Crucible
The hammer strikes in rhythms meaningful only to the blacksmith as the tempered steel is folded and turned, folded and turned. The flame of the forge crackles as if in time with the private music; the crucible hisses in sibilant chorus. The clatter of cooling metal adds the percussion and the blacksmith himself moves quickly, efficiently through a forge almost too small for his great Tauren bulk. It is the sole dance the smith knows, the one unending song, the only grim joy he allows himself. In the heat of the forge comes his singular act of creation, for he lives alone, and works only for his smithy.
He knows all the world's ores as they melt; he sees all the little impurities within them and boils them away into purity. It runs always hot, his forge, forever tending to some new project. Birthing new metals and new weapons. They give him comfort, his steel children and their bites. They may leave him in time, as children do, but they always come back to him. Spattered, dented, marked with all the knowledge of the battlefield. He knows all their moves and the ways they themselves can dance in a warrior's care, though he refuses to carry them into a fight in his own hands. He knows his limitations. He admires the potential of his children.
The blades he makes are eternal where his flesh is not. He clings to this knowledge as his solace where the words of shamans have failed him.
. . .
He was a boy, barely out of his yearling, not even yet fit for the first hunt. His days were spent chasing boar and plainstrider for easy meat and the first glimmers of his practice to be an adult. The rest of the time, he sat at the shaman's knee, listening to tales both tall and reverent. They were good days, and there was peace for him. The camp kept their children gentle and full of joy in the Earthmother's grasp. If there were risks to their way of life, the boy, like all the camp's children, did not know of them. Until the hot summer day when he learned all of it.
The raiding party struck fast, screaming in from the Barrens towards the tiny camp. The air was full of the snap-snarl of the massive riding cats and their lingering heated musk; the sky full of the flight of impossibly slender arrows. It was revenge for some perceived infraction in the northern forests of elven green, some small disagreement of hunting rights though the boy does not yet know this and later does not care.
It was done in minutes, the destruction of lives built on years, and the boy will never again read the tales or listen to the songs of grand battles that last many days. Not without a tremor, without nausea, and only ever with the cold, dead eyes of understanding. He knows too much of the truth now. Death comes too quickly, draping itself across plains drenched red in the gore of his father, his mother, his calfling brothers and sisters. The families that tented around them lay still in the dust and the broken grass, among them is sweet little Alani Firehoof who smiled at him each day and no longer smiles as her eyes stare up at nothing. They are frozen in a wounded look of pleading.
What the boy meant to be a blacksmith sees, he sees as if through a muffling haze. It is as if shadows have fallen across his eyes, though An'she rides high above in a cloudless sky. He has survived by chance, caught within his family's tent as it fell. Its ties were cut, supports shattered when heavy forms struck them with grunts and cries. It is when the boy climbs out to view what has happened that he sees the holes punched through the tent's thick leather all around his hiding place. It is then and not before that he wets himself in mindless terror and sorrow.
Blades stick up from the ground, littered among the dead of his herd-kin. Harsh sun glints on them, on the redness that slicks the hilts and edges. Arrows mark tents, the cooking fire, the faintest of winds ruffling what remains of their feathers. His eyes fix on the weapons as the shaman's low, sonorous wail of mourning rises from nearby rocks spattered with already drying blood. "She too survives," the boy thinks dimly to himself. But for how long?
He is still staring at the blades when the scouts arrive to collect him. The blades never change. But the bodies do, in the hot sun. He never forgets. It is with him through his years, the sound of the arrows whispering to him in the night as he sleeps.
. . .
The blacksmith never looks at his clients. It is not a policy; it is simply his way. They are only bodies to him; fragile and easily lost. They come and they go, taking his steel children with them to other places that the smith has no interest in seeing. He knows what they all look like after.
Likely, though, the clients remember him. He is hulking and near-silent, the grey of age beginning to spark through his mottled hide, the damascened steel ring heavy in his face. The clients know better than to stare at it. It is fine craftsmanship, an example of what he's capable of. It is art.
. . .
The smith examines the ores of his visitors with either a grunting acceptance or a growl of denial, narrowing his dark, deep-set eyes at the lumps of metal as he divines their flaws and calculates the heat needed to purify them. The effort needed to change them into something more. Later, as he works, he names the new blades for himself, but never shares them with the clients. He leaves his sigil on the fresh metal, writes little signs in his maker's diary to remember each weapon and their identities, but forgets their owner's sound and smell almost as soon as they leave with his children.
. . .
"I need a blade." The voice has a waver to it, thin and reedy and something more hidden underneath the words. The hands that creep into the smith's corner of view are small and fine. They are shaking as they push a ratty woolen bag across the counter at him. The bag is incapable of sealing, so he glances at the ore before grunting his yea or nay. It is cheap and easily found copper, of flawed and impure form. More rock than ore; mud and dust dribbles from the bag and soils his counter. There's the glint of some tin as well, stained and shot through with granite and coarse rubble. The smith shakes his head without looking up. The bounty the voice brings him is likely useless. He has no faith in the contents of the bag, nor a care for the trembling voice. He turns away, dismissing the arrival with the broad wall of his back.
"I need a blade!" It is almost a wail now, the tone of the words spiraling up and revealing the fear the voice fought to hide. It startles the smith and despite himself he flicks a glance to the voice's owner. The face matches the hands, small and fine. Sin'dorei. His nose wrinkles for a moment around the steel ring, then looks again before his instincts tell him to turn away and forget. The armor she wears is ill-fitting, made for another of far different size than she. It is battered and old; he recognizes some of it as Orcish and other, smaller pieces as smelling of the Forsaken. But it is her eyes that catch him, keep him looking though his face is unreadable to her. They are wide eyes, a bright, shining green in a face that's young even for their kind... and hollow, filled with the knowledge of the dead. He knows the look. He knows it well, having seen it once in the reflection of a Mulgore pond as scouts and rescuers from nearby Thunder Bluff helped wash his child's shame from him. His jaw twitches despite himself and still he looks at her.
"Go home," he rumbles in low tones, and for him it's a speech. She doesn't move; she tenses, eyes widened at the response. He permits an even rarer monologue. "This is not for you. What you bring to me is too weak. Go home."
"Please. A blade." She raises her head as her armor clanks and scrapes in the act of pride. "I'll pay whatever you ask."
He doesn't respond in words, but he meets her eyes and asks the questions with them. What is so important? Why do you pester? Go.
"I'm to kill a king!" she manages to hiss, fright and anger and hate all mixed up. The eyes blaze and for a moment the smith sees a kind of madness in her. "He what did this to us. To my family. To my people. I swear it. I swear it."
What she is going to do is die, the smith tells himself. But very well. He has tied himself to the matter by acknowledging her far more than he ought to have. She will have her blade. He reaches out a thick hand and pulls the sack of homely ore towards him with a resigned grunt. As he turns away at last, his other fist bangs the sign inlaid on the counter: Pay on delivery.
. . .
He works all day and night in his forge, determined to make something of the ruin the little elven girl brought to him. Other projects lay to the side, some warlock's toy blade, some ornament for a lady's spellstaff forgotten in favor of this fool's errand.
The copper takes many meltings, meticulous, careful work to ensure that all the flaws and flecks of alien material are gone from it. All night, he has a doubt that he's pulled the worst from it. In the end it gleams in the crucible, bright and waiting for him to mold it. The scarce tin takes even longer, though by the effort he has to put in, he ought just discard it and stay with the copper. It seems right this way, however. Better. His instincts suggest there might be some worth in it after all.
At the latter end of the midnight hours, the bronze is at last stable. The smith looks into the gleaming mold with pride. Something weak and ill-meant for such grand ends birthed into something better. Something more than it could have been. The child outstrips the parent's grandest hope. It gives him a tremble, a sense of what-may-be.
The blade itself is made smoothly, the bronze working with him as if sculpted through the hands of the Earthmother herself. It is a simple sword, light, perfectly balanced, and meant for small, awkward hands unused to fighting, but he gives it his private sigil near where the tang meets hilt anyway. No ornamentation, an almost bland weapon, but it still represents a pinnacle for him. Chance, he names it in his private book. He has taken one. Now the weapon will go out and take its own.
. . .
In the morning, his new child goes away to its fate and this time he does not look at its fragile owner.
. . .
Years pass and the smith takes a rich offer from Orgrimmar to set shop in the frozen north. He leaves his old forge in the care of some well-meant apprentice with a flair for the work and finds himself a new flame in cold stone. Clients are more frequent now, and he turns down far more than he can accept.
Some of the clients that come to his counter are those that would have been enemies anywhere else than in this strange, flying city, and his stomach still gnaws itself acidic when one of them step in to seek his craft. The smith tells himself that it is no weakness to feel emotion, and turns each one of the darkling forest elves down without a word.
Other clients bring new metals to him and he learns each one's secrets and lies. They are new children born under his hands, dark, and sometimes full of the whispery deceit of the strange-born and corrupted saronite. They do not lure him, though, and he tames each to his full satisfaction. Even in this pale stone place, his work remains art.
. . .
It is a cold spring day, and he is working on some old, fiddly project of khorium and steel when the slender shadow draws across him. Another client. He has no time for it; he has turned away a dozen this day and he will turn away a dozen more. Beyond the spires of the city, the war he strives to ignore rises to a fever pitch.
The smith grunts to himself and puts the toy down with a clank. "I need a blade," comes the voice, and that makes him jerk. The voice is not reedy. It is not afraid. It is full of a warrior's weight, and a warrior's pride, and it is a voice that recognizes him as he recognizes it.
The blacksmith turns his fully-silvered head very slightly to see the fine profile of a slight Sin'dorei woman. "A new blade. I had one that served me so well, until I was forced to leave it in some moldering thing's chest. I regret that. I need another." He turns further so that he may look fully at her, that lost and hopeless elven girl from long ago. Her armor fits now, molded like second skin to a slim form. It is fine work and the smith admires it, never having worked for defense. It is ornately decorated, whorled black and bronze along the shoulders with the runes of her path, that alien holy warrior's craft of blood and light. A shield rests easy on her back and in her hands is an old woolen bag that doesn't close. No muck and rubble falls from it, though. Instead, there is the barest bright gleam from the mineral within.
The smith squints to see the ore caught inside and catches his breath with a sharp inhale. More than a lifetime's worth of rare, pure saronite in its most primordial form. Mineral impurities would be nearly impossible in such a state. A gift of the earth. Any weapon forged from it would have a chance to be the greatest child he'd ever created. If he could tame it, and shape it to perfect form.
He allows himself to look up once more into the face of the woman and sees all the things he recognized once and sympathized with. The cold knowledge of death, the hollow loss, the sorrow. Now he sees something more; her will forged into a chance to fight and win against the enemy she'd made and named for herself. In a flash he understands something he forced himself to ignore. To never see in his clients. He never took the chance.
Blades may be eternal, but never change once tempered. The brief life can; a single, flawed, impure soul caught in its own crucible and remaking itself into something far stronger than it was before. A life that can become more than it was ever meant to be. It did not have the limitations of steel; could not be forged solely by a master's hand. Life forged itself.
Something springs to the blacksmith's eyes, a moistness that he blinks away and instead utters a gruff, deep noise from the back of his throat.
"You're to kill a king," he says, drawing the bag across his counter. His lips curl into a rare smile. "I'll take the chance." A jut of the chin towards her. "I swear to you a blade meant for it."
Outside the smithy, bright birds flit up the pale spirals of floating Dalaran, dancing in the air despite their life in the shadow of the ice-crowned citadel.