“When we were fleeing, a man leapt from the sled and confronted the dragon. His body is not here,” Gunnar stated grimly.

“Hm? Oh. That one. I saw him get swallowed whole, unfortunately. If it is any consolation, he fought well.”

A brief negotiation followed, pertaining to the specifics of what would be supplied to Red and how it would be dropped off. The matter of her lockout from the city came up as well, with Yvonne revealing that the stain should fade within a few weeks of last exposure. She escorted them on their way out of the jungle, warning that she was certain she hadn’t exterminated all the remnants of the conspirator-clan forces, and that Eisengeist was still in the area. The intact bodies barely numbered over thirty. They hauled them to the sleds in two trips, with some help from Red. They took a different route that went underground and through partly hollowed trees, just in case.

Everything was going just fine, until it suddenly wasn’t anymore. A pattern all too familiar to Zefaris.

Colossal footfalls shook the earth. The air grew warmer by the moment.

An overpowering presence made every fiber of Zef’s body scream in alarm. Among the trees, she saw it. The gleam of metal, the shifting of pitch-black fur, a massive hexapedal form with two rows of three long tails each swirling upon its back, and at their tips, by the Dead Ones, were great shining blades of mirror-like sheen.

“Run. Get your dead out of here, I will be fine,” warned the mantis, ushering them further away and not waiting for a response, rather raising a blackstone wall and pushing it forward to force them to move. It would’ve been easily bypassed, but it was the gesture that mattered.

Zefaris caught sight of two octagonal blackstone rods zipping through the air as they retreated. Roars of fury, the singing of cold-iron, and the scream of Red’s magic were all heard.

Though they had remained far from the great beast, the sense that they had escaped by a hair’s breadth still weighed heavy on each and every one amongst the expeditionary force. The razorflayers pulling their sleds, too, were terrified, and very eager to get away.

Only after they were clear of the jungle was Zefaris faced with questions pertaining to Red’s identity and nature. The answers she gave only elicited further confusion, be that in regards to her loyalties, her motivations, or her nature as a living dungeon core. Jorfr conveniently omitted that he actually knew more of Red’s current combat abilities than Zef did, having been there during the fateful battle against Von Wickten at the Meat Market.

Their return was on Friday, late in the morning, and Zelsys recounted an incident she had had just earlier that very morning.

Friday morning.

Zelsys arrived at Ingvald’s, just as she had several times before.

The place was surrounded by corpses. Cadavers scorched beyond recognition with hammer-smashed faces, many still wearing broken animal masks. Out in front, sat before a pile of bodies burning a bright blue flame, was Ingvald.

He looked at her and smiled.

“Newman. Just in time. Tell me. How many Jade Dragons and Huén coins do you have?” he asked as if he wasn’t sat in the midst of a slaughter before a makeshift funeral pyre.

“A funeral pile, more like.”

“Forty-two Jade Dragons and a few hundred of each smaller denomination,” she answered, ignoring the corpses.

“Hrm… Give me twenty-one dragons and thirty-three-thousand, three-hundred and thirty-three Huén. I will use them in forging the individual segments and return the remaining coins once I’m done. With an artifact of this level, it will be best to split up the imbuement… And I know you would try to use all of your dragons. Normally there would be power loss from doing it like this, but dragonsteel will magnify what I put into it even in the time between me finishing the segments and you putting it all together - it’ll be a fraction of a fraction, but you get the point. It will never weaken.”

“You believe that I will-”

“Newman. My Walking Way is that of the Forgemother. There is no fate in this world truer than that which pertains to the demesne of a dead god. I no longer have a choice. In choosing to involve myself with you, I have become bound to seeing your blade to its rightful fate… And that fate is one steeped in Eisengeist’s blood. One way or another, the blade will be forged. I pray to the ancestors that you succeed in whatever plan you’ve devised, else ruin shall come upon us all.”

Zel couldn’t tell if he was speaking in mystical terms or whether it was a purely personal belief, but… The absolute conviction in his eyes and the corpses strewn about were proof enough. It didn’t matter if there was some ethereal force of fate, Ingvald had decided that the Butcher would be reforged in its greatest possible incarnation and that was that.

Indeed, it was beyond doubt.

A fey mood had taken hold of him.

Ingvald was possessed by the vision of a magnum opus.

He stood and reached into the burn-pile, and from within he pulled a cleaver with a handle of mammoth bone. It was a fraction of the size of the final design, closer to an actual butcher’s cleaver than the huge mass of cold-iron that was to be her weapon. All craftsmanship was of the highest quality, and its spine menaced with innumerable sawteeth, just as its pommel and guard both menaced with spikes. She could see the seams between its seven segments, the blade’s inner edge possessing seven serrations, one for each segment.

“The mockup I promised. All these dead fools - they must’ve seen the Forgemother’s manifestation when I was making this and mistaken it for the initial sparks of the real thing. Now, just to warn you, this has none of the heavy-duty enchantments required, it’s “just” a high-quality cold-iron cleaver, not to mention the size.”