The next morning’s sun brought with it hope dashed and a change of plans.
Before breakfast, Eir visited Bertha and returned with the unfortunate news that she was not pregnant. Even with Jadis’ Potency Alteration skill, if Eir’s body didn’t have an egg ready, then there simply wasn’t anything for her seed to fertilize. Jadis had hoped that whatever magic was empowering her sex-based skills would translate to a first-try success, but it seemed chance was against them in that regard.
While Eir was disappointed, she was still as bright and cheerful as she ever was. Just because they hadn’t succeeded on this attempt didn’t mean they wouldn’t succeed on the next. Jadis absolutely agreed with her attitude on the matter and made a promise to keep her potency set to max whenever they were having sex in the future. That meant the other girls had to be aware if they were doing any group activities that they could be impregnated as well, but considering how onboard everyone seemed to be with that prospect Jadis didn’t think it would be a problem, as least so long as they had access to Bertha.
The change of plans came in the form of her scheduled date. It was supposed to be Aila’s day, but with the news of her parents coming to town, some shuffling had to be done with the order of the dates. For Jadis, that meant after the morning training session with Noll, she made her way to the High Temple of Svaroga, God of the Forge. She hadn’t visited this particular temple yet, though she had been meaning to even before coming to Eldingholt. Doru, the High Priest of Svaroga she had met previously interested her, and she had wanted to arrange a meeting between him and Sabina for some time.
Fortunately, it seemed Sabina had already been several steps ahead.
“Ease the crucible down now,” Doru rumbled, his deep voice easily heard over the roar of the fire and the clanging of metal on metal. “Slowly. Slowly. We want the eleria to flow evenly throughout the channels. If it clumps, the enchantment could be faulty.”
Jadis watched in fascination as Sabina gradually poured liquid eleria into the tiny, intricate passages that had been carved into the blade of the strange sword. The crucible she held with iron tongs was glowing bright white with heat, though the molten material within wasn’t red, but a multicolored mixture of shining lights. It looked less like she was handling a melted stone, and more like she was pouring liquid light in the channels.
The eleria, a pretty enough stone while in its normal state, had been crushed into powder and then melted down like glass. The enchantments Sabina had etched into the sword would work all on their own, but as soon as any amount of magic power was put through them, they would cause the material of the weapon to quickly degrade and break apart. Eleria acted as a conduit, letting magic flow through the enchantment without damaging the surrounding material.
From the way Sabina described the process, it felt a lot like electricity and circuits. If circuits were made correctly and made from the right material, the electricity passing through them would cause no harm and allow the electronic device to function as intended. But if the circuit was incorrectly fashioned, or if it was made from the wrong material, it wouldn’t function correctly, or even at all.
Or maybe it would work for a brief moment before overheating and exploding.
As Sabina emptied the small container, Doru reached over and took it from her tongs and switched it out for another so that she could continue the enchantment. Unlike Sabina, the half orc half therion high priest did not use tongs and simply held the white-hot crucibles in his bare hands. Jadis knew that the temperature on those ceramic containers should have been enough to melt through Doru’s skin down to the bone in less than a second, but apparently the big man had a skill that gave him immunity to any heat that was generated by a forge. Definitely a useful trick, not just for the utterly badass way he could just pick up chunks of burning metal and literally mold them by hand, but also because the forge was hotter than an oven on Thanksgiving Day.
Almost the entirety of the temple interior was dedicated to workshops of one kind or another. Everything from fletchers to candlestick makers were represented in some fashion since crafting of any kind was Svaroga’s domain. However, the back half of the first floor of the large temple was nothing but forges. Dozens of priests were running around inside the massive open room, all working to forge weapons and armor which would be sent to the army to aid in the fight against the demonic invasion.
Of course, the priests didn’t look much like priests. Most of them were large, sweaty men, while a few were large, sweaty women. Most wore heavy leather aprons rather than a priest’s robes, and quite a few were spotted with fresh burn marks from the sparks and flames constantly flying from the open flames and hammering anvils. All were focused on their tasks, with only a few occasionally glancing over at Jadis in curiosity.
Doru didn’t pay any of the other priests any mind at all. His attention was solely on the blade being forged, and by extension, teaching Sabina how to better enchant.
“There. Let it cool a moment now. The eleria needs to set or it’ll spill out of the channels.”
“The metal is still hot though, isn’t it?” Jay asked. “Will it really cool enough like this?”
Doru didn’t answer, instead motioning towards Sabina. The half elf set her tongs down and took a step back from the burning platform where the blade had been set, its metal still glowing red.
“Cold flame steel doesn’t have to be as hot as regular steel to be workable,” Sabina explained as she motioned towards the incomplete weapon. “While eleria has a very high melting point compared to almost anything else. At this temperature, the liquid eleria will cool and bind to the steel, which will result in a stronger, longer-lasting enchantment.”
“So long as you don’t break her, this lady will last you a lifetime,” Doru commented as he gently ran a thick finger over the surface of the blade. “That’s about enough, Sabina. I’ll handle this next part. You prepare the quenching mix.”
Since she had three sets of eyes, Jadis was able to keep track of what both crafters were doing.
Doru pulled a different crucible from his forge, this one filled with a molten metal of some kind. To Jadis’ surprise, he used a small tool to gently cover the eleria-filled etchings, creating a smooth surface on the blade. The work was slow and extremely finicky as the master smith was careful to only get the molten metal onto the enchantment etchings with no spillover onto the main parts of the blade. Considering how small and thin those channels were, the process was excruciating to watch. If Doru didn’t have the ability to ignore the heat of the metal, Jadis didn’t think he’d be able to paint the metal on in the way he was.
“This can’t be how most enchanters craft swords,” Dys addressed Sabina, not wanting to distract the high priest while he was so focused on his task. “There’s no way this is done for all the magic weapons out there.”
“Definitely not!” Sabina chirped in her excitable way. “Most smiths will forge the sword first, then add the enchantments after. Which is perfectly fine! It’s how I’d have to do enchantments. In fact, it’s how I’ll have to add the enchantments I want to make for your armor. That’s the normal way and there’s nothing wrong with it! What Doru is helping me do is the expert way! Only the greatest smith-enchanters in the world can do this! It’s truly an honor to get his help with something like this, especially since he’s teaching me so much about how the masters work! Oh, if only my father were here, he’d love to see Master Doru in the forge, he’d probably talk about it for days! I hope I get a letter back from him soon, but probably not since he gets so focused on his work that he forgets everything else around him and then—”
“Sabina? Sabina,” Dys interrupted her gushing lover. “Don’t forget the mix.”
“Oh!” the smith exclaimed, realizing that she was still holding a sack of something in one hand while standing next to a very tall, thin barrel. “You’re right! Thank you!”
Unable to reach her cheek, Sabina hopped up on her toes and gave Dys a peck on her arm, drawing a laugh from Jadis. Without further delay, Sabina began pouring some kind of powder out of the bag and into the quenching barrel.
The barrel, Sabina explained as she worked, was full of an oil made from a particular plant seed called Forge Thistle. Other seeds could be pressed to make suitable oil, but forge thistle was the best due to its purity. The powder that Sabina was pouring into the oil was a mix of different reagents that came from magic beasts as well as alchemically useful herbs. Even some crushed eleria crystal was mixed in, everything ground down into as fine a powder as possible before adding it to the oil. Several ingredients had to be added separately though, and ideally only moments before the metal was ready to be quenched.
“Once we quench the blade in this oil, all the magic inside the ingredients will be used up,” Sabina told Dys and Syd, pointing to the mixture in the barrel that she was stirring with a large pole. “So it’s a very expensive process. We have to make sure we get it right, or thousands of coins worth of ingredients will be wasted.”
“How much is all this costing?” Syd asked with some concern. If this was a one-try only kind of situation with some expensive materials, she didn’t want to be a distraction.
“Well,” Sabina thought out loud as she stirred the thick mixture while balanced on top of a step ladder. “The forge thistle oil would cost about twenty eagles for this amount.”
Jadis cringed at the quoted number. An eagle was one of the higher coin denominations in the imperial monetary system. She knew from previous experience that ten eagles was enough to buy a riding horse with its saddle. Twenty silver eagle coins for just this barrel of oil was quite an expense.
“Then there’s the powdered drake bone, the wyvern spikes, the purple crown mushroom, the silverleaf, the red rot lily petals…”
Sabina continued to list of one ingredient after another, the number of different strange and alien items growing to a worrying amount. Jadis knew that some of the materials Sabina listed came from their own adventures in the Great Southern Forest, but many were unknown to her and likely came from the crate of materials the Dryads had gifted Sabina.
“All together, I think the cost is probably somewhere around nine hundred eagles.”
“That’s not counting the cost of the blade itself,” Doru called out from where he was still finishing up his part of the enchantment. “Add on seven hundred eagles, then a few hundred more for the labor.”
“And then there’s the types of enchantments we’re putting onto it,” Sabina pointed out as she added the contents of a small bottle of black liquid to the oil mixture. “Enchantments for hardness, enchantments for sharpness, enchantments for arcane damage,” she called out with glee in her tone. “We can’t add too many or the enchantments will interfere with each other and cause them to fail, but the ones we put on there will be worth their weight in gold! Except, enchantments don’t weigh anything, so I guess that doesn’t work, but they’ll be worth something really heavy in gold!”
“A kingly blade,” Doru murmured as he smoothed out the final touches. “Or queenly, I suppose. You’ll inspire fear in your enemies and envy in your allies.”
“I, uh, guess I’ll just stand over here, then,” Jay mumbled as she slowly backed away from the incomplete weapon that probably cost more than all the rest of her gear combined, multiplied by ten. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way—”
“Nonsense,” Doru shouted over the din of the forge. He pointed at Jay, then at one of the large bellows. “Syd, get over there and start pumping. I need some heat for this.”
“That’s Jay, not Syd,” Sabina corrected without looking.
“She’s all the same woman,” Doru huffed. “What’s it matter?”
“It matters because that’s Jay and this is Syd,” Sabina replied matter-of-factly. “You wouldn’t call a sledgehammer a cross pein hammer, would you?”
“Whatever,” Doru dismissed as he pointed a meaty finger at Jay. “You, pump the bellows.”
Doing as she was told, Jay began working the bellows as Doru placed the blade into the forge to heat it up to a bright red color. Following the master smith’s instructions, she settled on what she felt was a fairly slow pace, but according to Doru anything faster would risk overheating the cold flame steel to the point of melting, which would ruin all their work.
“Why do they call it cold flame steel, anyway?” Jay asked the high priest as he retrieved a pair of tongs and leather gloves from a nearby workbench.
“Because if you use the right fuel, it softens at a much lower temperature than ordinary steel,” he pointed at a barrel of dark green pebbles that he’d been periodically tossing into the fires. “Lower temperature, colder flame. Cold flame steel.”
Oh. That was significantly less magical than Jadis was hoping for. Still, it was an interesting concept. Since it acted differently from steel, which Jadis knew was just iron and carbon in the correct mixture, she wondered what materials the cold flame steel was made with. There had to be something magical going on there, otherwise she was sure she’d have seen something like the metal back on Earth. Since she’d never heard of anything like it, there had to be something supernatural to the metal and its manufacturing.
“Go ahead and add the demon blood to the oil,” Doru ordered as he checked the blade to make sure it was heating evenly. “Then get your butt over here, Sabina. You’ll be doing the quenching.”
“Demon blood?” Syd asked, surprised by the final ingredient. “Really?”
“There’s a lot of magic in demon blood,” Sabina shrugged as she added a small pot of the dark liquid to the barrel. Unlike with the other ingredients, she didn’t mix the blood in, but simply poured enough on the top to create a surface layer. “Other additives work well, too, but demon blood is super full of magic and does a great job of getting the reaction going, better than most. I’ve heard some powerful enchanted weapons were made with Seraphim blood, or Dryad sap, or things like that. But demons are all over the place right now, so their blood is in good supply.”
That information sparked a tinge of discomfort in Jadis’ thoughts. Since she now knew that Demons were just as sentient as humans or other avatar races, the idea of using them for parts in the making of enchantments felt a little wrong. Then again, it wasn’t as though the demons were being bred in a pen and farmed for their value as an alchemical ingredient like some kind of farm animal. They were hostile entities trying to kill all other mortal races by any means necessary. The people of Oros had been in conflict with Demons for millennia. It only made sense that they had come up with a few ways to make use of their enemy.
A different thought crossed Jadis’ mind at that point. If Demons and other avatar races could have their blood used in the crafting of enchantments for powerful effects, could Nephilim blood be used too? Would it be better or worse as a reagent? What about other fluids? She was certainly capable of outputting enough of her more pleasurably obtained fluids to fill the jar Sabina held. Maybe it would have the same effect? Maybe even a better one?
Not that Jadis was going to suggest Doru and Sabina stop what they were doing so she could jack one of her selves off into the quenching barrel. Beyond the fact that it would be awkward as fuck, she wasn’t about to suggest experimentation when so many rare and valuable ingredients were on the line.
Moving quickly and without need for instruction from Doru, Sabina put on the leather gloves and used the tongs to pull the heated weapon from the forge. The sword was large, with a long blade and an even longer tang, but the tang had not been heated and apparently didn’t have to endure the quenching process. Holding the sword so that the blade hung straight down, Sabina quickly carried it over to the barrel and up the stepladder. With a steady hand, she dipped the blade into the oil.
Jadis had expected the oil to flare up with fire and maybe some steam. Instead, a searing light shone from the liquid, bathing the workshop in an eerie, blue-green glow. A high-pitched sound accompanied the light, almost like a steam whistle, yet it had an indefinable quality to it that made Jadis’ brain itch.
As the light and the sound slowly faded, Jadis noticed that the forge had gone relatively quiet. All the other priests and their apprentices had stopped what they were doing to watch the quenching. Under a full crowd’s eyes, Sabina lifted the sword from the barrel, revealing the tempered blade.
The metal was black, yet it seemed to shine with an inner light that made it stand out against the shadows. In fact, there really was an inner light coming from the blade. Where Sabina’s enchantments etchings had been made, filled with eleria, then covered by Doru, were glowing runes. The runes shone silver against the black blade and, as Jadis could observe from multiple angles, the runes were visible on both sides of the sword.
Sabina quickly passed the blade to Doru, giving the high priest one last chance to make any adjustments before it grew too cool to be worked any further. Checking the length for any bends, he simply grunted his approval and passed it back to Sabina, who then locked the tang into place with a vice so that the blade could be left to cool while hanging upside down.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, Sabina let out a sigh of relief before grinning up at Syd.
“Whew! That’s done! Now, what else do you want to do for our date?”
299