Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1826: Everwright

It was not cooking her. The torrent broke around the elf like current around a bridge pillar, and she stood rooted in it, comfortable, a tank in her own element letting her partner’s power roll over her shoulders.

A scandalized master rounded on his neighbors, beard bristling, demanding sense from somebody. ”What in the Ancestors’ name is she doing?!”

The fairer half of the hall answered him at once, flat, fluent, without taking their eyes off the anvil.

”Charging up.”

”It’s part of the ritual,” someone added helpfully from the rails. ”Weren’t you paying attention?”

The master opened his mouth, closed it, and turned back to the forge, educated.

On the guests’ bench, Elowen had both hands pressed to her mouth.

”She is... they are... during labor,” she managed. ”In public. In front of dwarves!”

”Isn’t she amazing? Inside the forge, she is always more comfortable...” Seraphiel had her chin propped on both palms, watching her best friend like a proud coach. ”Look at that form. Head placement, hand placement, the lean. She learned it all from watching me. I taught her.”

”That is not a technique!”

”It’s absolutely a technique.”

”...Does it require being his lover?” she asked the air, with enormous, doomed dignity. ”The hearth-tending.”

”Mm~?” Sera’s head turned very slowly, her grin arriving ahead of it. ”Why do you ask?”

”For the report.”

”Of course~ For the report.”

Elowen achieved a posture rigid enough to shame a parade manual and said nothing further, which said everything, and Seraphiel added another flustered royal guard to a collection that was coming along beautifully.

At the anvil, the final strike fell, and the seven lights banked themselves in Quinlan’s eyes like lamps turned down for the night. He rolled the haft once in his grip, set the hammer aside, and gave the steel one long, satisfied look, and the air above the anvil shivered with a power none of them could name yet.

Brokk was moving before anyone else dared, because some offices cannot be delegated. The First Hammer of the royal smithy called the final quench herself, her voice cracking across the hall as if the masterwork were her own, and the whole hall leaned in.

Steam went up like a curtain rising.

The steam stood over Kaelira’s borrowed anvil at the heart of the royal smithy, and for three long breaths nobody moved, three hundred professionals holding themselves still for the sake of a cloud.

When it thinned, the hammer sat in the quench-mist, finished. And it was humming.

Faintly, deep in the metal, at a pitch felt rather than heard: a finished thing announcing itself. The water-grained faces of three humble steels ran with rune-script that glimmered as the metal cooled, settling into the grain like the last words of a long argument, won.

Quinlan stood over the quench-anvil while the last of the steam curled off it, in nothing but the towel and the heat rising off his own back, and studied the humming hammer.

Behind him, the tip of an overly long ear poked out from under his arm before Kaelira had fully let go of his waist. She ducked through, came around to stand between the Villain and the anvil, and settled inside the circle of his arms while his chin came to rest over her head. Neither of them appeared to find this worth remarking on.

The smith went to work with her eyes first.

She tracked the rune-script down one face and up the other, tipped her head to read how the light moved through the layers, and only then touched the hammer to turn it three slow times against her wrist and find where the weight wanted to sit. Her hands were rock steady. Three hundred dwarves watched a woman run a full acceptance inspection while pressed spine-to-chest against two meters of half-naked primordial, and not one degree of her focus slipped.

’She isn’t even breathing differently,’ Brokk thought, somewhere between awe and grief.

”Well?” Quinlan’s voice rumbled down over the top of her head, warm and unhurried. ”What’s the verdict?”

Kaelira turned the hammer one last quarter-turn, felt the balance seat exactly where she’d built it to, and delivered her judgment on the masterwork three hundred masters had just wept over.

”You did a good job,” she nodded, proud of his work.

”We did.”

”Me?” the Runeweaver shook her head. ”I only-”

”Kaelira.”

”...” silence overtook the tomboy elf, but only for a few stretching seconds. Then, the most honest, simple, joyous grin the dwarves had ever seen on an elf materialized on her lips.

”We did a good job!” she beamed.

”Good. Want to do the honors?”

She went still. Then she smiled, small and soft, entirely to herself, the shy elf surfacing under the smith for just long enough to matter, and both hands closed around the haft.

”...Yeah.”

She stepped out of his arms and raised the hammer high over her head. The hall’s noise dropped off a cliff, forge-light running the length of the water-grain and waking the rune-script where the glow crossed it.

”I think I’ll call it Everwright,” Kaelira said, her voice carrying to the top tier without her having to push it. ”This is not a war hammer.”

The gallery had no idea what to do with that, a relic humming with a conqueror’s whole element-set, raised overhead like a war-banner, and the elf holding it telling them plainly it wasn’t a weapon.

”Then what in the deeps is it?” a master got out.

”Everwright is a tool for master smiths with more mana than time on their hands.”

”Huh?” came the gasps from all around.

Elemental infusion was a lengthy process, taking a great deal of time and resources. The most common method was to have a ’Mancer-type’ mage expend their element into a special artifact made for compressing and storing it, a Pyromancer striking fire into the vessel, for example. The smith would then extract that stored fire and imbue it into the piece on their anvil.

”Could I borrow a few plain shields, First Hammer?” Kaelira asked, knowing it would be easier to show than tell. ”Whatever your hall turns out on an ordinary day.”

Brokk didn’t ask why. She barked a name, an apprentice bolted for the common rack, and five plain dwarven wall-shields came skidding out across the floor, hall-forged and unlovely, the honest output of an ordinary shift.

Quinlan lifted two fingers.

A low gale peeled off his palm and slid under the shields where they lay, and all five lifted off the flagstones at once to hang in a slow, patient rotation at the height of Kaelira’s shoulder, turning in his wind like leaves that had forgotten to fall.

Kaelira picked one with her eyes and reached into the hammer instead of into herself.

”Magma.”

The rune-channels answered.

Of the seven elements folded into the grain she called up exactly one, and the hammer’s head woke red, then deeper, then molten, magma-light bleeding up the water-grain until the whole tool ran the color of a fresh pour.

She struck the hanging shield once, and the magma took, heat spreading from the point of impact in a slow bloom that the plain dwarven steel drank down and held.

The second blow drove it deeper, the bloom running to the rim, veins of banked fire threading the surface and down the straps until an apprentice on the rail forgot every rule of the hall and yelped.

On the third she swung full-arm, the way she’d driven her last folds, and Everwright’s glow guttered out the instant the blow landed, every ember of it gone from the hammer and into the shield.

The shield rang off the flagstones no longer plain and no longer cold, a common wall-shield off a common rack now banked with a magma heat, while the other four spun on in Quinlan’s wind, untouched and waiting their turn.

For one heartbeat the hall couldn’t make sense of what they’d seen. Then the rune-master who’d sat down on the stairs got there first, and he came back off them slow.

”Ancestors,” he breathed. ”They forged a tool that bypasses the whole pain-in-the-ass enchanting procedure?!”

Silence held for exactly as long as dwarven lungs could bear it.

”Impossible!”

”There must be a drawback!”

”How many uses?!”

”How much mana needed?!”

”What’s the output?!”

”Am I out of a job?!”

Then the royal smithy came apart. Masters surged in around the anvil, protocol dead and terror forgotten, shouting over each other in dwarvish and trade-tongue at once. Someone demanded to know the fold count. Someone else had produced calipers from somewhere. An entire delegation was interrogating Kaelira about the shear plane, and she answered six of them at a time with her ears blazing and her spine straight.

Dain got a hand on the hammer’s haft, just laid it there, the way you’d touch a shrine, and his shoulders shook once.

”Twenty-two years I begged the crown for the best metal and cursed them for forcing my craft to get stale,” the old master said, to nobody, his voice cracking around an apprentice’s grin. ”...Perhaps it was never the metal.”

Brokk stood over the anvil, thumbs hooked back in her belt, studying the finished work for a long, wordless stretch. Then she raised her head and looked across it at Quinlan. The question that had been building in the First Hammer’s chest all day finally came out, and the hall heard it coming and went quiet to make room.

”You didn’t come with terms,” she said. ”You came, you asked good questions, you opened the crown’s racks like they were yours, you worked my bellows. Fine. I’ve stopped trying to make sense of you.”

She stood iron-grey and unbowed under his gaze. ”So I’ll just ask it, since every hammer in this hall is afraid to. What do you want from the dwarven people, Conqueror?”