The Temper of Steel

The campfire was dying with a dull red glow in the dark of the ravine. A few yards away, beneath the heavy wool of her traveling cloak, Shierra’s breathing had finally stabilized into the deep, rhythmic pattern of natural sleep, her mind still slowly rebuilding the cognitive pathways burned out by the skirmish. Dashiel was curled up against his massive canvas pack, snoring softly, a graphite stick still clutched in his fingers.

Reis sat on a rot-softened log, his heavy plate breastplate unbuckled and resting at his feet. In his lap lay his father's bastard sword. With methodical, rhythmic strokes, the knight ran a tallow-soaked leather rag down the flat of the blade, his eyes examining the firelight as it danced along the worn fuller.

From the branches above, a shadow dropped into the clearing without making a single sound. Reis didn't flinch - his hand didn't even pause its rhythmic stroke. He knew the gait of the dark elf by now.

Morohtar walked to the edge of the embers, his charcoal cloak wrapped tightly around his frame. His silver hair caught the faint crimson glow of the coals, and his luminous silver eyes fixed instantly onto the steel in Reis's hands.

“You’re oiling a corpse,” Morohtar said flatly. His voice was a low, deadpan rasp that barely carried past the fire pit.

Reis’s hand stopped. He didn't look up, his jaw tightening slightly beneath his close-cropped beard. “It is standard maintenance, Northman. Steel must be fed if it is to survive the damp of the ridges.”

“Standard maintenance is for standard soldiers,” Morohtar replied. He stepped closer, kneeling by the hearth. He reached out, his long, twilight-skinned fingers splayed, gesturing toward the sword. 

“Give it here.”

Reis hesitated. To a knight of the White City, handing your legacy blade to a cynical rogue went against every instinct drilled into his bones. For weeks, their friction had been an unspoken wall between them - the paladin's honor versus the assassin's utility. But Reis looked at Shierra sleeping peacefully, remembered the mercenaries Morohtar had silently cut down from the ridge. He placed the leather rag away, and slowly extended the hilt.

Morohtar took the bastard sword by the crossguard. He didn't wield it. He didn't test its balance with a dramatic swing. Instead, he held it flat across his palms, lifted it close to his face, and let his silver eyes dilate completely.

To Reis, the blade was a familiar piece of ancestral steel. To Morohtar’s pure-blood elven brain, running its parallel-processing diagnostics, the sword was a complex map of structural physics and thermal data.

Morohtar ran his thumb along the forte, examining the thickest part of the blade near the guard, then flicked the steel with his fingernail. A sharp, clear ring echoed through the camp, but toward the middle of the blade, the pitch dropped into a dull, muddy vibration.

“Your father was human,” Morohtar stated, his eyes tracking the invisible stress lines in the metal. 

“He fought men with ordinary metal. He didn't channel kinetic current through his marrow.”

“What is your point, rogue?” Reis asked, his voice defensive but curious.

“Every time you pray, your internal Light acts like a furnace,” Morohtar explained, his finger tapping the dull spot in the center of the blade. 

“From your core, the energy floods to your arms, and from your palms, through the hilt. It races down the steel. Metal expands when it heats, Reis. But you’re discharging it into cold night air and striking iron shields. Look here.”

Morohtar tilted the blade toward the embers. Under the intense scrutiny of his guidance, Reis bent down and saw what his human eyes had missed: a faint, web-like discoloration in the grain of the steel, right where the blade began to taper.

“The carbon is separating,” Morohtar said. 

“The thermal shock is killing the blade from the inside out. I would say, three more heavy engagements - three more times you willed your spark to throw a battering ram of Light - and this legacy of yours is going to shatter right at the mid-point. Probably while you're executing a high vom tag parry. And then you're dead.”

Reis stared at the structural flaw. The defensive wall he usually kept up around Morohtar began to erode, replaced by a cold, sober realization. The dark elf wasn't mocking his sentimentality - he was offering a mechanical autopsy of his survival.

“Can it be mended?” Reis asked quietly, the archaic formality dropping from his tone.

“Patched? Yes. Properly fixed? No. Not with standard forge work,” Morohtar said, handing the bastard sword back hilt-first. 

“The core composition isn't engineered to handle the throughput of your magic. When we reach the foundries in the big city, I know a smith who works with volcanic slag. We will need to melt this down, fold in a high-tensile alloy to absorb the expansion, and re-balance the fuller.”

Reis took the sword back. The leather grip felt different in his hand now - less like an unyielding symbol of his past, and more like a fragile machine that required the dark elf’s specialized eyes to keep running.

“And my form?” Reis asked, his voice dropping lower. 

“You mentioned vom tag.”

Morohtar sat back on his heels, his expression unchanging, but the silver light in his eyes softened by a fraction. 

“You grip the pommel too tightly with your left hand when you transition from mounted to foot combat. You’re trying to force a bastard sword to have the rigid torque of a two-handed longsword. It’s an elite style, but it creates a structural blind spot on your left flank. 

Adjust your lower hand downward by half an inch. Let the weighted pommel act as a true counter-balance. It will save your wrists, it will speed up your recovery vector, and it will keep Shierra from having to weave a wall every time you miss a beat.”

Reis looked from the blade to Morohtar. For the first time since Fieri burned, the knight didn't see a self-serving cutthroat. He saw someone who used a flawless, cold-blooded intellect to keep a broken group of outcasts alive by any means necessary.

Slowly, Reis nodded. He adjusted his left hand on the leather wrap, sliding it down until his palm cupped the heavy steel disk of the pommel, feeling the immediate, natural shift in the weapon's center of gravity.

“Half an inch,” Reis murmured, testing the leverage in the dark. 

“...Thank you, Morohtar.”

Morohtar pulled his hood back up, his face disappearing once more into the charcoal shadows of his cloak as he leaned back against the tree trunk.

“Get some sleep, Knight,” the dark elf muttered, closing his eyes as his internal sensors remained wide awake, tracking the cold perimeter of the forest. 

“Tomorrow, the road gets steeper.”