1 Introduction

I was opposed to this at first, but JT makes a good point. We need to keep a record of all the weapons we've made in pursuit of our ultimate task. Who would even believe that two bumpkin kids from the Drab village would amount to anything unless we were to keep a record of all our achievements. This will serve as a memoir of sorts, an inventory I suppose, almost a tome of recounting. It will list the weapons, their abilities, their materials, and how we gathered them all in one place. For being weapon forgers we are oftentimes confused as adventurers, and have somewhat made a name for ourselves in their community though we don't really know why. I cannot for the life of me understand how craftsmen like ourselves could so easily be misidentified.

This is my chance to clear the air about it and place us firmly in the ranks of men like our departed master. Blacksmiths of renown quality and outstanding ability. Truthfully, this is only the beginning. We plan to achieve godhood through changing the world with our creations. That we will save for later, for now let me detail all the happenings of Jaron Tempest and Dario Cadal. Stepping from the shadow of our legendary master, Wayland Anvil, we plan on changing the face of blacksmithing and metal works forever!

To begin with, our master had taught us to rely on our own skills rather than cut corners and being short on coin we naturally acquired our materials by hand, like we had always done for him before. This meant getting our hands dirty. I agreed with this way of doing things wholeheartedly. Call me crazy but I enjoyed the hard, menial labor of our youth. Chopping wood, stoking fires, striking ore, collecting hay and straw would bring me peace and clarity of mind. It never sat well with me to idle around while others toiled.

JT on the other hand always had his head in a book and was constantly distracted by the desire to learn new things. The amount of pages he singed reading while working the billows, I would put in a clever muse here but the truth is all of them. Every page of every book in our library has been singed. Every scroll, burn marks from falling sparks, and every tome soot stained from his inability to clean up between work and study. He dreams up the most marvelous and grand ideas implementing the vast knowledge in his head, albeit some are a bit mad. I am dead certain though that if there is anything to learn in this life he has already learned it or is already aspiring to learn it.

He is where most of our ideas come from and honestly, I don't know how he retains the amount of information that he does. What surprises me most is that he cares very little for writing or even manners, and hardly expresses himself with speech. Unless it has something to do with laying the groundwork for our next endeavor, of course.

I, on the other hand, am a disciple of conversation, a social acolyte, and a master of penmanship and poetry. Thus the reason I am tasked with writing this blasted thing. Not because I am in any way more intelligent than my counterpart, simply because despite the vast depths of his genius, JT's writing would be unintelligible and indecipherable. Why subject anyone to that when they can witness gentle spring streams of ink cascade over the smooth parchment riverbanks of this freshly bound book.

The one thing we both excel at above all else is our rhythmic motion of hammer to anvil. Timing is everything when it comes to working with metal. From the first strike of the hammer to the last not one strike can be off. Too early and you'll strike the others hammer, too late and you run the risk of having yours struck. Have you ever had your hand come alive with one thousand tiny bee stings? That's close to the same feeling as a hammer reverberating in your hands as it's been struck by another. You could say that we have become one mind in the forge whose fires need to be kept roaring and hungry. They wait mouths agage for the exact moment that you will thrust the cooling metal back in, allowing it to be gnawed back to red hot life. Never strike cold metal, unless you want to waste all your time and effort up to that point. This means that at the drop of a hammer or the neglect of the billows cold death awaits your creation. Diligent teamwork allows neither to take place.

Synchronized movements and habits allow us to feed off of one another anticipating when and where the other will need us next. Seldom are words spoken, actions are what matter. We fly around the space we inhabit changing tools, places, and tasks to bring about new life for our creations. Nothing ever rushed nor coming to a grinding halt. Our teamwork is a work of art that teams of 3 or 4 could never replicate. It was the only way we could ever outpace our master, working in tandem. What a tremendous day that was! We trained so hard for so long to reach the hidden potential our master had been cultivating for years.

Reminiscing aside, the simple fact is we couldn't simply jump right to making the world's greatest sword when we didn't even know it was going to be a sword yet. You cannot simply pick up a hammer and create a masterpiece of metallurgy, it takes years of dedicated practice to even make simple basic weapons. We needed to hone our skills and work out the best way to craft weapons, for we had no intention of wasting our time settling for passable or usable trinkets. We wanted to make weapons unlike anything this world had seen. Swords so thin that when you turned them on their edge they would disappear, spears so light they could almost take flight on their own, bows capable of firing arrows faster and further than the eye can see. The sort of weapons only found in fantasy or the legends of old. This is how we made the weapons of heroes and gods…