The air inside Old Corren’s underground forge shop was thick with the scent of pine resin, bone dust, and hot sulfur.
A single animal fat burner hung from an overhead hoist. It cast long, wavering amber shadows across the granite vault. On the central anvil bench, surrounded by chipped chisels and dull iron rasps, sat the instrument that would decide whether Mira Vale lived to see another dawn or dissolved into polished quartz cabochons on the Guild’s cutting tables.
It was a cone-shaped sound horn, two feet in length, sculpted from a solid block of sight Iceland spar.
Artificer Ren stood over the bench, his leather apron stiff with dried cerium sludge. His four diamond loupes were flipped down across his left eye, magnifying the rhombohedral cleavage faces of the crystal to four times their natural scale. In his right hand, he held a delicate copper burr. With his left, he steadied the horn’s flared bell.
“White spar-stone possesses a trigonal crystal structure,” the Artificer murmured, his voice as dry and rhythmic as the scrape of his stone. “Most lapidaries only value Iceland spar because it produces double refraction when light passes through its sight axis. Strike a candle behind it, and you see two flames. But light is merely magnetic back-and-forth swing at an impossible to understand hum. Sound behaves identically when the lattice is cut along the seventy-four-degree cleavage boundary.”
