Author: NebulaSpider
Rating: G
Title: Metallurgy of a Life
Summary: How did Urprox Screl go from a master sword smith in an industrial Southland city to a jewelry trader in the rough Rainbow Lake country?
Disclaimer: I donot own Terry Brook's Shannara series or any of the characters from the books. I am certainly not making money off of this fiction.
Urprox Screl quenched the sword for a final time, steam hissing up from the barrel like a living entity. Once it was cool enough, he took it to his grinding wheel and polished both sides into edges hard and true. One last time, the old man's magic flared and splashed against the blade. One last time, the magic wrapped around the sword and became a part of it. When it was done, the smith held the blade in both hands reverently. He had done his best by the blade. When the old man first approached him, the smith had known reluctance and even anger. When the old man first convinced him, the smith had felt the challenge and excitement. A blade created with his matchless skill and a Druid's magic – surely no such thing had ever been attempted. Deep down inside, he had wondered if he could meet the challenge.
When Urprox looked down at the blade he had forged, he knew that there had never been and would never be a blade made its equal. He poured everything he had into his Sword. Two long years of disillusionment and heartache and longing and a lifetime's worth of skill he poured into the Sword and as it had been all his life he found the place inside himself to surpass all expectation. Urprox looked down at the weapon in his hands and nodded very slowly. He sheathed it in the plain sheath made for its shape and handed it to the Borderman. Silently, he turned away and banked the fires burning so unnaturally hot in his forge then walked out into the hot summer air of Dechtera to Mina and his home. There was no goodbye. He knew that there was nothing left to say.
The next morning he woke early and walked to his forge. Somehow, he was not expected to find the doors locked and barred once more and his forge as cold as if it had not been fired in the two years he had been retired. He almost walked away, then stiffened and unlocked the doors to go inside. The air inside was still. There were only the piles of ash as evidence of the previous night. He held a callused hand over the forge. There was no heat left at all, despite the awesome temperatures burning for days on end. The work of a lifetime and no evidence at all that any of it had ever happened. He turned to leave. There was nothing left for him here.
When Urprox reached his home and Mina's warm welcome, he was not surprised to learn that a small, dark girl had left a purse full of coin with his wife. Over breakfast, he spoke hesitantly of his feelings from his return to his forge. He spoke hesitantly not out of reluctance to tell his wife but out of an uncertainty of how to put his feelings into words that others could understand. Mina, of course, understood without his trying.
After that morning, there was no more talk in his home about his forge or his Sword. Urprox was mildly surprised to realize that he thought of the blade as his Sword, and then eventually dismissed it. He had forged it, even if it was with help. Of course it was his, in some small way. Others, of course, continued to talk. They would have talked no matter what tale Urprox came up with, because his famous forge was silent and still for two years and he had been the best. He was the best, still, even after those long years.
He wasn't really sure where the rumors first started. In a way, it seemed as if he had always been aware of them. He recognized the slow, guarded withdrawal of his friends and the odd looks in the shops from merchants he had been dealing with for years. He acknowledged that people stepped out of his way on the always busy, too-crowded streets of the city he had lived in his whole life where no one ever stepped out of anyone's way. One day, his wife Mina came home and commented in an off-handed way that one of her close friends would no longer speak to her because of his involvement in the dark arts. There was no judgment in her words, only a repetition of words spoken to her. They spoke for a brief time after dinner with their children. The next day, they began preparations silently. Three days later, the forge was sold and Urprox and his family left Dechtera for another kind of life.
In the end, there had not been much discussion at all. At a point in his life when Urprox was convinced that not much could move him anymore, his wife and children's quiet acceptance of him and their passionate desire to stay together as a family shook him to the core of his being. Somehow, it also managed to shake him out of the limbo he had fallen into after the forging of the Sword. Purpose returned to him, although it was elusive at first. In all his life, Urprox had never left Dechtera. All of his life had always been there. He loved the city and desired nothing else once he had Mina and his children and his forge. Slowly, he realized that there was a part of him that desired to see the rest of the world. When he and his family left, they took their belongings and went north.
Eventually, after some small amount of wandering, they found land around the Rainbow Lake area and built a sprawling home there with the money left from forging the Sword. Urprox and his eldest son took up the life of traveling traders, buying and selling pieces of jewelry to the remote homesteads in the surrounding areas. The very first person they encountered in the lake country had an accent so thick that their name Screl turned to something very close to Creel. Eventually, Creel became the name Urprox and his family introduced themselves by.
Urprox Creel lived the rest of his life as a wandering trader. He never again lifted a hammer to forge a sword, or even a knife to carve a block a wood. His desire to create and shape had burned most brightly and then banked permanently with his creation of the Sword. When others encountered him or his family years later, suspicious of the similarity of Creel to Screl, everyone denied any knowledge of the Sword or of the master smith that created it.
Over time, the Sword's origins became as vague and wondrous as the power it supposedly embodied. No one remembered who created it, only why it was created. As its memory faded, so did that of Urprox Screl, the master sword smith. Eventually, there was only Creel, the wanderer and trader whose sons eventually became known as wanderers and expert swordsmen of the same name. There was no memory of the druid Bremen, the forging of the Sword, or of any roots in the great industrial Southland city of Dechtera until the name and the history converged once again five hundred years in the future when the last remaining son of Shannara joined forces with the last remaining son of Creel in the barren Skull Kingdom and finally destroyed the Warlock Lord.