CHAPTER 55
POV - Azra'il
The first three days of any decent forging job are, in my experience accumulated across countless lives dedicated to this craft, the least photogenic and the most essential. There's no glory in the process of heating, hammering, folding, and starting over hundreds of times in a row, there's only repetition, sweat, and the patience cultivated by someone who accepted long ago that shortcuts in metallurgy tend to cost fingers, eyes, or the structural integrity of the entire piece.
The Tiāngōng Spirit Steel ingot resisted, in the first strikes, with an almost personal stubbornness.
I heated it. I hammered it. The metal stretched under the blows, gaining an elongated shape, and then, on cooling, revealed tiny microscopic fissures on the surface, impurities that needed eliminating before the blade could gain any real integrity. I folded the metal over itself, heated it again, hammered it again, repeated the process until the layered pattern began forming beneath the surface, invisible to the naked eye, but present in the molecular structure like a fingerprint only the metal itself could recognise.
〈Eos, fold count so far.〉
[One hundred and eighteen. Impurity distribution pattern reducing consistently with each cycle.]
〈How many more do we need?〉
[Estimate: at least two hundred more to reach the structural homogeneity required to sustain continuous mana flow without premature fatigue.]
〈Wonderful. Two hundred more chances for me to break my own wrist through excessive optimism.〉
[The probability of fracture is only two per cent, given your cultivation level.]
〈That was rhetorical, Eos.〉
[Logged. Still, the information seemed relevant.]
On the second day, the metal started yielding differently, less brute resistance, more reluctant cooperation, as if it had finally decided that arguing with me was a wasted effort and it would be more productive to simply become what I wanted it to become. There's a moment, in any prolonged manual work, when the raw material stops being an adversary and becomes a partner, not because it's been overpowered by force, but because it's been persuaded, strike by strike, that the proposed shape made more sense than the original one.
Spirit steel, unlike ordinary metals, had an added sensitivity that demanded extra care: every time I channelled mana through it during the folding process, the structure reacted subtly differently, absorbing a little of that energy and retaining it in a kind of latent memory. It was exactly that characteristic that, years later, would allow the blade to "learn" the energy of whoever wielded it, but in the immediate present, it meant I had to calibrate every blow with a precision no ordinary blacksmith would ever need to consider.
It was also on that second day, still in the middle of the rough shaping work, that I reserved space at the base of the blade, near the ricasso, shaping a small cavity while the metal was still malleable enough to accept the shape without resistance. A discreet niche, sized with millimetre precision for a crystal I'd already selected from my inventory, left there, deliberately incomplete, waiting for the right stage of the process to be sealed. Touching it before the right moment would only create exactly the kind of structural tension I intended to avoid from start to finish.
On the third day, I decided to work on the grip.
I took off the leather apron I'd been wearing against the furnace's heat, and stayed in just a simple vest, damp enough to stick to my skin, arms repeatedly raised against the weight of the smaller hammer, shaping the metal core that would later hold the leather wrapping.
It was at exactly that moment, sweat running down the back of my neck and my muscles protesting in a way I chose to ignore out of pure professional stubbornness, that I heard footsteps too hurried to belong to Ghislaine.
"Found you!" said Rudeus, appearing between the trees with the still-uneven breathing of someone who'd run a good part of the way.
He stopped.
He stood there, looking at me, with an expression I couldn't immediately decipher, not because it was complex, but because it was so unexpected my brain needed an extra second to process exactly what it was seeing on my own twin brother's face.
"What?" I asked, without pausing my work.
"You're all sweaty!"
"Rudeus, I've been literally hammering metal heated to fifteen hundred degrees for three days. Sweating is the bare minimum expected."
"No." He took a step forward, still with that strange expression. "I've never seen you sweat. Never. Not even that time we trained under the sun all day without stopping. Not back with Paul, and not in training with Ghislaine either. You just... don't sweat."
I stopped the hammer mid-air for a moment, considering the observation with more seriousness than I'd planned to give it.
He was right, technically. My control over my own body, refined across a thousand lives' worth of accumulated power, normally regulated temperature, exertion, and any visible sign of fatigue with an efficiency that made sweat a practically extinct event in my physiological repertoire. But forging demanded something different, it demanded that I channel energy through my own arms in a way that competed directly with automatic regulation, letting the body, for once, react the way an ordinary body would.
"This is real exertion," I said, finally, going back to work. "The kind not even training can fully disguise."
He kept looking at me for another moment, and then, slowly, something in his face shifted, not surprise any more, but a kind of quiet recognition, as if he were seeing, for the first time in over seven years of living together, a version of me that hadn't been carefully edited to look invulnerable.
"Ghislaine told me you were here," he remarked, approaching the bench with that curiosity he could never quite hide in front of anything involving manual work or applied magic. "She wouldn't say what you were doing. Just said I should see it with my own eyes."
"Traitor."
"She said 'you deserved the surprise.'"
"Still a traitor. Just with a nicer justification."
He examined the bench, the partially worked ingots, the rough outline of the blade still far from its final shape, and a slow understanding spread across his face with the same quality of someone solving a complex maths problem after staring at it for too long.
"Is this for Eris?"
"It is."
"You're forging a sword. For Eris. With your own hands."
"Your ability to state the obvious remains impressive."
He ignored the jab, still too absorbed in the whole scene to take offence as easily as usual, and lightly ran his fingers along the still-irregular edge of the forming blade, with the care of someone who recognises they're touching something that hasn't finished becoming what it's going to be.
"This is going to take weeks," he said.
"Two, probably. Maybe less."
"You're spending a lot of time on this."
"I am."
He stayed quiet for a moment, looking between me and the blade, processing something I could already see forming behind his eyes before he even found the right words to express it.
"I was going to make her a wand," he said, finally, in a quieter voice than usual. "I'd already decided that a while ago. She's worked pretty hard at her elemental magic lessons, more than I expected from her, considering how much she hates sitting still to study anything. I thought she deserved that recognition."
"That's a good idea."
"I was going to make something simple. Functional. Enough for the purpose."
He looked again at the unfinished blade, at the sweat still drying on my own skin, at days of manual work made material in that partially formed metal.
"Now I don't think I'm going to make something simple," he said, a new determination growing in his voice. "I'm going to make a wand as good as the coursebook Roxy made for us. The kind that takes sleepless nights. The kind where you look at it and know how much time went into thinking about it."
There was something genuinely lovely about that declaration, not for the ambition itself, but for the fact that my stubborn, perverted, easily distracted twin brother had just connected, with no explicit help from me at all, exactly the same principle I'd been operating on.
Dedicated time is the only gift that truly means anything, for someone who's already lived long enough to know how finite it is, even when the person in question hadn't yet lived a single full decade.
"It's going to be difficult," I said, without softening the observation. "Quality wands require fine control of mana flow while shaping the wood, and you're still developing that kind of precision."
"I know."
"And you're currently stagnant in your own magical progress, which is only going to make the process more frustrating."
"I know that too!" He raised his chin, with that stubbornness I recognised because we shared it genetically. "But if you can spend days hammering metal, I can spend the time needed testing woods until I find the right combination."
"My hands aren't bleeding, for the record."
"Yet."
"Disturbing optimism, coming from you."
He laughed, a lighter sound than the whole conversation up to that point, and stepped back from the bench, looking around the improvised workshop with renewed appreciation.
"You rebuilt the whole place," he remarked.
"Minor refurbishments."
"That doesn't look minor at all."
"You're the second person to tell me that exact sentence this week."
"Maybe it's because it's true both times."
"You should head back," I said. "If you're really going to make that wand as ambitious as you're now planning, you need to start soon. Good wood needs selection time before any shaping work at all."
"You know about wand woods?"
"I know about practically everything, Rudeus. It's one of the irritating advantages of having lived too long."
He considered that, and then, with a smile that mixed genuine gratitude and his usual stubbornness, asked:
"Would you help me? If I get stuck on something?"
I stopped for a moment, hammer suspended, considering the question with more seriousness than he was probably expecting.
"I'll give you hints," I finally replied. "I won't do it for you. This needs to be yours, start to finish, or the gesture loses half its value."
"Fair."
"But if you get properly stuck, with no way out, I'll point the way. I'll never solve it."
He nodded, satisfied with that agreement, and said goodbye with a wave, heading back along the path between the trees with a considerably lighter step than the one he'd arrived with minutes earlier.
I went back to work, and let the following days dissolve into that rhythm that only exists in prolonged manual labour, where time stops being measured in hours and starts being measured in repetitions.
By the fourth day, the blade already had a recognisable shape. Not perfect yet, but present, the elongated outline of a one-handed sword, with the subtle curve I'd planned from the start to favour quick cuts over heavy strikes, since Eris, even nearing ten years old, showed more natural affinity for speed than for brute strength.
It was on that day that I faced the first moment of real technical tension: normalising.
I reheated the entire blade to the point of austenitisation, that intermediate state where the steel's crystalline structure reorganises, relieving the tension accumulated across days of repeated hammering, and let it cool in the open air, without touching anything, without rushing, without interfering. There's a constant temptation, in any prolonged manual work, to keep tinkering, keep adjusting, keep controlling. Normalising demands the opposite: it demands you trust the process enough to let it happen on its own.
〈Eos, structural reading.〉
[Homogeneous grain. Internal tension reduced by eighty-seven per cent. I recommend proceeding to the quenching stage once ambient temperature is reached.]
Quenching came on the fifth day, and it was, without any exaggeration, the riskiest stage of the entire process.
I covered the entire blade with a thin layer of refractory clay, leaving only the cutting edge exposed, the ancient technique of selective quenching, the same one that produced those wavy contrast patterns craftsmen from other traditions consider almost sacred. The idea was simple in theory and unforgiving in practice: the exposed edge would cool too fast, hardening to the point of maximum brittleness, while the clay-protected body would cool slowly, retaining enough flexibility to absorb impact without shattering under pressure.
I reheated the blade to the exact cherry-red, no lighter, which would indicate excessive temperature and risk of carbon burn, no darker, which would mean incomplete quenching, and plunged it into the water in a single continuous motion, starting from the tip, letting the thermal shock travel through the whole metal in a calculated sequence.
The sound the water made on receiving red-hot steel was, in any life in which I've ever heard something similar, one of the few sounds I can classify as genuinely sacred, a short burst of steam, followed by silence, followed by the certainty that something had just changed nature forever, with no possibility of return.
〈Eos, blade integrity.〉
[No detectable fissures. Selective quench successful. Differential hardness pattern within ideal parameters.]
〈Excellent.〉
Tempering came right after, reheating the blade to a considerably lower temperature, drawing off some of the extreme brittleness the quenching had introduced, without sacrificing the hardness gained. A delicate balance between two extremes, one only accumulated experience allowed me to calibrate without relying on tables or written formulas.
It was only on the sixth day, with the whole heat treatment finally complete and the blade already stabilised, that I turned my attention to the cavity I'd left prepared since the second day, and to the stone that would fill it.
Not just any magic stone this world could offer, none of the local varieties, however valuable the regional nobility considered them, carried the energy density I was looking for. The stone I chose came from somewhere else entirely, taken from a life in which I'd walked through planes of existence that didn't even share the same basic physical laws, a small crystal, of an unstable colouring that shifted subtly depending on the light's angle, dense enough to hold a constant flow of energy without fragmenting under continuous pressure.
I fitted the crystal into the already-prepared cavity. The fit had been designed from the start for exact pressure, the crystal going in with minimal resistance, but firm enough to never come loose under impact or vibration. I sealed the junction with a thin rune, carved directly onto the boundary between the crystal and the metal, forming a permanent magical bond.
It was work that demanded more precision of fit than any stage up to that point, the kind of exactness that didn't forgive even a fraction of a millimetre.
On the seventh day, I carved the remaining runes.
Unlike ordinary enchantments, which rely on a chant or momentary intent, runes permanently carved into a blade demand a different kind of commitment, each carved symbol needs to carry not just the correct shape, but sustained intent throughout the whole inscription process, because the rune isn't decorative. It's functional. It's a permanent channel between the embedded stone and the metal structure around it, and any lapse in concentration during the carving would translate into a permanent failure in function.
I carved the first rune near the base of the blade, dedicated to stability, vibration reduction, improved control on impact. As I carved each stroke with a fine enchanting needle, I thought of Eris, of her tendency to strike with brute force before refining technique, and I designed the rune to compensate for exactly that tendency without eliminating it.
The second rune, dedicated to structural resistance, I carved thinking about how many times she'd probably swing that blade against surfaces no ordinary sword would survive without chipping.
The third rune, affinity with Touki, demanded more care than any of the others, because it needed to respond to her growth over the years, not just her current capacity, and calibrating something to grow along with a person is infinitely more complex than calibrating something for a single fixed point in time.
I followed with balance runes, adjusting the centre of gravity as her own combat style evolved. Runes against corrosion and rust, because I already knew far too well her habit of leaving equipment lying around carelessly after any particularly intense training session. And, lastly, an edge-maintenance rune, ensuring small repairs happened automatically over time, without requiring constant sharpening.
None of these runes granted direct offensive power. That had been a conscious decision, made long before I even chose the metal: I didn't want to create a weapon that fought for Eris. I wanted to create a weapon that would accompany her while she learned to fight for herself.
On the eighth and ninth days, I worked on the finishing.
I reinforced the grip with dark red leather, dyed that shade for reasons I preferred not to examine too closely, wrapping each layer with calculated tension to ensure firmness without compromising comfort during prolonged use. The pommel, simple in shape, designed solely for balance and stability, with no unnecessary ornament that might divert weight from actual function.
I shaped the sheath from the remaining leftover metal, reinforced with leather from a spirit creature felled in a life I preferred to keep filed away, material rare enough to protect the blade without interfering with draw speed, light enough not to weigh things down during movement.
It was on the tenth day, with the sword practically complete and only the final polishing touches left, that I heard footsteps approaching along the path again, slower this time, more hesitant, carrying the noticeable weight of someone balancing something with care.
Rudeus appeared holding a handful of branches of varying sizes, each marked with small charcoal notes directly on the bark.
"I brought a few options," he said, without preamble, setting the branches down on the free end of the bench with the care of someone who'd carried them long enough to develop anxiety about dropping any of them. "I don't know which is the right one."
I set down the file I'd been using and went over, examining the branches one by one.
"Ash," I identified, touching the first one. "Good mana conductivity, but brittle if shaped too quickly."
"That's what Philip's library books recommended for beginners."
"The books aren't wrong. They're just being cautious." I moved to the second branch, darker, with denser grain visible even through the bark. "This one is interesting."
"I don't know the name of that tree. Found it near the stream."
"I don't know the local name either. But the fibre density suggests good mana retention over time, the kind of wood that gets better with repeated use, instead of degrading."
He came closer, sitting on the edge of the bench beside me, eyes fixed on the branch I was holding with an attention I recognised well, the same attention he reserved for any problem he genuinely considered important to solve properly.
"How do I know if I'm choosing right?" he asked.
"You don't. Not with absolute certainty." I handed the branch back to him. "You test it. Channel a bit of mana through the wood, no chant, just direct flow, and feel how it responds. The right wood doesn't resist the flow. It guides it."
He closed his fingers around the dark branch, closed his eyes, and concentrated for a moment that stretched longer than I expected.
"I feel something," he said, slowly. "But I don't know if it's the right wood or just... wanting it to be."
"That's exactly the real difficulty of any serious manual work," I said, sitting beside him on the bench, letting the nearly finished blade rest alone for a moment. "You never have absolute certainty while you're in the middle of the process. Certainty only arrives afterwards, when the final result confirms or disproves the choice. Until then, you work with the best information available and accept you might be wrong."
"That's not reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be honest."
He laughed, quietly, and opened his eyes again, looking at the branch in his own hand with renewed seriousness.
"I'll use this one," he decided. "Even without absolute certainty."
"Good choice, given the circumstances." I watched him carefully put away the chosen branch, discarding the others with less ceremony. "When you go to shape it, start from the tip, not the base. It's easier to correct a proportion error at the tip than at the base, once the general shape is already set."
"Noted."
"And don't try to do it all in one session. Wood needs time between mana work sessions, or the structure becomes unstable."
He nodded, absorbing every instruction with the serious attention of someone who genuinely intended to use it, and stayed sitting there a moment longer, looking around the workshop, at the nearly complete blade resting on the bench, at the tools organised with military precision on the refurbished wood.
"She's going to be proud of both of us," he said, finally. "When she finds out how much time each of us put in."
"She's going to be proud of the sword and the wand," I corrected. "The time invested is between us. She only needs to know she received something made just for her."
"That's kind of sad, put like that."
"It's practical. There's a difference."
He considered that, visibly disagreeing without bothering to argue, and stood up, putting away the chosen branch with the same care he'd carried the whole handful with.
"I'll come back when I have real progress to show," he said.
"I'll be here."
He walked off along the path, and I turned my attention back to the nearly finished blade, to the last polishing still left before that piece of metal, stone, and accumulated intent could finally, without any reservation, earn the name of sword.