When I arrive back in the forge, I find that I cannot even touch my tools. I pace back and forth, fretting. Her image haunts me—those arcane eyes, that long white hair, her unnaturally elongated features and frame.

Just a junior wizard was powerful enough to stop my heart with a single attack, and my armor could do nothing to protect me against it. How powerful might this Alae be? Nthazes said he'd never seen light so bright. Could she blind us with a single word?

I want to believe she is on our side. She is Jaemes' daughter, after all, or at least someone who knew him well. Yet how can a dwarf guess how the minds of short-lived humans work?

But there's no point worrying over something I can't control. If she comes, she comes.

I start plans to remake my visor using a slightly different method. I'll bend the titanium first and then meld the true metal into it. There will be no need to hammer it into shape. My idea seems foolproof—though I do worry. True metal may not act so simplistically.

With some more of the guild's proceeds and most of the rest of Runethane Halmak's reward, I purchase another sheet of titanium as well as some more titanium ingots. I refine the latter and familiar silver smoke rises into the air.

I cut out the shape of the visor, flatten the off-cuts, beat them into the metal. I keep on beating, until it I can see my sweaty, grimy face clearly. My eyes are red, my pupils dilated.

I sip beer as I work, and chew on jerky to stave off my fatigue. The forge echoes with the shout of metal until I am done. I inspect and am pleased. It's a little smoother than the first part of the helmet. My arms and hands are getting used to how titanium feels, its softness compared to tungsten.

With only my bodyweight and thickly-gloved hands, I bend the shape into a half-circle. I then lay in the finishing touches with one of my smaller hammers.

At this point, I allow myself a rest. My dreams are of mocking mirrors and twisting shards, and a black shadow lurking behind me. I wake in a sweat and force myself to sleep again. This time I see no dreams, and when I awaken most of my fatigue is gone.

It's time to shape the true metal. I melt the grains into a bead, let the bead cool to red. My hammer-strike turns it to an imperfect circle. Fifty cycles of heating and hammering later, I have a perfect one.

I cut it into wedges. Time to meld them into the mundane metal. Because the craft is already curved, I can't simply just lay them on top and heat. I need to be clever about it.

I heat the mundane piece to white heat and place it on the anvil. Next, I heat one of the segments of true titanium to yellow—the exact same shade the others reached on my last attempt. I can judge color more accurately than before.

Very carefully, taking many minutes to angle my tongs exactly, I place the segment onto the mundane metal. I tap—it melds! Now for the other segments. I pile up some of the black molds to use as a kind of scaffold and position the visor within them at an angle, the next place I'll lay the true metal facing up.

Once more, very carefully, I heat up and lay on the next segment of true titanium. It melds perfectly. So far, so precise. I lick my lips.

Over the next short-hour, I repeat this method another fourteen times. So patient am I, withdrawing and re-angling the moment I feel that something's off, that I make no errors at all. My placements are exact down to the sub-millimeter.

But now I must anneal, and worse, quench. A groan escapes my lips. Something is going to go wrong here. I can feel it just as sure as I can feel the heat of the furnace on my face.

I'm just nervous, I tell myself. I place the visor into the furnace and heat. Once it's glowing bright orange, I judge that it's ready to quench.

I take a deep breath, pull it out and thrust it into the bucket. Steam blasts out with a rushing sound. I sense danger, make to pull out the metal, but I'm too late. The bucket shatters. Shards of steel lacerate my skin, stab deep into my forearm when I bring it up just in time to protect my eyes. Wet heat scorches me as the steam rises. I stumble back, fall.

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I take my forearm away from my eyes. Held in my tongs is the middle section of the visor only. The rest is lying around the forge, scattered into a hundred fragments.

I scream out in rage. It's a wordless scream—there are no oaths powerful enough to describe my fury. I stand up and dash the tongs and what remains of my craft to the floor. Blood drips from my arms. I fling them out, bash my fists against the wall. Crimson drops fly and burst on the stones.

Instant failure. In a single instant, I've destroyed a hundred gold pieces' worth of metal. I expect that all of the true metal will be gone now, after such an embarrassment. I scream out again.

My precision was lacking. I did not calculate well enough. My thinking was lacking too—I want to hit myself. I beat my fists against the wall again. Why did I quench in water in the first place? There's a dozen different liquids that are easier to use. I used water because that's what the deep dwarves always did, because that's what I'm used to.

I should have thought the process through more.

I lean back against the wall and stare up at the ceiling. This has been a failure of patience more than anything else. I simply assumed that as long as I was fast enough—but true metal is not so simple. I need to find out more about it, and that means learning more about the mundane metal also. Patience has to start even before the crafting begins.

Yes. I must understand normal titanium before I can use the true stuff, the very essence of it.

Determination in my heart, shards of steel still in my arms to remind me of my stupidity, I head back up to Brightdeep. Like all dwarven cities, it has a large library for the use of any runeknight willing to pay.

Metallurgy—here's what I'm after. Titanium—there's half a dozen volumes on the subject, written in runes and phonetics both. I nearly discard the latter, but in the end, decide that perhaps mere metalworkers have knowledge often overlooked by other runeknights.

I pay up and bring the books back down to the forge. I notice that my food and beer has been restocked—I must thank Nthazes again.

There's no seat in here, but what dwarf needs a seat when there's an anvil to lean his back against? It's cold and hard, which keeps me awake as I delve deep into the volumes.

The prose in each is dry and detailed, with no rhythm, no rhyme, no alliteration. It almost hurts to see words abused in such a way, especially by the mere metalworkers.

But my opinion of the metalworkers soon changes. It seems they know a great deal more about how to form the metal than the deep dwarves do with their primitive furnaces—a lot more.

For one thing, it's been shown that heating the metal in air weakens it by a significant degree. The process is not fully understood, but several techniques have been developed to mitigate the issue. One method, described in great technical detail, sticks out to me in particular.

Into the furnace, you place a certain substance. As it heats up, it releases a kind of thin, toxic smoke that replaces the ordinary air.

The other methods involve treating the metal after you're finished—I feel that the true metal will not like this. So, I make up my mind: I will fill my furnace with the mysterious, unnamed smoke and find some way to cover my anvil in it also.

Strange smoke: didn't Runethane Yurok fill his hall with a similar substance? That was to warn off the darkness, and we could breathe it, but perhaps he also had a stock of something similar, yet more concentrated. His metalwork was superior to the rest of the deep dwarves'. Was this airless forging his secret technique?

I search the forge in a frenzy. Gems and metals of all kinds are here, but nothing that looks burnable. I search for any hidden compartments, secret strongboxes. Here! A larger block of stone in the wall, when pushed at the right angle, slides out. Within is an unassuming box of black coal. I inspect it and cough. It certainly smells smokey enough stop one's breathing.

Into the furnace I place it. I heat. Thick black fumes pour out as if from the throat of a sick dragon. They seem to be about the same weight as air, for they neither rise up nor fall down, but extend out evenly.

I take the smoke-coal out and open the door to the forge to let the false darkness clear away. I'm still not done—I must decide what to quench with.

Back up to Brightdeep I go. I scour the forging district, searching for something better than water to quench with. I have money, now, and I make sure my hefty purse of gold is visible. It clanks while I walk. Shopkeepers, when they see and hear it, are eager to speak to me and tell me everything about their wares.

Eventually, I settle on dithyok blood. It's foully toxic, and prone to cause terrible hallucinations if you breath in the fumes, but it can absorb more heat, more slowly than water. No one is quite sure why this is, but the money speaks for itself. Runeknights in Allabrast have been paying a steep price for its importation.

After restocking on titanium, there's just one more thing I need to buy: a long leather hose for breathing through. Once I've found something suitable, it's straight back to the forge again. I prepare my materials: titanium on the anvil, smoke-coal in the furnace, thick purple dithyok blood in the bucket.

I flex my fingers. The steel shards in my arms stab painfully. They'll remind me to go slow. And as long as I do go slow, things will work out. I am about to make a craft worthy of enruning. I feel totally confident about this. The secrets of titanium, both mundane and true, are about to be revealed.

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