In the workshops of the Oran ironmongers who forged weapons for foundation and Bronze schools, a sword blade was cooled and hardened to carry a single, uniform grain of spirit vein tension from tang to point. The fighter wielding it projected force in one flat direction along the fuller. So long as that held, good Bronze-grade steel could endure years of hard blocking without losing its temper.
What a Bronze-prepared blade could never survive was having two same-time, contradictory layers of Early Jade depth folded across its internal grain while absorbing the full channel output of the Chamber of Permitted Shapes.
Daro Kesh heard the high, crystal-clear ping inside the fourteen-inch stub of his half-blade a quarter of a heartbeat before the metal let go.
Because he had spent his life around smithies and practice yards, he didn’t make the novice mistake of clamping his fingers tighter to try to hold dying steel together by main force. Had he locked his wrist as the temper failed, the exploding shards of Jade-charged iron would have blown backward across the chalk line into Mina’s face and Halin’s open collar.
Instead, the instant he felt the internal grain of the fuller shear beneath his thumb, Daro angled the flat of the dying stub fifteen degrees outward toward the western pillars and released the outer two-thirds of his grip pressure. That kept his palm anchored solely around the heavy, unquenched iron handle and its short crossguard.
