Rise of the Living Forge

It was five days later when Arwin finished his first Core. It was one of the most simultaneously difficult and straightforward projects he’d ever worked on. The constraints on it were so general, so indeterminate, that he had no idea what would work or what wouldn’t.

All he knew was that he needed a heart for his Soul Guardians. A source that was more than just power. It had to be an artificial soul.

He knew how to make an item with a soul. He’d made one for Reya. The only difference was that he had to make one for a suit of armor instead. In theory, it shouldn’t have been too different.

Things were more than a bit harder in practice. The core was meant to be part of a larger being. It was simultaneously a piece of the guardian and also its own item. Arwin couldn’t just stick one of his own hairs into it, but he couldn’t just modify the suit of armor made from the Ivory Executioner Armor and add the core in.

The armor had to serve the role that Reya did, providing him with energy and giving him a way to make the item its own item.

Figuring out how to do that took Arwin three of the four days. He spent practically every waking moment he had in the Infernal Armory, emerging only to get food for it and himself and to sleep.

He spoke with everyone in the Menagerie to see if they had advice. Wallace swung by at one point and lent him a few pointers on working with more intelligent items, but in the end, the solution turned out to be far simpler than Arwin had thought.

Every step he’d tried had been one where he tried to replace the source of power that Reya had provided for her item. After all, he’d been convinced that no piece of metal could ever actually provide magic.

That was his job. Metal was nothing but that. Metal.

Except Arwin was wrong. The Soul Guardians were so much more than metal. And on the third night, when he’d been trying just about everything he could to see if he could find even a small hint to work off, he tried doing more than just smelling or listening to the metal.

He tried asking it for help.

And to his disbelief, a trickle of energy brushed against his mind. It was so faint that he barely felt it, but there was power within it. The distant scent of blood and ashes had wafted through his nostrils and his entire back had gone as stiff as a rod.

Then he’d thrown himself into his work.

If anything, he was disappointed in himself for not trying to ask the Soul Guardian for energy sooner. He’d already determined that soul items were far more than just crafted weapons. He knew that he was an outlet to let materials make themselves what they truly wanted to be by merging their desires with the deepest desires of who someone was.

He just hadn’t made the connection that the Soul Guardian could have desires of its own even after it had been made. The armor, even though it did not belong to anyone, knew what it wanted.

And all Arwin had to do was let that power free.

For the next day, he didn’t leave the Infernal Armory.

He remembered little of what happened in that day. Arwin — fortunately — didn’t forget the methods and the theoretical strategies. It wasn’t that he couldn’t replicate the feat. On the contrary, he suspected he would never forget how to forge a Core.

But the immensity of the undertaking nearly broke him. It was pain. The torture that was the forty hours he spent crafting the Soul Guardian’s core had been locked away into the recesses of his mind. He’d pushed his body and magic to their limits and then well beyond them. Every single drop of magical energy in both him and the Infernal Armory had been wrung dry.

They worked tirelessly, but the Core was hungry beyond measure. Arwin had been forced to call for Lillia to back him up, unable to leave his post as he worked and barely able to muster requests for food.

He couldn’t ask the other members of the Menagerie for power. The Core could not be influenced by their power or souls. It had to carved from him and the Soul Guardian alone. There was no time for a break; no time to rest. Stopping would have meant everything fell apart. All the work he’d put into creating the core would be wasted.

Looking back at it, Arwin would realize that he’d been far too weak to handle the immensity of the task he’d taken on. Shouldering the burden of bringing true life into the world without another human soul to help him was beyond an immense task.

It was an impossible one.

At least, it should have been.

But, in the darkest moments of the night, when his entire body was desperately trying to shut down and his mind was wrung so thoroughly that he could barely swing his hammer, he felt another pair of hands around his. ȓ

A presence, always at the edges of his awareness and never visible, stood alongside him. It held his hand when it faltered; propped up his back when he stumbled. And that presence would not let him fail.

He couldn’t afford the delay. Lillia would have told him if the Secret Eye had announced the tournament, but it would be coming any day now. He had to finish this Core so he could make Olive’s armor.

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And with the Infernal Armory and the strange presence at his side, Arwin did not fail.

He finished the Core. It was made of several segmented pieces that had all been slotted together into an orb — a deceptively simple looking piece in spite of the amount of effort that had gone into it.

His eyes were so blurry that he could barely even keep them open for long enough to see, but he couldn’t stop now. Arwin couldn’t even read the hazy words pulsing in the air above the core from the Mesh.

All he knew was that it was done. The Mesh didn’t need to confirm it for him. He could feel it. The Mesh was just writing in the air. It had nothing on the connection he felt with the materials he worked with when he truly allowed them to flow through him.

They were satisfied, and so was he.

Arwin dragged himself over to the Soul Guardian awaiting him on the far end of the smithy. Every step threatened to send him tumbling to the ground, but he was too close now. He couldn’t stop.

He reached out to the armor’s chestpiece, and the metal split down the center. It slid open, revealing a perfect cavity sitting in wait. The armor had prepared itself.

A faint smile pulled at Arwin’s lips.

Then he slotted the core in.

An explosion of magical energy drove into his heart like an ice pick.

Arwin crumpled on the spot. He hit the ground in a pile of limbs, and the last thing he saw before a wave of darkness slammed into him and dragged him into the depths of a black ocean was an enormous swirl of golden energy.

***

Arwin sat up with a sharp breath. His hand shot to his chest, clutching at his heart, to find that the pain was gone.

Everything was gone.

He sat in an endless white void, clad in nothing but plain gray robes. There was no end to the infinite plane. It was just… white. White that stretched on as far as the eye could see.

Even his mind felt still. There was no panic. No stress. No worry. He could still feel them lurking beneath the surface, but every emotion seemed to have had a thick, wet blanket thrown over them.

He was truly alone.

And then he wasn’t.

A man stood before him where there had been nothing. There was nothing about the man that could have been adequately described. He was of average height, with average posture and features. His hair was the kind that could blend into any crowd and his skin could have been any color or none at all.

There wasn’t a single discernable feature on his face. Arwin could have sworn that the man’s appearance was constantly changing, and yet, when he squinted, it was the same as it had always been.

“What is this?” Arwin asked. His words sounded strange to his ears, as if someone else had spoken them. A flicker of panic broke through the wall that blocked him from his emotions. “Am I…”

“Dead?” the man asked, the corner of a lip pulling up in the faintest bit of amusement. His voice was vaguely melodic, and a distant part of Arwin’s mind noted that he would probably be a fantastic singer. “What do you think?”

“I’d certainly hope not. I was really busy, and there’s still too much I have to do with Lillia. We’ve only slept together a few times, you know. I want to taste more of her cooking. I want to see monster towns with her. I want to do everything with her. She’d be really damn pissed at me if I killed myself making an item. The rest of the Menagerie, too. I can’t die right now.”

“I think I might have dialed the haze up a bit too much,” the man said, extending a hand toward Arwin.

Something popped in the back of his head. Arwin drew in a sharp breath and staggered.

“What was that?”

“You were a little too loopy. That’s what happens when you get slammed with that much magical energy at once, but you didn’t give me much choice.”

“I — what?” Arwin shook his head. “Hold on. Am I dead? I can’t be dead! I —”

“Please, Arwin.” The main raised his hands. “Relax. You aren’t dead.”

“Oh, thank god.” Arwin blew out a relieved breath. The panic had gripped him so suddenly that it had threatened to choke him on the spot. “Where is this, then? What’s going on? Who are you?”

“One thing at a time. You’re still in the Infernal Armory. We’re just having a little discussion inside your soul. You’ll be back to the real world soon enough.”

“Are you the item I just made?”

The man let out a soft laugh. “That would have been interesting. No, you aren’t quite at that level yet. You could not make something like me. But we do have something important to discuss.”

“About the item?”

“About you.” The man crossed his arms behind his back. “You’ve put me in quite the conundrum.”

“Who are you?”

“You first,” the man said. “I’ll give you a question at the end of our discussion. I’d say you deserve it at this point. Really, you’ve been fascinating. But I have other tasks I am called to do. I can’t sit around here forever, so we’ll have to solve your little conundrum quickly.”

“My… what now? I’m still not sure what’s going on.”

“You did too much,” the man said flatly. “You shouldn’t have been able to make that Core, Arwin. It was too early. Reflecting someone’s soul into a weapon… that’s in your power. Well done, by the way. But what you’ve just done was creating a soul.”

Arwin stared in disbelief. “What? But that’s impossible. I can’t—”

“Oh, it’s quite possible. It’s not a soul in the manner that you’re thinking. A soul is a bundle of beliefs and goals. Love and hate and life. That sort of thing is borne of desire and experience… and power. A great amount of power. Armor for Olive… you could have made that. But this? It should have been beyond you.”

“But it wasn’t?” Arwin asked carefully, still completely lost. “I succeeded?”

“You succeeded. You had a little help. Help I didn’t foresee.”

“You didn’t foresee?” Arwin’s brow furrowed and he pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers as he tried to force his muddy brain to work. “From who?”

The presence I felt? And how does this guy know so much about me? Who is he? Hell, how is he in my soul?

“That’s not a question for me to answer.” The man shook his head. “It doesn’t matter who. What matters is that you succeeded. That’s an immense accomplishment. One that cannot be handled so simply.”

And then it finally clicked.

Arwin’s eyes went wide and he took a step back. Goosebumps exploded over his arms and wreathed his neck.

“You’re the Mesh.”

The man smiled, but Arwin knew he was right before another word left his lips.

“I am,” the Mesh said with a small smile. “And we must discuss what you will receive for your creation. You have just taken one of the largest leaps in magical energy that I have ever seen someone earn. Arwin Tyrr, you have amassed enough power to jump all the way into the Adept Tier — and you’ve got some options as to how we’re distributing that. It wouldn’t be much of a reward if you missed out on a large amount of power in the process, after all.”