Long before they reached it, Caeden could smell the forge. The distinct smell of hot metal and burning ether wafted over him. It was like coming home again, and Caeden felt a tension he hadn’t noticed fall away. He had been away from a forge too long. The longest he had gone without laying hammer to metal in the past was the three weeks it took him to travel from Earthstrom to the village by the Dromar house. That had been pure torture.

Now, he was five weeks out from the last time he had forged, and Caeden felt like part of him was dying. Having spent half his life learning and applying the craft, genuinely loving the physical and mental challenges it posed, its absence in his life was like losing a part of himself. He couldn’t put into words what it did for him to know he would once again get to put his mind and body to the task.

“I’m not sure how well Snowball is going to hold up in a smithy. Sky might not like it either.” Caeden commented. Lily had brought her new pets with her throughout the day. In fact, the only time she put her bear cub down was during physical conditioning.

“They’ll learn to deal with it. I can communicate with them a little, so they won’t cause problems.” Lily shrugged.

“I’m not really worried about them running loose; I’m worried about the health of two infant creatures in a hazardous environment. Especially since Snowball is heavily in line with ice. He might not be able to physically endure the heat.” Caeden warned.

“I’ll know if they’re uncomfortable. They need to get tough.” Lily dismissed his concerns.

“Ok, they’re your pets.” Caeden gave up. He wasn’t sure if Lily genuinely thought her pets would be fine, or she was just unaware of what a smithy was like. Either way, he didn’t think the two babies would enjoy the experience.

The smithy itself was formed in a similar manner to the Mess, the main structure of the Academy. It was far away from any of the Seats, at the edge of Academy land. Caeden assumed most of the students and teachers wouldn’t appreciate the noise and smell. It was a big place, though only a single story tall. The entrance was a single unadorned door, in contrast to most of the buildings, which had elaborate and highly decorative flourishes. Caeden could hear the roar of flames and the hammering of metal even from dozens of yards away.

Stepping inside, the sound intensified to a point where Caeden could feel his body vibrate from the intensity. The designs of the outside, merging all the aspects of the four Seats, fell away to bare dark grey stone. There wasn’t a spec of ether in the exposed walls. Instead, lighting was provided by glowing balls set into the ceiling. They had a slightly off-white color completely different from ether lights.

There was a large open space with walled-off sections, each containing its own dedicated smithy. Caeden assumed the rest of the building was just this format on an even larger scale. There must be dozens or even a hundred smiths working in here. It was much more than he had expected for an Academy learning center.

There was a man with spectacular, fiery red hair in a magnificent beard with a bald head standing near the entrance. He wore proper smithing attire, a thick leather apron that went down to his elbows along the arms and down to his knees like a giant bib. He was crossing his beefy arms and scowling.

“Oy, you there! Are you my pain in the ass today?” He shouted over the deafening sound in the room. Before he could continue, Lily lifted a hand a let out her Cloud splinter, surrounding them in a wall of fluffy white that completely cut off the constant ringing and cacophony of other supplementary sounds. The man’s scowl deepened. “You keep that shit away from my smiths, missy. A little shroud at the wrong time can be dangerous.”

Lily nodded, ducking her head to bury her nose in Snowball’s furry head. The little cub hadn’t stirred at all, seemingly unbothered by the drastic change in conditions. Caeden could feel the floor shaking beneath his feet, but Snowball slept on. Sky was hopping back and forth between Lily’s shoulders, letting out the occasional chirp, and generally taking in the new surroundings before Lily made her cloud wall. Now she was just staring at the smith with that weird intensity birds had.

“I’m the head smith here in Forge One, so you best listen to me, or I’ll kick you out, test or no test. I was told only one of you snots was coming today.” He glared at the two of them.

“That’s me.” Caeden nodded. “Lily tagged along to watch.”

The scowl transformed into a full-blown frown. “Ethersmithing is serious work, not some happy-clappy carnival show.”

Caeden frowned back. “She’ll be watching me. If the smith being observed doesn’t object, you have no grounds to throw her out of my smithy.”

“Oh, you got some balls on you, at least. Think you’re going to get a space in here, kiddo?” The man snorted. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Trainees start learning the basics in the back.”

“I think there’s been some confusion. I’m a fully capable smith already. I don’t need training.” Caeden knew that the man was aware he was here to work; he had already mentioned the test. This was just some pissing contest.

“You may think that, but if I’m not satisfied with you, you’ll have your ass in a seat learning basic ether combinations for the rest of your years here. I don’t care what you think, brat. Ethersmithing is an art that takes years and years to learn. Not whatever you know from a couple of afternoons in a forge.” He gave Caeden a look of open contempt.

“Whatever, just show me an anvil and give me the test.” Caeden wasn’t in the mood for another delay between him and his craft.

“Your funeral.” The man laughed.

He led them to one of the smithies near the very back of Forge One. Caeden immediately set about familiarizing himself with a different setup than his own. Overall, he was happy and impressed. There were three rendering barrels made of high-quality densa wood, to cut down on interference from all the ambient ether in the forge. There was an ether cabinet with a wide assortment of crystals for him to use and a workbench much like his own back on Alturus. The anvil was similarly high-quality Null Iron. Good stuff, highly resilient, if a bit temperamental. Caeden preferred generic iron or Cold Iron, which had to be treated with care but had less interference with most of the ether he worked with.

The hearth was a beauty. Three independent bellows with a dedicated temperature and ether input monitoring setup. Caeden wouldn’t have to add crystals by hand. Instead, he could add them into a slot, and the monitoring system would keep that ether type at the requested density. He couldn’t wait to explore the setup and see how well it worked.

“This is great. Not sure how much I like the anvil, but I can work with it. I’ll have to go analog with the hearth since I’m not familiar with the equipment.” Caeden cracked his knuckles and shook his arms out. “Where’s my apron, and what do you want me to do?”

“I’ll give you an easy one.” The man was smiling, but not in a friendly way. “Make me a knife with a basic fire infusion.”

“On a Null Iron anvil? Ok. Any size or infusion intensity requirements?” Caeden couldn’t keep the bemused expression off his face. Null Iron would destabilize a fire infusion during the forging process. This wasn’t meant to be easy at all.

“Nahh, go wild. If you can get the intensity above forty CI, I’ll be impressed.” The head smith laughed. “Apron’s over there.”

Caeden shook his head. Forty CI, or Crystal Integrity, was the standard unit of measurement for ether infusions. It also wasn’t very high at all. Forty was less than a third of the intensity of the piece Caeden had been making that exploded. Even that wasn’t anywhere near his best. Caeden’s magnum opus clocked in at 500 CI. He could do better, but they didn’t have the money or the market for high-CI infused items back in Eathstrom.

However, he was working in an unfamiliar forge on uncomplimentary equipment, so he was aiming for a comfortable 100 CI. “Where’s your metal stock?”

“Other side of the forge, all set in full pound ingots.” The head smith tossed a thumb over his shoulder towards the far wall of Forge One.

Using his aura, Caeden could feel the ingots through the wall in cleverly concealed storage lockers. “What's up with the hidden cabinets?”

“It’s not really for hiding. The ambient ether in here is high. The walls are infused repulsion granite to keep the stock as unaffected as possible.” The sour attitude slipped away for a moment. Caeden got the impression his tester would be much more comfortable teaching him than letting him use the equipment. Too bad Caeden didn’t have time to waste learning things he already knew.

Walking over, Caeden used investigative sense to sift through the various ingots, looking for what he wanted. Normally Caeden would want iron of some variant for a fire infusion, but with his anvil, that would just increase the instability. Null Iron did not play well with other varieties. Instead, he chose obsidian copper. A close contender with iron, but with significantly less durability.

He had already been planning to use earth ether in his forge since it acted as a stabilizing agent, but with his chosen metal, he might make that ratio much higher. It would make the brittle metal much more robust. He would have to be careful with his amounts, though. Otherwise, his fire infusion could shift to a molten or lava infusion. Luckily, obsidian iron played well with both fire and earth, so it would be easy to adjust the ratios as he went if he started to go too far in either direction.

With his ingot chosen, Caeden was ready to begin. There were five major components to ethersmithing, with the base material being the first. His next step was to select his ether crystals. Ether came in thousands of varieties, but the number that would bind well to a given material was much, much less. Only a dozen or so varieties of ether would bind to a particular material. Things got more complicated with man-made ether and various alloys, but that wasn’t a factor right now.

To start with, Caeden obviously needed some fire ether to act as the base for his infusion. The most important choice he was making here was the size of his crystals. They went from grains of sand all the way up to one's larger than his fist. Different sizes were useful in different situations, and in this case, Caeden went for a variant roughly the size of grains of rice. Obsidian copper was brittle in its normal state, but when heated, it was highly malleable. That meant it would deform under the heavier hammer blows Caeden would use for large crystals.

He also needed some earth ether for his hearth. This was the third step, flame. For this, he took two chunks the size of his palm and tossed them in. Then he worked the bellows to get up to a temp he was comfortable with. Caeden wanted to kick himself. WIth investigative sense, he had a much easier time judging the forge’s temperature and Physical Enhancement, both his shroud and the principal of body infusion, meant he wasn’t even slightly tired after working the bellows. He wished he had known about both this whole time. It made his job so much easier.

Now he had a roaring flame in a solid earthy brown, perfect for his purposes. Caeden couldn’t help but hum softly to himself as he went. This was truly like coming home for him. He took a long pair of tongs off the workbench and threw on the apron that had been hanging near the entrance to his forge. Then he used the tongs to pick up the pound ingot he had and set it into the heart of the hearth. He planned to split the bar in two and make some heavy-bladed combat knives. Why else would you want a flaming knife, except for combat? A hot knife was useful for a lot of things, but one that was wreathed in fire had limited uses. Namely, stabbing and burning people.

Once his ingot was heated to a nice dull red, the normal dark brown color shifting in the heat, Caeden grabbed the tongs and laid it on the anvil. Now came the fun part. After the flame came hammering. Caeden had wanted to try out his new hammer for weeks. Pulling out Forged infinity, Caeden clicked a button, and the dial spun to 007. Of course, his shrouded weapon became a hammer. Why wouldn’t it?

The act of hammering ether crystals into a material was the most complex and vital part of the process. There were dozens of different techniques, and entire schools were devoted to teaching each. Caeden used the technique his uncle taught him, The Hammer of One Hundred Hands. There were one hundred different patterns, or ‘hands’ to this technique, each with a hundred variants, for a total of ten thousand distinct patterns.

For this particular project, Caeden used the fifth hand, Finger of the Dancing Flame. It involved rapid soft blows compounding on one location where he had placed an individual crystal, followed by a heavy blow with a pause before repeating the process with another crystal. This entire process was called Resonance. The sequencing, pacing, location, and weight of his blows resonated with the metal and the crystal, allowing them to merge in a unique way. A different sequence would have vastly different results. This particular hand was perfect for fire ether in small crystals.

He repeated this process multiple times, adjusting his ether content and airflow to the hearth as necessary. He could feel the subtle rejection in the Null Iron of the anvil with every blow he struck, causing his resonance to shift ever so slightly. Caeden would compare it to someone randomly shouting at you every few seconds while you tried to sing. It was annoying, and he constantly had to adjust for the interruption.

After a certain point, Caeden split the ingot in two, ready to begin shaping the metal even as he continued adding ether to it. The Crystal Integrity of a piece was determined by how high its ether content was by volume, so the more ether he added, the better it was. Obviously, most of that came from what he was hammering into the metal, but the earth flames added some of their own. He could see in the shifting color of the ingot that he was very close to his desired CI and ether ratios.

After ten rounds back and forth, Caeden whistled appreciatively. He had two heavy-bladed daggers in a lovely orange color with a darker orange along the spine, with a lighter orange for the edge. The very tip was an angry red. Now, on to the last step, rendering. This was the process by which the ether in the piece was stabilized and set so that it would produce the desired effect. Right now, these two knives were just so much brittle metal. Only through rendering would the infusion show its worth.

For this particular set, the rendering would be simple. Sometimes rendering was used to remove unwanted byproduct ether from a piece, which was what he had been doing back home that fateful day. This one had no such problems. Caeden ground up some power ether until he had a fine paste, the ether becoming almost liquid. Then he dumped that and the blades into a barrel of water and stirred. After ten minutes, the white paste was completely gone, and Caeden pulled out his two finished knives. He ran Sharp along the edges, eliminating the annoyance of a grindstone. These edges could cut through steel.

“Well, there you are.” Caeden smiled and gave one of the daggers a quick swing, creating an arch of flame about a foot wide and long. It dissipated quickly, but it was quite hot. A thrust produced a much more intense jet of flame. “How did I do?” Caeden couldn’t help but feel a little smug, knowing he’d passed.

Looking at the head smith, he saw something he wasn’t expecting. Abject awe. The man literally had his mouth hanging open. “Where the shroud are you from, kid?”