The abandoned underground cellar smelled of crushed stone, cold salt water, and ozone.
Unlike a conventional blacksmith’s workshop, there was no roaring coke fire, no blast of red-hot bellows, and no blinding shower of golden sparks.
The hearth remained cold and dark.
Instead, an eerie, pale-blue frost crept outward across the granite striking face of the ancient stone anvil.
An Ni stood over the anvil, her small, scarred hands gripping a heavy two-pound cross-peen hammer forged from pale meteor iron.
Her dark eyes were wide and focused with total intensity.
From her wrists to the tips of her slender fingers, her veins had turned a rainbow-bright, ice-blue, pulsing with the old family chill of her cold-iron bloodline.
Every time her hammer dropped onto the Calamity Cleaver, the impact didn’t produce a dull iron thud.
