Chapter 32 – Underground Forge
Training with Tamara became a habit faster than I expected.
Not every day—our schedules didn't line up that neatly—but often enough that the practice yard started to feel like it had our names etched into the dust.
She would show up early sometimes, pretending she hadn't, running her forms with that new, sharp wind on her blade. Other days she'd arrive late and complain that I was trying to tire her out before we even started.
Either way, we ended up in the same space, cutting the air to pieces.
"Again," I said now, stepping aside as her slash went past.
Wind followed her wooden sword, a thin line of pressure that trailed just ahead of the edge. Her boots slid a fraction as she stepped, the ground giving way to a soft glide instead of a stomp.
She was getting better.
"Your back foot," I added. "You're still planting it like you're trying to punch a hole in the world."
Tamara hissed under her breath, reset, and did it again. This time her weight carried forward more cleanly, the wind catching her ankle just enough to smooth the step.
The dust at her feet drew new lines.
I watched her for a few more repetitions before nodding.
"Good," I said. "That's enough for now. If you keep going, you'll start forcing it."
"I can go longer," she snapped automatically, then winced as her calf cramped. "Tch."
"You can," I agreed. "But you'll just be teaching your muscles the wrong thing."
She looked like she wanted to argue, then didn't. Her eyes flicked to my sword at my hip instead, still sheathed.
"You're not going to use that thing again today?" she asked, trying to sound casual and failing.
"Not unless you plan to buy three more practice swords," I said.
She scowled.
"It's your fault they break," she muttered. "You pay."
"We'll negotiate when I'm rich," I said. "For now, focus on not tripping over your own wind."
She clicked her tongue, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
"I'll be back tomorrow," she said, grabbing her practice sword and slinging it over her shoulder. "Don't you dare start teaching someone else while I'm gone."
"As if anyone else wants to be yelled at this much," I said.
She snorted, turned on her heel, and stalked off toward the dorms, wind still whispering around her ankles as if it refused to leave her alone now.
I watched her go.
When she disappeared through the archway, the yard fell quiet.
Mostly.
The sun was still high enough that a few students lingered at the far end, half-heartedly sparring or pretending to stretch. A couple of them threw glances my way—quick, then away again, like they didn't want to be caught looking.
It wasn't their stares that bothered me.
It was the other one.
On the second-floor walkway overlooking the yard, in the shadow of one of the stone pillars, the same not-quite-empty space watched me.
If I hadn't spent more lives than I wanted to remember waiting for ambushes, I would have missed it. Just a little distortion in the light. The hem of a skirt pulling back a fraction too late. The faintest sense of eyes that darted away the instant mine turned.
Always there when Tamara and I trained.
Never close enough to be "just passing by."
The first time I'd noticed it, I'd thought it was some nosy noble or a bored instructor. But instructors didn't hide. Nobles liked to be seen watching.
This presence tried not to be seen at all.
"Persistent," I murmured.
I didn't call it out.
If Lyra wanted to watch from shadows and pillars and pretend she wasn't there, I could pretend not to notice.
She hadn't gone screaming to a teacher about humming swords and broken practice weapons. She just watched.
That was enough for now.
I turned my back on the walkway and headed for the gate.
Free time finally meant what it sounded like today. No divinity lectures, no surprise "assessment bouts," no mandatory drills.
Just a stack of scribbled diagrams in my satchel and a destination.
The blacksmith.
***
The clang of hammers and the hiss of quenching water hit me before I even pushed open the workshop door.
The academy's smithy sat half-tucked into the outer wall, a fat stone building with its chimney coughing out dark smoke into the afternoon sky. Students were technically allowed to visit, but most only came when they needed armor repaired or practice gear replaced.
I stepped inside, squinting against the heat.
The room was crowded with racks of swords and spears, bundles of practice staves, bins of horseshoes, and a few half-finished pieces of armor. Two apprentices worked at smaller forges near the front, while an older man with arms like knotted rope hammered at a glowing bar of metal on the main anvil.
"Come back in an hour," he grunted without looking up. "We're swamped."
"I'm not here about repairs," I said.
The hammer paused mid-swing.
He turned his head just enough to squint at me, sweat glistening on his brow. His beard was short and shot with gray, his eyes sharp despite the heat.
"You're the one who split the training post," he said.
Word traveled fast.
"Maybe," I said.
He snorted.
"If you're here to ask about 'making your sword sharper,' you can leave," he said, turning back to his work. "I don't forge miracles for first-years."
"I'm not asking you to," I said.
I slipped the rolled diagrams from my satchel and tapped them against my palm.
"I brought my own miracle."
That made him stop.
He set the hammer down, wiped his hands on a rag, and jerked his chin toward a cleared spot on a nearby workbench.
"Fine," he said. "Show me this miracle."
I unrolled the parchments carefully, weighing down the corners with a few stray rivets.
On the top sheet, a claymore stretched across the page—broad, long, two-handed. The proportions were standard enough at first glance, but the cross-sections told the real story.
The spine of the blade, drawn as a thick central strip, was marked with faint notations: "core alloy – high flow," "mana-preferred path," "heat-tolerant." The edges on either side were solid steel, hardened for cutting. The guard and hilt were drawn slightly oversized, their interior sketched with a hollow channel running down into the grip and expanding into a chamber in the pommel.
Beside it, another drawing showed a cutaway of that chamber. A crystal nestled there, almost twice the size of the irregular piece in my current hilt. Lines marked where metal would cradle it, where channels could carry whatever it stored into the spine.
In the last timeline, they had given it a proper name.
An alloy discovered near the end, when countries were desperate for anything that could carry both spell-flow and aura without tearing itself apart. It had started as a curiosity in some border workshop, then became standard in the mass-produced blades of spellslingers—swordsmen who had finally figured out they didn't have to choose between steel and magic.
It hadn't existed yet in this era.
But if I could get close enough to how it behaved, I didn't need the name.
"It's a claymore," I said, in case that somehow wasn't clear. "But the core material here—" I tapped the central strip—"needs to carry mana very well, and… other flows. The edges can be standard steel. The hilt and guard need to be large enough to hold a crystal about this size."
I held up a finger as rough reference.
The blacksmith stared at the drawings for a long moment.
Then he gave me a look usually reserved for people who claimed they'd seen dragons in their bedroom.
"You want a mixed-core greatsword with a hollowed hilt and a mana stone socket the size of my thumb," he said. "Forged strong enough to not snap the first time you hit something."
"Yes," I said.
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
"And you're a first-year."
"I'm still a first-year if I'm holding it," I said.
The corner of his mouth twitched, but only for an instant.
He leaned over the drawings again, tracing one thick finger along the central spine.
"This core," he said. "The way you've drawn it—soft enough to carry whatever tricks you want, but the blade still has to hold an edge and not twist under aura. That's already stubborn. Then you want the core to touch a crystal chamber and not rattle itself apart when some idiot pours too much magic into it."
"I'm not planning to give it to an idiot," I said.
"Every swordsman is an idiot at some point," he said. "Usually when they get tired."
He fell silent, studying the lines, then shook his head.
"Even if I had the ore for this kind of mix—and I don't, because those veins are hoarded by old men in higher towers than this—you'd need precise tempering along the spine and edges not to ruin both. And the hilt…"
He tapped the chamber drawing.
"Hollow handles are already fussy," he said. "You want this" — he jabbed the crystal sketch — "pulsing near it. I've seen lesser work explode from less."
"So it's not possible," I said.
He snorted again.
"I didn't say that," he said. "I said I can't do it."
I waited.
He wiped his hands again, staring at the diagrams with the sort of expression a man might wear for an interesting, dangerous cliff.
"This is stupid," he said.
"Most interesting things are," I said.
He rolled the top parchment back up halfway, then stopped.
"There is someone," he said slowly.
I raised an eyebrow.
"Not in the academy," he added quickly. "Or the upper city. The kind of work you're asking for…" He hesitated, searching for the right word. "It's closer to what you'd get when you mix old craft with people who actually listen to metal, not just beat it until it obeys."
"Sounds like the kind of person I want," I said. "Where?"
He frowned, then glanced toward the open door, as if expecting someone to be listening.
"You didn't hear this from me," he said.
"I didn't hear anything at all," I said.
He gave me a look that said he very much doubted that, but continued anyway.
"There's a man in the city," he said. "Not human. Short. Thick. Smells like smoke even when he hasn't touched a forge all day, if the stories are right. They say he can fold three kinds of metal into one bar and it'll still sing when you tap it."
Dwarf, then.
"They also say," the blacksmith went on, "that he doesn't like being bothered by academy brats."
"That sounds like a personal problem," I said.
"For you," he said dryly. "Not for him."
He rolled the diagrams all the way up and shoved them back into my hands.
"If you're set on this," he said, "go to the lower district. The old warehouse quarter near the river, where the cranes don't move anymore. Find the one with half its roof caved in and a rusted chain still hanging from the beam."
"That's very specific," I said.
"It's meant to be hard to find," he said. "When you do find it, look for a bent iron ring on the wall inside. Feed a little mana into it instead of pulling it like a normal person."
"And then?" I asked.
"If you're lucky," he said, "you'll find nothing and can come back and ask me for a normal sword like a sane boy."
"And if I'm not lucky?" I asked.
He picked up his hammer again.
"Then you'll get what you're asking for," he said. "Now get out of my forge."
***
The lower district always smelled like damp stone and old smoke.
The academy sat on higher ground, near the cleaner parts of the city. Most students didn't have a reason to come down here unless they were slumming for thrills or following someone more reckless.
I wasn't slumming.
I wove through narrow streets and worn cobbles, past shuttered shops and laundry lines drooping between buildings. The river's faint reek drifted up from a block over, mixed with the metallic tang of rust and old machinery.
The old warehouse quarter rose ahead of me, a cluster of squat brick buildings with sagging roofs and blind windows. Once, this had been where goods came and went, lifted by cranes and lowered onto carts for the upper city. Now the newer docks farther downstream had taken the work, and this place had been left to rot.
I tightened my grip on my satchel.
A small group of men lounged near one of the alley mouths, eyes tracking me as I passed. Rough clothes, harder faces. Not nobles. Not workers either, not with the way they leaned like the street belonged to them.
One of them pushed off the wall.
"Hey," he called. "You're a little far from your fancy towers, aren't you?"
I didn't slow.
"Wrong boy," I said. "Try again with someone who's lost."
He stepped into my path.
"I don't think so," he said, grin showing too many teeth. "Those academy boots are worth more than my month. Be a shame if you scuffed them on the way home."
His friends chuckled.
I sighed internally.
"I'm in a hurry," I said. "Move."
He reached for my shoulder.
I stepped in, catching his wrist before he could grab anything. A twist, a shift of weight, and his balance vanished. He hit the cobbles with a surprised yelp, air whooshing out of his lungs.
The others straightened, hands going to knives.
Aura slid over my skin like cool water. I didn't bother drawing my sword.
"You really want to try this," I said quietly, "with people watching?"
They hesitated.
It was a narrow street, but not empty. A few merchants farther down had stopped to stare. A woman with a basket clutched her child's hand and stepped back into a doorway.
No city guard in sight, of course. They never were until after the interesting parts ended.
The men weighed it.
Then, grumbling, they decided I wasn't worth the trouble.
Their leader hauled himself up, rubbing his wrist, and spat near my boots.
"Fine," he muttered. "Keep walking, academy hero."
I did.
I'd wasted enough time.
***
The warehouse the blacksmith had described wasn't immediately obvious.
Half the roofs here were sagging. More than one had rusted chains hanging from beams. I circled the quarter twice, watching for details.
On the third pass, I saw it.
A squat brick building near the riverbend, its front doors hanging crooked on broken hinges. Half its roof had collapsed inward, exposing splintered rafters like broken ribs. A single rusted chain dangled from a central beam, its hook twisted and bent.
Close enough.
I slipped inside.
Dust coated the floor in a thick layer. Broken crates lay scattered, their contents long gone. A few beams of light poked through holes in the roof, illuminating floating motes and spiderwebs.
No sounds of movement. No signs of recent use.
If there was anything here, it was good at pretending not to exist.
I walked slowly along the inner wall, eyes tracing the brick. The blacksmith had said to look for a bent ring.
There.
Half-hidden behind a collapsed crate, a metal loop jutted from the wall about waist-high. It looked like it had once held something heavier—a chain, maybe—but whatever had hung from it was gone. The ring itself was slightly deformed, as if someone had tried to wrench it free and failed.
I reached out and rested my fingers on the cold metal.
Nothing obvious marked it. No runes, no carvings.
"Let's see," I murmured.
Mana gathered in my palm, a small, controlled flow. I fed it into the ring, pushing it into the stubborn metal instead of pulling.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the ring warmed.
A faint vibration ran through the brick. Somewhere inside the wall, something old and hidden woke up with a reluctant groan.
The floor shuddered.
Dust rained from the ceiling as stone shifted beneath my boots. In the center of the warehouse, between fallen crates, a section of the floor split along hairline seams I hadn't seen before.
A square platform sank slowly, revealing steps spiraling down into darkness.
I stepped back, hand on my sword hilt, and waited.
No one burst out. No arrows flew. The platform came to rest a few steps down, stopping with a dull, final thunk.
A faint orange glow flickered up from below.
Heat followed it.
I exhaled.
"Of course it's underground," I muttered.
I stepped onto the top stair and began to descend.
The air grew warmer with every turn, the smell of old dust giving way to smoke, metal, and something else—rich, hot, like earth that had never seen the sun.
Torch sconces lined the walls at intervals, each holding a small, steady flame. They weren't ordinary torches. The light was too clean, too unwavering.
Mana lamps. Old ones.
The stairs finally opened out into a cavern.
I stopped at the threshold.
It was larger than I'd expected—an underground hall carved from stone, the ceiling lost in shadow. Pillars thick as tree trunks held it up, their surfaces etched with faint, glowing lines. Forges dotted the far side of the chamber, fires burning bright in each, smoke carried away by chimneys cut into the rock.
And everywhere, dwarves.
Shorter than humans, but twice as broad through the shoulders. Muscles like carved knots under leather and soot. Beards braided or tied back, hair cropped short or tucked away. Their eyes were bright, catching every glint of metal and flame.
Hammer strikes rang through the hall in a constant rhythm. Sparks flew. The air was alive with the sound of steel being bullied into shape.
No one looked surprised to see me.
The nearest dwarf glanced up from his anvil, took me in—a human boy in academy colors standing hesitantly at the bottom of an impossible staircase—and snorted.
"Surface brat," he said. "You took your time."
I blinked.
"Sorry?" I said.
He jerked his chin toward the stairs.
"That ring's been sitting cold for three months," he said. "We were starting to think the old fool upstairs had forgotten how to talk."
So the blacksmith had known them for a while.
Good to know.
I stepped fully into the hall, the heat wrapping around me like a heavy cloak. The dwarves nearby gave me a few more measuring looks, then went back to their work.
No one stopped me.
Which probably meant someone up the chain already knew I was here.
"Over here, boy."
The voice came from the largest forge at the far wall.
The dwarf standing beside it was older than most of the others, if the streaks of white in his beard were any indication. His arms were still thick, his posture solid. Unlike the other smiths, he wasn't currently hammering anything. He stood with his hands resting on the anvil, watching me approach with calm, steady eyes.
The metal around him—bars, ingots, half-finished blades—felt different. Even without touching them, I could tell. The lines were cleaner, the balance better, the way they rested on their supports almost… comfortable.
"Let me guess," he said as I stopped a few steps away. "You're the one with the ridiculous sword idea."
"Possibly," I said. "Depending on what you've heard."
He huffed—a sound that might have been a laugh if someone squinted at it hard enough.
"The old man upstairs doesn't waste my time with gossip," he said. "He sent word. Said you wanted a claymore that thinks it's a lightning rod and a mana stone that doesn't explode when you look at it."
"That's one way to put it," I said.
He held out a hand.
"Diagram," he said.
I unrolled the parchment and laid it on the cleared space beside his anvil.
He studied it silently.
He didn't skim. His gaze lingered on each line, each notation, taking its time. He traced the outline of the spine with one finger, then hissed softly.
"You drew this?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Without tracing someone else's work?"
"Yes."
He grunted.
"The spine," he said, tapping the central strip. "You want something that carries mana and other flows well, but doesn't collapse when the steel edges bite into something harder than you."
"That's the idea," I said.
"And the hilt," he went on, moving down to the chamber drawing. "Big enough to house that stone and whatever tricks you're planning to feed it, without snapping your wrists when it kicks."
"Yes."
He looked up at me then, eyes sharp.
"You know how stupid this is?" he asked.
"Very," I said. "Will you do it?"
His beard twitched.
"The mix you want here," he said, tapping the core again, "I've seen something like it. A memory from deeper halls. Vein-metal that lets mana run through it like water and doesn't scream about it."
So their people did eventually stumble near it in the old timeline too.
They'd just found it much, much later.
"In another fifty, hundred years," Grum went on, half to himself, "I could see this becoming standard for the right kind of blade. Spell-slingers, maybe. The fools who insist on dancing and casting at the same time."
He wasn't wrong.
In the last run, that was exactly who had used it—swordsmen who slung spells like arrows, their blades wired to their cores.
I stayed quiet.
I wasn't about to explain that he was describing the end of the world.
He straightened, expression settling.
"I'll make you an offer, surface boy," he said.
That didn't sound like the start of a healthy decision.
"What kind?" I asked.
"I'll take this job," he said. "I'll dig through our stores and beg, borrow, or insult the ore I need out of whichever cousin is sitting on the right veins. I'll forge your claymore with this core and this pattern."
He tapped the parchment again.
"For free."
I blinked.
"No cost?" I asked.
Dwarves didn't work for free. Not properly.
His eyes crinkled.
"Coin's the least interesting thing down here," he said. "If you want to toss a purse at us later, I won't say no. But for this?"
He tapped the spine drawing once more, almost gently.
"This is worth more than whatever pocket money the academy gives you."
I waited.
"There are conditions," I said.
"Of course there are," he said. "First: this alloy blend, this pattern you've drawn for the core and the way it ties into your stone chamber. I get to use it."
He held up a hand before I could speak.
"Not this exact sword," he said. "That's yours. But the idea of it. The way the metals lie. I'll experiment, hammer, curse, and refine it, and when it's ready, I'll use it in other works."
In the last timeline, someone else would have invented it anyway.
Here, I was just moving the discovery date forward and handing it to the people most likely to do something sane with it.
"And second?" I asked.
His eyes glinted.
"Second," he said, "when your head spits out new diagrams like this—new blades, new tricks, new nonsense—you bring them here first. Not to that academy forge. Not to some noble patron. To me."
He jabbed his thumb into his own chest.
"I get first look," he said. "First refusal. When you're about to do something stupid with metal, I want to be the one who decides if it's stupid enough to be worth making."
That was… dangerous.
Letting an underground dwarf forge be the first filter for every piece of future knowledge I turned into steel was the sort of thing that could change a lot more than my own life.
On the other hand, the last time around, no one had caught nearly enough of the future before it crashed into them.
If dwarves with mana-conducting cores and spell-slinger blades went into the final wars earlier…
Maybe the world would still burn. Maybe it wouldn't.
Either way, it gave me more pieces to move.
I met his gaze.
"And if I say no?" I asked.
"Then you walk back up those stairs," Grum said calmly. "You find another fool to hit metal for you. Maybe you even get your sword. Maybe it holds together. Maybe it doesn't."
He shrugged.
"I'll still sleep," he said.
He wasn't bluffing.
I weighed it for another heartbeat.
Having the first proper alloy of the end times in the hands of a dwarven master-smith now, not decades from now, was a risk.
But it was my kind of risk.
"Fine," I said. "You can use the alloy and the core pattern. And I'll bring new diagrams here first. As long as you don't claim what's mine as yours."
Grum's beard twitched into a grin.
"I'm not a surface noble," he said. "When we borrow, we say we borrowed. When we steal, we at least have the decency to admit it."
"That's… comforting," I said.
"It shouldn't be," he said.
He rolled the parchment up neatly and tucked it under one arm.
"One more thing," he added. "That little toy at your hip."
His gaze flicked to my short sword.
"Draw it," he said.
I hesitated.
Then I did.
The blade came free with a soft whisper, aura sliding over it by habit. I didn't touch the ring.
Grum's eyes narrowed.
"Again," he said. "With your trick."
I considered refusing.
Then I thought of the alloy, the core, the chamber, and the fact that if anyone was going to understand what I was trying to build, it would be the kind of person who lived under an abandoned warehouse and listened to metal for a living.
I slid my thumb over the ring.
Click.
The hilt warmed. The edge hummed.
The air along the blade tightened, that invisible line drawing itself between steel and world.
Grum didn't flinch.
He leaned in, close enough that a stray spark from one of the nearby forges could have landed in his beard, and stared at the edge.
He didn't look impressed.
He looked interested.
"Ha," he said quietly. "You've already made the problem and you're here asking me to build the solution."
"Something like that," I said.
He straightened, grin spreading through his beard.
"All right, Erynd of the surface," he said. "Now I'm properly curious."
He jerked his chin toward the heart of the forge hall.
"Welcome to the place that will either make your sword," he said, "or your grave."
The forges roared around us.
I let the hum of the monoblade fade and slid it back into its sheath.
"Let's aim for the sword," I said.
For the first time in too many lives, I'd found craftsmen who might actually keep up with my stupidity.
And I'd just traded them a piece of the future.
The world had no idea what sort of edge it was about to meet.