked at the task before her, tried to slap some life back into her cheeks, before placing her hands over the table and its contents.
Nothing confirmed mastery better than a field test. Nothing gave her assurance like action given upon an object.
She began the deconstruction phase: taking them out of the universe and driving them into meta instability, poking the holes in the ether of the object that would allow her to slither in and guide whatever she wanted into them. The objects flickered, faded, then restablized, fighting for a foothold in the world outside the field before they returned to being ghosts.
Then came the alteration phase.
She pushed the concept of Malorite into each and every major surface of their assorted armours. This was a bulk job, sloppy and unrefined, and she took no pride in what she did to save herself some time. She injected the qualities into the ghosts of the objects in the field, filling in the holes with what was now an intangible concept, soon to be made real when the field came back into being.
It took longer than she had thought and when the sergeant came in to check on her, she gave him a loud and unambiguous “OUT.” and he took the urgent hint in her shout. She was not to be disturbed.
Then came the reformation phase.
Like a midwife guiding a child to birth, she gently eased the pile of armour as a collective out and back into the world, guiding them out inch by inch as if they were the most fragile things in the world. And then they were out: looking the same yet undeniably changed.
Job complete.
… How was it night already?
