Dwaim was not a terribly good apprentice. He did the menial bits best, the scrubbing up of the workshop and the polishing of the tools. The other apprentices seemed to loathe the work, but Dwaim relished it, watching the tools slough away their rust and shine until they reflected his face. At handling the cooking and cleaning, nobody could hold a candle to Dwaim. His stew was the king of stews, and sometimes there was even real meat in there - he was good at rat-catching too.

It was the bit where he was supposed to be learning smithery where Dwaim lagged behind. His fingers were crude, clumsy things when it came to feeling the subtle give of the metal under the tower, his ears were deaf to the ring of a blade tempered just enough. He could name you every technical aspect of blacksmithing and still, and yet, and always, he failed; knowledge never translated into skill, practice never gave way to mastery, his soul never sung in the heat of the forge; he just sweated and cursed and wanted to go home.

And go home he would, if he didn’t learn soon. The master looked at him with disappointed eyes. There had been a quiet moment, when he was pulled away from the others and, with a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, asked if this was ‘really what he wanted to do’.

Dwaim didn’t know. He had always been a cloud-head, a dreamer. Dwarves had only the one use for creative types. Send them off to the forge. His parents had paid good money to have him apprenticed among the best, scrimped and saved for a pair of boots that wouldn’t embarrass him among the boys of the minor nobility, put their hopes on him.

Damn stupid thing to do.

He had just stood there, stock still, a statue made out of flesh. The master smith had sighed, taken the hand off his shoulder, and told him, “Run along then.”

The next time he’d been taken aside, the message had been more clear. “Make something, Dwaim. Yer a… a clever lad, with an interesting mind. I like you. You’ve got a life ahead of you, but I’ve got to-” Here he paused, punching Dwaim in the shoulder. “I’ve got ta see you show something, anything, worth speaking of. Can’t have people saying I put out bad work, not for swords nor apprentices.”

And now Dwaim was in the pits of misery.

His plan had been simple. Make a ring. A simple enough thing, a ring. You take the metal, you make sure its got a hole in the middle, and there you are.

But he’d underestimated how hard the fiddly work of setting the gems would be. He’d chosen rich, yellow garnets, planning to set them in a flowering shape. But the twisty little wires foiled him at every turn. His fingers were marked with numerous little cuts, having to pause to wipe the metal clean as the blood smeared, and accidentally twisting this bit or that out of alignment in the process.

Damn. Damn damn damn.

Deep into the night, he labored over his workstation, fumbling and fussing and cursing as his tools nicked at his fingers. Under blood and bandages they were more leaden and useless than ever. Desperation made him shake. The silver and the iron slipped free of his grasp, bouncing across the table, down to the floor.

He gave up and put his head down, howled in anger and frustration. His hands clawed through his hair.

After a long pause, with a sigh, he got to his knees and started the search, lifting a candle from the bench. The flickering light illuminated the underside of the worktable.

A tiny clay man was picking up the spilled gems.

It froze as it saw his face, giant by comparison, looming above it. Dwaim was bent sideways, one ear to the ground.

His jaw dropped open.

The little man of clay dropped the contents of its arms, jewels spilling against the floor as it turned and ran. Lifting his head - bumping it against the tabletop and cursing - Dwaim saw a shadow scuttling up one of the tall wooden beams that supported the roof, up towards the rafters.

“No, wait!” He called out, voice echoing in the empty workshop.

Nothing replied.

“Little ancestor, please come down. I didn’t mean to disturb you… I could use your help.” He had heard the stories, although never believed them. Statues come to life in an hour of need. The spirits of ancestors possessing their likenesses to guide the younger generations.

Well, if now wasn’t his hour of need, what was?

He waited. Gathering up the spilled yellow garnets, which glinted like bits of sun in the light of his candle, he set them on the bench and bowed.

Nothing.

He stepped back, turning his head - and then snapped back around, waiting to see a shadow climbing down.

He had never heard of the ancestor spirits being shy.

Still nothing.

Letting out a weary sigh, consigned to the idea that he had seen a rat and imagined, in his desperation, that he was looking at a spirit, Dwaim hiccuped with something between laughter and tears. That would be just like him, wouldn’t it? Pleading to a rat to help him?

He settled into the great chair where the master sat watching his apprentices. Dwaim was more tired than he realized, and while he had only meant to rest his eyes, to let himself relax for a moment and steady his hands, although he hadn’t intended to…

He slept, deeply and soundly. In his dreams, tiny hammers rung, the rhythm forming the beat of a song so familiar it sounded like home, tasted of his mother’s rat-stew, filled the dream-space with visions of childhood...

“Hey!”

“Get your ass up before the master sees you there, lack-skull.”

“Dwaim…”

He was roused from his sleep by a sea of voices, by hands catching him and hauling him from the masters chair. He stumbled onto his feet, blinking his eyes, smacking his lips, trying to work himself awake.

A hand kindly swatted him on the back of his head to help him wake up.

“Dwaim.” It was the oldest of the apprentices, Marcer, speaking. He was hunched over Dwaim’s worktable. Something in his tone was odd, drawing them all, one by one, to come see what he was looking at.

It was the most beautiful ring Dwaim had ever seen.

The exterior was rough, dull, made of black crude metal. It was a braided geometric ring, assembled from long diamond-shaped segments of black iron that fitted one to the next so cleverly that, although none of them curved in the least, they folded into a perfect circle.

Here and there a segment was missing, allowing a glimpse inside, past the dark exterior to where numerous little wires of filigree silver ran twisted together, forming a thin vine with delicate little leaves. It glinted beneath the hard surface, a treasure within.

And at the front of the ring, the two halves combined. The black diamonds were arranged to form the petals of a flower, and the silver vines came bursting out from the center, the pistil and stamen of a jeweled flower, each little twisting shoot tipped by a tear-cut of yellow garnet, like a droplet of the sun’s golden flames. At the center sat a circular eye of yellow, the flower’s heart.

Dwaim barely dared to breath, in case the ring blew away like dust, a delusion of his fevered mind.

“Dwaim, did you make this?” Marcer repeated.

“It came to me in a dream.” He choked out, with tears in his eyes.