Interlude - The Maw
A blacksmith would have taken different steps. Forge the blade, give it a handle, wrap the handle. Something like that, at least. Thankfully she was able to skip most of that by designing a mold and taking extraordinary care in its production. A perk of being smart, as she figured it.
The metal was nearly ready. It wasn’t the colour of anything she’d seen back on Azeroth, instead shedding four different glows at once. They overlapped and intertwined because nothing here was ever simple. Ilandreline wasn’t one for metaphors, but even she could recognize this one: four ores, wildly distinct, that could only be properly alloyed through the use of a fifth. Naturally the alloy was stronger than any of them independently. Also it was a bastard to work with.
She fed the ingots into the crucible, watching as the forge’s heat quickly liquefied the elethium. A pull of the lever and it drained into the waiting mixture, which one more movement injected into the waiting mold. That had been the real work, creating the exact negative space needed inside a block of solid stone. Not just any stone, of course, but the kind that wouldn’t melt in a furnace designed to bind souls to metal. Getting pieces of the Black Empire was hard enough even before one crossed into the realms of the dead.
Once the mixture had filled the block, Ila grasped it with the tongs she’d liberated from the soulforger whose workspace she now used. Steadiness was required to keep the metal from sloshing out or the whole thing from upending. Her movements were slow and deliberate, never jerking. A device was only as good as its craftsmanship; she intended this one to be her masterpiece.
Typically one would quench using a specific liquid. Fresh water, salt water, olive oil, certain beverages made by the dwarves… what one used depended on the desired outcome and the materials involved. For this it was something a bit more unusual. The Maw had recently become the destination for a great deal of anima drawn from the spirits being repented in Revendreth. This made for a sharp, hungry quench, which was precisely what she needed. She lowered the discomfiting block of slick stone into the roiling crimson, listening to the violent hissing as the alloy took shape.
Once the soul-steam had cleared and the little barrel was minutes removed from its moment of boiling, she fished the mold out with her borrowed tongs. "This better have worked," she muttered, mostly to externalize the worry. Better out than in, that sort of thing. "Only one way to find out."
Placing the black brick on the anvil nearby, she inspected every side for cracks or gaps. The only one she could find was the little hole where she'd added the molten metal, so… maybe it had happened? Picking up the hammer she'd made for just this purpose, Ilandreline closed her eyes and sought the resonance. It was so much easier now than that first time. That was how she'd survived the darkest path into the Shadowlands, and ever since she'd found herself increasingly aware. Now it was almost as easy as making saltpeter; not necessarily fast, but a simple task for the experienced. She felt for her core, dove into it, releasing her perceptions through the nightpurple veins bordering reality.
The Black Empire remnant was anything but dark now. Even the Maw's dolorous half-light caused a reaction, oil-slick scintilla flaring across the infinitesimal pockmark surface. In a way, it sang. Not like a voice, but a tuning fork, a frequency of sensation manifesting multitudinous waves into singular tone. Where her family's faith resided she felt the echo of kinship. Reaching through herself, she grasped the thread of the stone's structure and pulled.
In a sweater, such an act would have been the destruction of order that caused its unraveling. The bedrock of those who dwelt between the stars was made differently, however. What she had done manifested as an ordering matrix, leaching the inherent structural chaos out, snapping the minerals into some kind of grid. Gripping tightly through the depths of her soul, Ilandreline raised the hammer high and swung.
The hardened shadowghast strikeface tolled as it impacted the ruthlessly ordered block. The sound was brutal in its discordance, an archetypal resonance of shattered chains. What was held tightest become most undone; the black stone crumbled to dust, its forced structure inverted until it could no longer hold together.
Ilandreline felt her entire self ringing as she set the hammer aside. The reverberations rattled through her bones, trying to unmake her as thoroughly as she had the old gods' relic. But she was a Glimmerbow, born of those dark blessings, the ancient primordial unmakers' essence suffusing the deepest fibers of her being. The resonance traveled through her, unable to find an outlet to erode, equally unable to escape until she opened her mouth.
She didn't scream; this wasn't pain. Instead she had become an accidental echo chamber, an acoustic amplifier not unlike the elegant curves of a bell. From inside her structure rang the peal of uncreation. Open-mouthed she exhaled it into the stygian plains, unable to cease until the note was spent. Unable to hear, she could still feel the rigid structure of forge beside her eroding beneath the reciprocal action to what she had done.
As suddenly as it began, the moment ended, buckling her knees. Reflex alone allowed the elf to catch herself, weak-legged and bent over the anvil, eyelids only now able to pry themselves apart. Unsteady, Ila exerted her focus once more, willing herself to stay standing. As she did so, refusing to acknowledge the possibility she might collapse, she examined her work.
Atop a fine pile of utterdark sand lay a blade. It was a single piece, cast-forged, with a tapering, triangular blade emerging from one edge of a metal-wrought vertebra. Opposite the blade extended the cylindrical smoothness of bone, flaring into a double-knobbed pommel. It was far more beautiful than she'd expected, or perhaps that was the wrong word. Elegant? Fitting. This was a blade made with purpose, for someone very specific, and such certainty was apparent in its aesthetics.
"Almost done." Her voice was hoarse though she didn't realize it. She hardly knew she'd spoken, what with the ongoing ringing in her ears, and the way structures sounds such as speech fell apart in the fading wake of the hammer blow.
Ilandreline forced her legs to stillness, stood straight atop them once more. Grasping the weapon's handle -- she would wrap it with aged linen later, to give it the feel of something found in an ancient mausoleum -- she turned its stiletto point toward herself. Her other hand moved to expose an expanse of pale flesh, against which she set the blade.
"Freely given," she murmured, the spoken fraction of a larger recitation mostly contained within her mind. "A gift for another, made with intent. A part of me to carry with you." It was almost embarrassing to say it. Hearing herself speak so openly brought heat to her cheeks, but it wasn't so bad to shake her from her plan. Not after coming so far.
Shutting her eyes, Ilandreline exhaled slowly. Her free hand rested along the cold curves of the pommel. Freely given. Lungs fully empty, she braced herself and pushed.
The blade slid in more easily than she'd expected, quickly piercing through skin and fat and muscle. Farther and farther she guided it until the change in resistance signified she'd reached her goal. Just the barest movement more, pricking the exterior of her still-beating heart. Now the hard part.
Pulling the blade back out was the most excruciating experience of her life. It was a tool of purpose, to pierce through barriers and bring an end. To remove it without having killed was to deny it that fulfillment, and so the blade fought her every fraction of the distance. Blood -- her blood -- flowed over its pyramidal smoothness, slicking everything, trying to undo her efforts and allow the blade to feast on her life. Gritting her teeth, she looped a finger through the hole in the center of the guard, using the extra leverage to force the dagger out of her flesh entirely.
Slamming the bloodied weapon back on the anvil, Ila scrambled to the forge. There she snatched up the last of the prepared tools, a length of featureless iron, brilliantly glowing from the infernal heat. "Fuck, this was a stupid idea." Laughing at herself, she pressed the white-hot implement against the triangular piercing in her breast, allowing her rasping scream to drown out the sound of flesh cauterizing.
She didn't know how much time elapsed between keeping herself from bleeding to death and when she was able to stand again. It didn't matter, not really. The important thing was Loira's gift was finished. Complete, even. Totally worth it… but if she loses it I'm gonna kill her.
Chuckling at that, Ilandreline scraped herself together. Time to get out of here before the Covenants' assault wavered and the Jailer's forces had time to look for things like wayward elves with bad ideas. She took another quick look at her handiwork as she vacated the premises. There was no trace of her blood any longer, though she didn't remember wiping it clean, and every now and then the faint ghost light would reflect off a fleck of gleaming darkness. Sand in the blade? No, not sand; the dust of the Black Empire. Absorbed somehow following the sanguine consecration. Curious, but probably not a big deal. She hadn't felt anything strange, and her instincts were usually good about that sort of thing.
"Thanks for the help!" she told the forge's previous user, stepping over its hollow corpse. The spiked helmet that had been something like a head was mangled beyond recognition, as if repeatedly bashed by some kind of heavy blunt object. Ilandreline hefted her oversized wrench, rested it on her shoulder, and set off. Hopefully the blood loss wouldn't slow her down too much. It would be a shame to die before she could actually give Miss Winford her present.
(( Tagging for mentions of @ms-winford ))
