Ten Thousand Strikes

Smoke billowed from the forge-tops of the ziggurat and out the bastion windows, and there was no Fradihta in there that wasn't bleary-eyed with its stinging fume. Professor Irina worked tirelessly to keep the air in the forge afresh as much as she could, while Quanmaster Montgomery jumped from post to post, hearth to hearth, racing to correct a mistake in a seam, a critical error about to happen, followed by the four other professors who helped each Arten follow through with Quanmaster Montgomery's instructions using all the Four Mahamastra at their disposal. The professors were greatest in their Maht, but they had proficiency with all the other Arts too that enabled them to handle the work of a dozen men – proficiency that put professors of other academies to shame.

For the Artens, what began as minutes – first melting and then molding the metal in precise temperatures – away from the fire, into the fire, away and into it again, stretched to hours upon hours of ceaseless effort. Elwin's lump of sea-bronze ore finally became malleable enough to be molded, but he had to fold it, and fold it again with the hammer to align each of its atoms into a single direction. There were things he needed to do before beginning the first of the ten thousand strikes of the soulforge, and that was treating and perfecting the metal and its properties so that it could endure the vast energies subject to it during everyday use. That wasn't even to say of the braceloom upon which the disc of the Quan itself would rest, which he was simultaneously forging on a separate bench, making it out of the same metal into the width and length of half of his forearm.

It was almost the end of the first night, and Elwin was exhausted beyond belief. His eye was muffled with stinging smoke and soot. In his confusion he almost dropped the red-hot blob of his orestone onto his feet, but the Quanmaster and Professor Aionia from several feet away caught it with bubbles of air, and hoisted it back up.

"Focus, Elwin. You can do this," assured the Quanmaster.

"Yes, sir."

He did not know how long he had been awake, but upon some seven hundred cycles of folding and chiseling away at the metal to that thick, wonderous disk of octagon to become his Quan, the Quanmaster finally approved him to begin the ten-thousand strikes of the soulforge. Each strike had to be precise, and near-perfect; he had to maintain the shape of his soul, his desires, his wants, his ideals, and what he wanted the Quan to be and to become. He needed to relay all of that to each of the trillion atoms in that piece of metal, which he knew well and loved because he chose it. But ten thousand times to trillion atoms is no easy game, and each strike was a conquest, a battle against his tired self and the instinctive sloth of mankind. He carried in his strike his daring to dream, his daring to know, his daring to protect the people he loved; but most of all, he carried in it his dream of proving himself to the world that only saw him as an ant.

ONE.

TWO.

THREE.

Elwin began hammering away the shape of his soul.

On the opposite side of the forge was Mirai. Bleary-eyed and exhausted to the bone she also was, but she was fighting not so much a battle against exhaustion itself, which was accustomed to her, but rather of her own mind. It was all too easy to hammer away at the metal with incandescent rage at the unfairness of the world and that of the people who framed her family, who starved her brothers, and let that anguish do the work of the hammer; to soulforge it with the intent for vengeance as the ordinary would. But she knew that to fall to it was to destroy herself and the Quan she created. So she gripped the hammer until her knuckles went white, and with eyebrows furrowed and tears in her eyes, chose to tear out, piece by piece, the venomous anger that was melded to her quest in avenging her family, that anger which survived her through hardship.

Each strike was a revolution, a conquest, the ploughing off and casting away of the fury of her past. Her Quan would contain all her hopes of good, the hopes to make a better world for every person who dreamed, for every silent voice unheard, in lighting their way through the long dark night. That is what her name would mean to the people that heard it – she would not be Mirai, the traitor of Heian and its monster bent vengeance, but Mirai as her name truly meant, the Beauty of the Future. 

Keep your pomp, false MAHA, giver of bad faith! 

And so Eramir and Hinozawa drove home, drove true, the bellows of their being, and the shape of their soul.

***

Nine-thousand and nine-hundred strikes.

The atoms and Elwin were one being, and despite how hard it was and how his entire body ached and his bleary eyes hot with soot protested for rest, Elwin pushed and pushed his mind to the zenith of the final task, upon his third day without sleep and without food, subsisting only on the water provided to him.

'Forging your Quan is as much a mental task as it is a physical one,' Professor Aionia had told him before. And she was right. His entire mind ached and throbbed with pain as he continued to hold that visage of atoms, that clear thread linking his soul to the hot seam of sea bronze, in his vision, for each strike beyond nine thousand.

Elwin steadily brought down the cordite hammer; and each smash of the hammer on the spirit core and the sea bronze joining them shook the entirety of his being, sparks flying off like fireworks off the metal surface and in his head alike. The final hundred strikes were what distinguished a successful Quan from a failed device, and the very final one that determined its destiny in the hand of its wielder. If Elwin could not hold all those atoms of the joint in precise fashion and weave them with each other in his consciousness before the ultimate strike, the Quan he had worked on for nearly three days, and the ore which Elwin promised to save – would simply crumble to dust as if he'd never tried.

Elwin looked to his right, and on the off distance witnessed Mirai reaching the same stage as his; hammering away at the joints, chiseling away the impurities, her face and hair streaked with ash and her brow furrowed with a focus of utmost ferocity. To Elwin's left, Isaac – driven by the dream of one day healing his father, where that journey would begin with the final strike that he'd drive in just a moment. Isaac's expression was of the same intensity as Mirai's, as those of everyone around him, Katherine included, her hair singed and frayed, her forehead drenched with sweat which she did not wipe away. He saw them fueled by so great a spirit that compelled him to ask what he was and what conviction he was fighting for.

And at that very thought, the vision of the atoms in his head began to waver. The mental exertion was beginning to take its toll. His soot-laden hands shook and resisted his command. Perhaps he couldn't make the final blow.

Unknown to him, Mirai was also suffering from the same wavering conviction. Never mind the mental task of binding the soul into a trillion atoms; to do it while creating a new purpose for herself was to create an entire world. Each fought their own battles, each unaware of the magnitude of their purpose as of yet. Each doubted their ability to make the final blow.

But they could. They always could.

In the seas of Elwin's spirit, courage rose like a dragon ascending in a tempestuous ocean, the same night where he was given his Maht of Water. All his experiences rushed in his head, all his efforts, his convictions, the mountains he scaled, as he began to feel the disk of his Quan awaken into consciousness, beginning to open its eye at last to the rhythm of the world on the nine-thousand, nine-hundred and ninetieth strike.

Somewhere at the roots of Mirai's soul, the Sun stirred and pierced the cold night, and became a vermillion bird rising to reach the heavens. Her memories of rejecting the MAHA from the beyond surfaced to the waves of her consciousness; her defiance of the fate ascribed to her, her rejection of his promise of forever; instead, to be the creator of the world, and not its annihilator.

Both remembered why they came to Aeternitas. They were here not on anyone's wishes, but because they willed it; Elwin to reinvent himself, and reforge the Epitomic Forms to vanquish the great evil to save his family and the world, and Mirai to steer her new future; and in their remembrance, their purpose and resolve crystallized into a single grain of truth, becoming unconquerable by any doubt.

And so Elwin and Mirai bit their lips and clenched their teeth; with the same focus they'd given to nothing else in life so far, reached for that ultimate vision in their head, of the unity of every atom in the octagons of metal and their own wills, beyond their aching brow and exhausted body –

Until at last, the clouds in their mind parted and with lucid clarity each saw the shapes of their souls, and struck the final blow to the radiant metals, awakening their incarnations for all the world to see, joining them for ever.

It was done.

The soulforge was now complete.

The kismets, acknowledging each other with a faint nod, sank down onto the bedroll and let exhaustion take them.