It took Mark the rest of the evening, but he managed to complete his daily quota of the bone-alloy armor and weapons. There was still a good pile of bones for the next day, but he felt accomplished with how much he had created already.
Anabel was fast asleep on her table as she had fallen asleep a couple of weapons earlier. Mark had noticed she was sleeping and decided not to disturb her, but with the forge cleaned up for the night, he would have to ruin what looked like peaceful sleep.
He walked over to her, but before he could shake her to wake her he noticed someone walking up the path to his smithy. He couldn't make out who exactly they were, but their stature was noticeable even from a distance in the darkness.
'Hmm, this is either a tall caravan guard or her brother . . . maybe he has come to escort her home. That is nice of him. . . saves me some trouble, I suppose. . .'
Sure enough, the man came near enough that Mark could make out his facial features which revealed his identity as Anabel's older brother, Phill. His distinguishing features soon stood out in the light, with his wheat blonde hair slightly glowing in a similar manner to his sister's. When he was close enough for Mark to see his bright green eyes, Phill spoke up in a slightly hushed tone as he could see his sister was sleeping on the bench next to where Mark was standing.
"Hey, Mark, I just came to make sure Anabel was alright. She didn't come home after dark and we waited a couple of hours past sundown to come looking."
Mark felt a little awkward as he noticed that he actually felt partially responsible for keeping her past an appropriate hour. While he had no bad intentions, it was still considered improper in their culture for a young, unmarried lady to spend the night with a young, unmarried man.
Mark awkwardly put his hand behind his head as he scratched his scalp as he responded, "Yeah, sorry about that. I was caught up in my work and I didn't notice the hour or that she had decided to take a nap there."
He pointed at Anabel, who was in an uncomfortable position on the table with nothing to act as a pillow beside her hands, which were folded on top of each other under her right cheek.
Phill just chuckled a bit and replied, "I know she is probably bothering you here at the forge, and my parents don't blame you. We just need to make sure she is sleeping comfortably in her bed. With how deeply she is sleeping, I suppose I will have to carry her home."
Mark nodded and stepped aside so Phill could position himself in a way that picking up his sister would need less effort. While Phill was no where near as big as Mark, he did have some muscle on him from his guard duties and Mark had no doubt that the man could lift Anabel with ease.
And as Mark had supposed, the man managed to pick up his sister with relative ease and didn't wake her. Actually, it looked like Anabel was so deeply asleep that she was limp in his arms. This caused the carrying process to be more difficult than it had to be, but Mark helped position her head at an angle that would prevent Phill from having to walk at a meager pace.
With his sister ready for transport, Phill looked at Mark and whispered, "Thanks again, I am sure she will be back around here tomorrow. Just tell her to bug off if she is annoying you Mark."
He said the last bit with a smile in jest as he knew Mark probably wouldn't send her away. Mark just nodded in response and watched Phill walk toward the village before he walked back to his own house.
Upon getting home, Mark ate some jerky and headed off to bed. He had another night of dreamless sleep, and after waking up, he had another meal of monster jerky before heading back to the smithy.
His morning began with a feeling of invigoration, which had become normal for him upon waking. While he never really felt tired for the past year or so, he knew the importance of sleep so he made sure to sleep through the night. Since he was a light sleeper, the sun hitting his face in the morning was perfect as an alarm.
The tough jerky was no problem for his strong jaws to tear through within just a few seconds and the cool spring water was refreshing as it flowed down his throat out of his waterskin.
He quickly made his way to the smithy to finish the quota he had promised Mr. Li before the end of the week. The smithy soon had the rhythmic chime of hammer on steel as Mark worked through the morning to complete his orders. It took him until about lunchtime to finish the bone-bonded and reinforced orders that utilized his strength alloy, but he managed to finish his quota a couple of days early and he had quite a bit of materials left over for his own projects.
Mark walked out of his smithy with some monster jery in hand as he looked around. Anabel was no where to be seen but it didnt bother Mark.
'I figured she would get bored of the smithy soon, not many people have ever expressed any interest in the work. At least I won't have to spend too much time away from the forge today. . .'
Mark turned back to the forge after he finished his lunch and looked at the ruined sword that was now sitting in the flames. It was more colorful than a rainbow and had no uniformity in the pattern of colors. Chaos was a good word for the way the metal twisted, cracked, and frayed.
The flames licked at the blade as he approached the forge. He could see that the metal was starting to reach a high head as the colors tended to a more red color. The color of the flames also began to change as the metal and the flames began to grow closer together.
While waiting for the metal to reach a workable temperature, he thought about what he would to to fix the project sword he had been near finishing the last time he worked on it.
'This metal is so warped and broken that I will have to start from the beginning again. Step one through step four will need to be diligently applied to this chunk of metal to forge it back into a sword. . .'
In his ruminations, Mark reached into the flames with his tongs to pull the sword out of the fire. It had turned orange from the heat, with the chaotic rainbow lost in the great amount of energy that could be seen coming out of the sword. He turned the sword over to observe it as it pulled it over to his anvil.
The heat had created a tenuous connection between the disjointed pieces of the sword which had become cracked and frayed when they were damaged. The warping was also less apparent with the heat partially resetting the original structure of the sword.
Mark began to hammer the sword to help set these changes, while he worked to correct the other deficiencies created in the catastrophe he experienced the last time he worked on the sword.
The sun was high in the sky when he began his work, and he hammered away without realizing the passing of time.
His hammer met steel and created a discordant ring that seemed to become clearer with every strike. He began with probing strikes in the most warped and damaged areas of the sword and continued to circle those areas with further strikes which served to shift the metal where it was needed.
There was no rhythm in his strikes, since he needed to spend a significant amount of time just getting a feel for the misplaced pieces of metal within the weapon. He could feel through his hammer that the bonding had not only failed during his last experiment, but the alloy that had previously been created through many sessions of forging and rearranged into a form that was unrecognizable.
With step one of his forging technique, he was able to get a good picture of what he was working with and could utilize step two to begin the repair process. He could tell that step three was out of the picture for now, so he focused on the first two steps of the method he had honed for the past few years.
He managed to get lost in his work, slowly pushing the metal from areas it had uselessly accumulated into areas of deficiency that served to exacerbate the warping that was apparent when the sword was cool. He slowly hammered the malleable metal at the sites of cracked alloy and diligently corrected the worst imperfections in the sword.
After the worst damage had been corrected enough, he found a rhythm to strike the sword which greatly increased his proficiency in repairing the damaged metal. After working with the rhythm for a while, the sound of the strikes also found the correct tune which all came together to pull him into a trance.
There was no vision with his trance, he only had a vague feeling of being on a battlefield. There was the scent of blood in the air, mixed with the acrid stench of the smoke from the furnace. The furnace seemed to be responding to its masters' work, as it began to billow a dense smoke from an unusual yellow flame.
Mark, though, seemed not to notice as he continued to hammer the sword in the same rhythm. The sword could be seen taking its original shape, and the only person that was nearby could see the weapon had not dimmed in its glow throughout this process.
Anabel had come by the smithy while Mark was concentrated on the sword, so she decided to take a seat nearby without alerting him to her presence. She knew he needed to focus on the work he was doing on that sword which had looked utterly ruined the last time she had seen it.
'Looking at it now, he may just fix it after this first time at attempting to repair it. I guess those merchants and guards were not fussing over his work for no reason. . .'
Mark could feel his strikes in his trance. They seemed to flow throughout his whole body, reverberating off of his bones and through his tendons to his muscles and out to his skin where they traveled across his hairs and finally coalesced in the air. Though silent, the small reverberations coming out of his hairs joined the strikes of the hammer, causing a concordant resonance as they traveled through each other along their respective paths.
This resonance served to amplify the strikes of the hammer at the site of incidence, causing a white flame to be produced due to the heat of the metal. This flame managed to increase the energy that was leaving the sword as the hammer struck it. The resulting energy generated by the hammer was thus amplified and served to heat the sword just as much as the air served to cool it.
To Anabel, this looked like magic. Regardless of how many times Mark said it was just a normal process, she could not shake the feeling that it was not normal for the flames to look the way they did.
'They seem to be taking special shapes that are not normal for flames . . . they almost look like letters. . .'
As the flames began to whisper their secrets to Anabel, she was broken from her trance by the sound of a discordant strike. Suddenly, she was no longer sitting in the shade of the smithy.
Anabel looked around at the dark smithing area that had been brightly lit by the sun only moments ago.
She looked over at Mark, who was beginning to put his tools away as he tended to the forge, his sword still lying on the anvil as it cooled.
She thought to herself out loud, "That was definitely magic. . ."
This startled Mark, who thought he was alone and he dropped the tongs he was about to put up. He scrambled to pick them up and throw them on a shelf before turning to look at Anabel.
"Oh, hey! I didn't know anyone else was here . . . how long have you been there?"
Anabel looked a bit shaken up and spaced out as she looked at Mark.
"How long indeed. . ."
Then she looked back at the sword which caused her to regain part of her posture as she took on a confused look.
Mark was about to ask her what was the matter when she just wordlessly pointed at his sword with a stern look fixed on her face.
Mark looked over to see what she was pointing at just to see his colorful sword beginning to slowly warp as it had been before he heated it.
As it warped, it began to crack in new places as the warping was different than before due to how he moved the metal around during the hammering process.
When it was done, it looked nearly as bad as before, without sections of it looking like frayed wire.
Mark said out loud, "I guess that is still progress. . ."