Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1824: One Smith In Two Bodies

Kaelira didn’t so much as break rhythm, as if fully used to it.

She drew, struck, folded, and turned with two meters of half-naked primordial hanging off her torso like the world’s most decorated apron, and her only acknowledgment of him was leaning back into his chest a degree on the long draws.

’No, not only is she used to it... She prefers it!’ many female apprentices squealed inwardly, suddenly feeling an overwhelming urge to try a certain unorthodox crafting style themselves.

”Is he...” a master began, scandalized on at least four separate levels.

”What in the Ancestors’ name is he doing,” Brokk said flatly.

”Charging up,” Quinlan replied, not moving an inch. ”It’s part of the process.”

”...” The First Hammer of the royal smithy opened her mouth, found nothing in the entire dwarven language up to the task, and closed it.

Up on the rails, an apprentice whispered the word ”degenerate” with an awe usually reserved for scripture, and the hall’s assessment of the Villain quietly rearranged itself once more: monster, war-ender, flue-listener, and now, apparently, a pervert.

”How are you feeling~?” Seraphiel purred, petting Elowen’s lush hair with the most amused of grins. As someone who personally snuck close many times to witness this exact ’smithing style,’ she was not one bit surprised.

Elowen was speechless, her big, expressive eyes closed and opened on repeat, but a healthy color soon reached her cheeks.

Then Kaelira reached the lamination.

Three metals, three tempers, one weld. The fool’s errand.

Every master in the hall knew the arithmetic by heart: hearth-steel and cart-spring iron ran different fires, and starforged steel drank heat the other two couldn’t survive. Fold them together and one of the three always cracked. Always.

It was why nobody folded them together, and why the hall leaned in, three tiers going still at once, as the elf reached for the impossible with her ears flat with focus.

The Villain moved.

No word passed between them. He came off her like a wave leaving a beach, and by the time her tongs touched the starforged bar, the bellows were already in his hands.

The draw quickened the instant her rhythm called for it and eased the moment the color turned.

”Is he taking instruction?” a master beside Brokk whispered, hunting for the mechanism. ”Hand signs? Is it the ears? Elves do things with the ears, right?”

”He’s not taking anything.” Brokk’s eyes narrowed on the pair. ”Look closer. Nobody’s leading.”

”Look at the coal bed,” an old voice said from the rails, gone hollow with disbelief. ”He’s banked it in steps. He’s running three heats in one hearth and holding them apart by hand.”

”That’s not possible on one draw...”

”Well, he’s doing it.”

Brokk had drifted back to the forge’s edge with a correction on her tongue, because coaching was involuntary for a First Hammer, and a smith attempting an impossible weld needed her colors called.

She never got a word out.

Three times she drew breath to call a temper, and three times the fire had already moved before the breath ended, the bellows easing or the coals banking at exactly the moment her centuries of experience demanded it, as if her correction had been heard before it was spoken. The third time, Brokk shut her mouth and hooked her thumbs in her belt.

”First Hammer?” the master beside her asked, quiet.

”I wanted to offer some dwarven knowledge but... they don’t need me.” It came out half diagnosis, half surrender.

It crept up on the hall after that, the thing unfolding in front of them, gradually and then all at once.

Kaelira’s hand opened behind her, empty, and the flux was in it, because he’d started moving before she reached.

He turned the billet a half-beat before her hammer wanted the new face, and she struck the instant the tongs settled, no glance exchanged, no signal given, nothing for three hundred professionals to catch.

When she paused between folds to flick the steel and listen, the bellows froze mid-stroke, the whole forge holding its breath with her, and the moment the note satisfied her the fire was already climbing, because he’d read the verdict off the angle of her ears.

*Tiing... tiing...*

*WHAM.*

Masters elbowed each other. Apprentices forgot to blink. The rails filled with smiths hunting for the signal, the nod, the code the two of them had to be using, and they came up empty.

The two of them had stopped being two of anything. What stood at that forge was one craftsman occupying two bodies, a single mind that had split itself down the middle for efficiency and handed the hammer to one half and the fire to the other.

And the royal smithy of Elvardia, which had measured every partnership in its history against the benchmark of a master and their own two hands, watched the benchmark quietly change owners.

Somewhere in the crowd a hammer-butt knocked twice against an anvil’s horn, and this time a dozen answered it, then more, the same low double-knock rolling around the tiers like slow thunder and refusing to die out.

On her bench, Elowen made a small, strangled sound. Kings waited whole reigns for that salute. The heretic elf at the forge was collecting it mid-fold.

Then the weld turned on her.

Three metals met. The masters nearest the forge saw the grain begin to argue with itself and made the collective sound of smiths watching a friend step off a cliff: the starforged steel was drinking the heat out of the seam faster than the iron could bear, exactly as every treatise promised.

”There it is. The crack’s coming.”

”It always cracks. Nothing holds those three together. Nothing ever has.”

”Pull the iron, lass! Save your folds!”

Kaelira did not pull the iron. She planted her feet the way a tank plants them to take a lance charge, stopped asking the steel nicely, and under the soot on her smithing arm, thin lines of light woke and began to climb.

*WHAM!*

The blow landed wrong, and every master in the hall heard it: far too heavy for the stock, far too heavy for her, the kind of strike that should have torn the lamination open and scattered her folds across the floor. The billet did not tear. It compressed, the three layers driven into one another as if her hammer had brought the weight of a hillside down through her arm, and where the crawling light reached her grip, script no dwarf had ever read sank glowing into the steel.

”What... WHAT?!” Old Dain was on his feet.

”Runes! She’s setting runes MID-STRIKE!”

”You inscribe after the shape! Everyone inscribes after the shape!”

”She’s not inscribing, per se...” Brokk said slowly as the impossible weld closed blow by rune-weighted blow. ”She’s... persuading.”

At the forge, low against Kaelira’s stomach, Quinlan’s mark ignited, shining through the soot-streaked linen with a deep crimson heat that owed nothing to the coals, and in the same breath an answering glow lit at the hollow of his chest, banked and steady, one hearth acknowledging another.

”WHAT IN THE GODDESS IS GOING ON?!” a dwarven master screamed, having fully lost his composure.