White heat shone off the giant stone anvil in waves of trembling, oil-scented distortion.
Ten miles beneath the shattered Netherworld Gates, the Pre-Gloom Primordial Forge rested upon its shelf of tightly packed diamond-slate. Below the cliff edge, the clouded eye of black stygian magma crashed into the bottomless mantle rift. It shook the foundation of the continent with deep, low, deep ring.
The composite billet lay before them, glowing at fourteen hundred degrees.
Thirty-two folds of Celestial Star-Lead and Core-Mantle Orichalcum were welded into a single brutal slab. The star-lead formed an unbending spine born from ancient star-fallen iron, dense enough to anchor earth-shaking plates. The mantle orichalcum formed the cutting cheeks, capable of conducting thousands of degrees of fire heat without heat degradation.
Now came the dangerous shift from raw forged mass to living weapon: the cool.
“Move fast!” An Ni shouted, her soot-stained brow gleaming in the orange glare. “The lead lattice starts freezing the instant it leaves the coals. If the heat drops unevenly, the core turns to powdered glass!”
She clamped her twenty-pound orichalcum tongs around the glowing tang and hauled the blazing bright billet toward the cooling trough.
The trough was carved from dense dark rock, heavy with bands of cold-forged iron. It held fifty gallons of underground stone salt water and rendered ox-marrow, black as pitch and smelling of brimstone.
