Legend of the Runeforger: A Dwarven Progression Fantasy

My peaceful, though by no means easy, life of forging and simple tasks continues. I finally finish repairing my armor, linking together the pieces with some cheap leather and padding the inside with linen pouches of shredded spider silk.

When I try it on, I’m not satisfied. It’s tighter than was before, awkward to move in. My boots, unruned for now, feel awfully heavy and cumbersome. And my fingers and wrists have little dexterity in the unruned gauntlets.

Let’s hope I survive enough foraging expeditions to be able to get the titanium I need to properly repair everything.

All I have left to do now is complete my ears. Out of cheap copper I shape the framework of twists and whorls I will place in the right one. Then I do some calculations, trying to visualize how the power and air will flow once I’ve grafted the runes, and adjust my craft accordingly. I’m not entirely sure I’ve got everything right, and of course the quality of materials is lacking, but this is the best I can do for now.

I start work on the very small runes of silver wire. It’s tricky work, not helped by the constant arguments of the twins a few forging pits along. They seem to be down here constantly, working on that strange amulet together. And they seem to fail miserably every time.

“I told you to listen carefully!” one shouts—I can’t tell who.

“It rang beautifully. It’s your fault for holding the metal squint.”

“We put it in the vise this time, even though I told you the iron mass would interfere. Another contributing factor caused by you.”

“You put it in the vise. Squint. The iron mass has absolutely nothing to do with it. I did the research myself.”

“Research! If that’s what you call gathering the opinions of a bunch of fourth and fifth degrees, I suppose it was research.”

“We’re both sixth degree, may I remind you. They know more than we do.”

“Not about what we're attempting.”

“We can still learn from them. That’s always been your problem, brother. You’re arrogant.”

“Will you two shut it!” someone booms. I recognize the voice as Commander Hraroth’s. He's one of the only first degrees down here.

“It’s no louder than your hammering,” one of the twins calls up. That’s another thing I find strange about those two—their total lack of deference to their seniors.

“Hammering is the only sound that should be heard in a forge. Keep it down, or I’ll punish you like children.”

“Fine.”

For another few sessions there are no more arguments, then after a particularly loud explosion they flare up again, louder than ever.

I try my best to ignore them, but while it’s true that their voices are indeed no louder than the sound of hammering, they’re far more distracting. Passion for one’s craft is all well and good, but it does seem to me that they lack the virtue of patience which I’ve been slowly cultivating.

Once I've finished grafting the runes to the right framework using a reagent called quizik much favored down here, I begin to shape the left framework. Making the complex network of spirals and curves exactly the same as on its counterpart is even harder than getting the steel casings symmetrical was. The sound they make when I tap them with the chiming rod is weird and rather hard to hear, not like that of a bell at all.

Too late I realize that I should have held back on grafting the runes to the right one. Doubtless they affect the timbre.

Halfway through one session of careful listening, trying to work out how exactly the runes are affecting the note the right one makes, Fjalar and Galar’s argument flares up worse than ever. This time it isn’t even triggered by an explosion, but starts right after they descend into their forging pit.

“We shouldn’t be using glass, I keep telling you,” one says—Galar, I think. “It’s too tricky.”

“The power won’t flow right if it isn’t glass. It needs to be inert.”

“We can use gold. I’ve suggested it before, why don’t you bloody listen?”

“Gold isn’t soft enough to shape easily, as I’ve told you a hundred times.”

“It’s plenty soft. At least as soft as your head—”

I hear the sound of a slap, followed by a shout of outrage, followed by the sound of another slap. I sigh angrily, put down my tools and storm up the stairs and over to their forging pit.

“Excuse me!” I call down, politely but firmly. Maybe too firmly. “Would you mind keeping it down?”

Fjalar is holding Galar by the lapels. Galar is grasping his twin’s neck with one hand, and has his other bunched into a fist. They are glaring daggers into each others’ eyes. Slowly they let go of each other and change the target of their glares to me.

“I’m trying to work,” I say. “Using sound. It’s a little hard to concentrate with you two shouting all the time.”

“Is it now? Poor you,” Galar says sarcastically.

Fjalar smacks him on the top of his head, knocking his titanium and copper ears askew. “No need to be rude, brother. This is a shared area, after all, for every runeknight.” He smiles at me, a very fake smile. “We’ll try to keep it down from now on.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“You are a fifth degree, after all.”

“I don’t really care about all that. I just think we should all try to be considerate of each other.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Making your first pair of ears, are you?” Galar chimes in. “How nostalgic. I remember making mine.”

“Anyway,” I say. “Just try to keep it down.”

“Okay," Fjalar says. "We'll try.”

My eyes remain locked with the twins’ for a few seconds longer, then I turn away and walk back down to my forge.

Another few long sessions of painstaking fiddling with the copper framework of the left ear, and I’m finally satisfied that it’s symmetrical with the right. Now I can get to grafting the runes onto it.

It proves easier than I expected. The quizik powder is slightly sticky and locks the miniscule wire runes in place just firmly enough that I can adjust their positioning to get them exactly aligned with those on the opposite framework. Grafting them is none too difficult either, since the quizik doesn’t need much heat to activate, so there's minimal risk of melting anything out of shape.

The bond isn’t as strong as it would be with incandesite or hytrigite, but Nthazes assured me quizik is good enough for a beginner, even though most of his own designs use incandesite.

Now to weld the enruned frameworks to their casings. This also proves easier than I feared, since both pieces are already properly measured. After some extremely slow and careful welding with a white-hot pointed rod of copper, they are attached.

I test their sounds. Nearly exactly the same. I search for the problem, and see that one of the welds near the induction point on the left side is a little less secure than on the right one. I redo the weld, melting the framework to the casing a little more thoroughly.

I test them again. Still very slightly different—I heated the weld a little too much, I fear, but I think I have to call it good enough and move on, or I’ll be trapped in an endless cycle of heating, testing, heating the opposite piece, repeating, until I’ve made a total mess of everything.

The imperfection galls. I hope it won’t affect the final performance too much.

Now only the gems, which I’ve already scratched runes into, remain. I hold the garnets in my sweating palms, dreading this next part of the process. Gently I slot them into their settings.

That was not the difficult part. The difficult part is the heating and rapid cooling.

Usually when you set gems into your craft, you solder them in with a liquid pearl of the appropriate metal, but of course it is impossible to get liquid metal to solidify in exactly the shape you want. Not a problem for most crafts, but obviously a problem when you need to make two pieces exactly the same in every single respect. Trying to set gems into the ears using this method would be like splashing two flagons of ale onto the floor and hoping they both make the same shape of puddle. Never going to happen.

So the dwarves here have created a unique method—heat the ears until they glow, then plunge them into icy water. They have invented buckets with carefully written runes of freezing at their bases for this, and one is sitting beside my anvil right now. The shock of icy water causes the metal to contract violently, firmly locking the gems into their settings.

Theoretically, if both ears are exactly symmetrical, heated to exactly the same temperature as each other, plunged into the water at exactly the same angles, submerged for exactly the same amount of time in the water, and cool down at exactly the same rate, the gems will all set in exactly the same way.

Theoretically.

I put the theory to the test.

It worked, mostly. A few of the garnets are definitely a little squint, so I adjust them with a pair of pliers, then I hold the ears up to examine more closely. The induction gem on the left one still looks a few degrees off. I give it another twist of the plier.

I test them with sound.

The ring of each is nearly exactly the same.

Now to try them on. I fit them to my helmet, into which I have cut symmetrical holes to accommodate them, then I shut my eyes and place my helmet over my head. What follows has me reeling.

I am plunged into a new world: a dimension where I can hear the breathing of each dwarf in his forging pit, where the beat of each hammer has its own ring unique as a voice, where the rush of air from the forges’ fires are part of a symphony of the air swirling around everything and changes the notes of every other sound in subtle yet now totally perceptible ways.

Finally I understand what Nthazes said about seeing with sound. The shape--for lack of a better word--of the symphony of air tells me where the walls of my forging pit are, their shape, how far the anvil is from me. I spin around, three, four, ten times just to test myself. There is a hole in the rushing sound of the burning coals in the furnace—an aural shadow. I reach out and my fingers contact the cold steel of the anvil. It’s at exactly the position I expected; I can see where it is with sound as surely as if my eyes were wide open.

To further test myself, I pack away my tools with my eyes still shut. Partly I remember where each goes from muscle memory, but it’s still an interesting challenge to try and see—or rather hear—how much of the fine details of my surroundings I can make out.

After I’m done, I open my eyes to check if I’ve missed anything, and I’m pleased to see that I haven’t. Giddy with triumph, I close my eyes again and walk up the stairs of my forging pit. I scan the chamber. My field of view—field of hearing—seems wide, since I get everything in the one hundred and eighty degrees my ears cover in equal detail. There is no periphery like with vision.

Not worrying one jot about falling into the forging pits, I make my way to the door. I step out into the corridor, and can’t help but grinning. For the first time ever I can tell its width, just from the way the echoes of my footsteps sound. Some way along, I can tell there are a few openings where the corridor branches, though I can’t hear exactly how distant they are—but I’m confident that that skill will come with practice.

I saunter down at a leisurely pace, drinking in the sounds of my own footsteps, the subtle hiss of the air catching in crannies in the walls, the vague voices I hear from far to the front.

The voices grow louder as the dwarves approach. I wince. The voices become excruciatingly loud, and are warped so badly that I can’t make out a single coherent word. The roar of the furnaces and the rhythmic beating of hammers were simple to understand, but two voices together are a discordant wavering crash of notes. They grow still louder, and the heavy clump of the opposing footsteps interferes with the steady beat of my own.

Sense of hearing totally overwhelmed, my hearing-vision of the corridor collapses into a rubble of shifting walls, plummeting floors, a ceiling that falls in one moment and flies a mile upward the next. I collide with the stones to my left and let out a grunt of shock that reverberates in my helmet. In panic I open my eyes to try and get my bearings, but of course all is pitch blackness.

A hand clamps on my shoulder and steadies me before I totally collapse. The heavy treads come to a halt. My helmet is pulled from my head in a single deft tug.

“Who’s this?” says a voice. It sounds quiet and distant. “Who are you, initiate?”

“I’m not an initiate,” I gasp. The shock of losing my enhanced hearing is like that of being plunged into an icy river.

“This is Zathar,” says another voice. Commander Cathez. “The one who fell from above.”

“Oh. Him,” says the first voice.

“Just finished your first ears, I see,” says Cathez.

“Yes. Thought I’d take them out for a bit of a practice run.”

“They do take a bit of getting used to, don’t they?” His voice still sounds distant to me.

“You could say that.”

“Don’t worry. A few circuits around the fort and you’ll be used to it. You’ll learn how to cope with interference soon enough.”

“His right ear is a little off at the induction gem,” says the first voice. I recognize the harsh tone—Commander Hraroth. “I’d redo it if I were you.”

“The gem?” I ask.

“The whole thing.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Cathez says. “Functional enough. Quite frankly, I’m amazed you managed to get anything done at all with those two shouting the whole time.”

“The twins?”

“Who else?” spits Hraroth.

“They never should have been allowed to work together,” Cathez says, uncharacteristically harshly. “I’m beginning to understand why there’s such a taboo against it. A dwarf should forge his own equipment, on his own, without so much as one hammer-stroke gifted from another.”

“What are they making anyway?” I ask.

“No bloody idea,” says Hraroth. “We don’t pry and they don’t tell. Anyway, rush along now. As a rule I don’t deal with initiates.”

“I’m not an initiate,” I say again. “I’m fifth degree.”

“In that getup?” He makes disapproving noise. “We’ll see.”