The Coreless Vanguard - The First Engraving

The third-bell had rung hours ago, le

The third-bell had rung hours ago, leaving the subterranean workshop wrapped in a heavy, suffocused quiet.

The great air-flues were shut, and the central pit had settled into a sullen, deepred glow, like an eye closing in the dark.Silas sat alone on a low wooden bench behind the scrap bins.His back hurt.

The tooth stub in his cheek was still tender, but the swelling had gone down enough that he could chew on his right side if he was careful.

On the bench beside him lay a small piece of dark blue metal—a palm-sized scrap of azure-iron he’d dug out of the slag-trough after

Vulcan had finished shaping the hinges.

It was an offcut, jagged at the edges, heavy for its size, and cold enough to draw sweat from his dirty palms.Silas picked up a four-pound hand hammer.He didn’t use the central anvil.

He used a smaller, pitted block of steel set into a stump near the back wall, where the shadows were thickest.

He didn’t want the ring of the strike to carry up the draft-flues.He set the scrap in the dying embers of the side forge, waiting until the blue metal took on a dull, plum-red hue.

Then he drew it out with a short pair of hand-tongs and began to tap.Tap.

Clink.He wasn’t trying to make something pretty.

He didn’t know how to turn a guard or carve a pommel out of brass.

He just wanted an edge.

A heavy, single-edged dagger, six inches long, with a thick spine that wouldn’t snap if he drove it into something hard.He made mistakes.

He struck too hard on the left flank, pinching the steel into a thin, ugly ridge that he had to spend twenty minutes hammering flat again.

His left wrist, still stiff from the

Basilisk fight, gave out twice, making the tongs slip and dropping the hot metal into the ash.

He cursed under his breath, picked it up, and kept going.By two in the morning, he had a blade.It was ugly.

The spine was thick and uneven, the point slightly blunt, and the surface carried the dark, mottled marks of the hammer face.

He wrapped the rough tang in three layers of greasy leather strap he’d cut from an old apron, pulling the knot tight with his teeth.It felt heavy in his hand.

Balanced like a rock, but solid.Silas set the cooling blade on the wooden bench between his knees.

The steel had faded from red back to a dull, slate-blue.He sat there for a long time, listening to the slow drip-drop of the ceiling leaks.Siron had used a diamond-tipped stylus and a bright, polite weave of

Aura to carve his snowflake lines into the blue-iron.

He had spent hours calculating the geometry, making sure the power would flow cleanly without hurting the metal or the man holding it.Silas had no silver stylus.

He had no diamond.

Aura.He pulled the skinning knife from his belt.

He looked at his own left hand—at the thick, yellowed calluses on his palm and the dark dirt ground into his knuckles.Without letting himself hesitate, he drove the dull point of the knife into the meat of his left thumb.”Gah…”He squeezed his eyes shut, his jaw clamping hard on his broken tooth.

Blood—thick, dark red, and hot—welled up from the cut instantly, spilling down over his knuckles and dripping onto the flat of the azure-iron blade.It didn’t sizzle.

The metal was too cool for that.

The blood just pooled on the dull steel, dark and wet.Silas uncurled his right arm, stripping back the dirty linen bandages.The

Gale-Wolf rune burned faintly under his skin, its eighteen silver-gray nodes pulsing in time with the throb of his cut thumb.

He reached out with his right hand and pressed his thumb directly onto the flat of the blue blade, smearing his own warm blood across the metal.Do it, he thought, his heart hammering against the hard, jagged

Shard beneath his ribs. Take it.He didn’t draw geometric curves.

He didn’t try to make a snowflake.He took an iron scribe—a heavy, pointed spike used for marking measurements on cold plate—and began to carve.

He followed the geometry that was burned into his own arm.

He drove the point into the steel, connecting eighteen tiny, crude dots in the exact order he felt them throb in his own muscle.He carved with raw, physical pressure, his left hand shaking from the strain, his blood running into the freshly gouged channels.Node one.

Node three…The work was brutal.

The scribe slipped twice, gouging deep, ugly scratches across the blade.

Silas didn’t stop.

He pressed harder, forcing his blood into the metal with every scratch, his teeth grinding until his jaw ached.When he finished the eighteenth point, he laid his bare right palm flat over the bloody steel.Inside his chest, the

Shard gave a sudden, violent shudder.A sharp, icy current shot down his right shoulder, blasting through his arm, through the eighteen nodes, and straight into the dagger.CRACK.The air in the dark corner of

Three went dead cold.The wet blood filling the carved grooves on the blade didn’t burn or turn to black soot.

It turned a strange, shimmering pale-green—a bright, translucent liquid light that seemed to eat the dark metal around it.A sharp, violent whip of wind erupted from the flat of the blade.It wasn’t a breeze.

It was a localized gust that blew the loose ash off the bench, threw

Silas’s hair back from his forehead, and snuffed out the tiny oil candle burning on the wall ten feet away, plunging the corner into pitch darkness.Silas sat in the dark, his breath locked in his throat.In his hand, the crude azure dagger was vibrating.

It didn’t feel like a dead piece of iron anymore.

It felt cold, light, and terrifyingly sharp, humming with the restless, caged energy of the

Gale-Wolf.He raised it slightly.

The pale-green light from the etched grooves cast weird, shifting shadows across his soot-stained face and the dark walls of the forge.It wasn’t elegant.

It wasn’t symmetrical.

It looked like a piece of salvaged iron that someone had dragged out of a monster’s stomach and branded with a hot iron.Silas touched the edge with his uninjured right thumb.

He barely pressed against the steel, but the skin split instantly, a tiny line of blood appearing before he even felt the bite.A dark, quiet laugh bubbled up in his throat, tasting of iron and salt.Siron had drawn a cage for his magic.Silas had just forged a claw.He pulled a square of oiled canvas from his pocket, wrapped the glowing dagger tight until the pale-green light was smothered, and shoved it deep into the inner lining of his coat, right next to his father’s journal and the

Shard resting near his heart.Then he stood up, picked up his brush, and went back to sweeping the coal dust off the floor before the four-o’clock bell rang.