Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 139

Forging was her life.

For as long as she could recall, Eloise had always wanted to create things. As a small girl, she had started with whatever she could find at hand. That child had molded sand villages, had honed sticks into makeshift blades. As she got older, she had molded clay into tools of ceramic, had overlaid handwoven shirts of grass until they were armor pieces.

Eloise’s parents didn’t hail from a wealthy clan and didn’t belong to some mighty sect or school, but she was still better off than the vast majority of people. A pair of rogue cultivators with regular work could supply a child with a great deal, but even they couldn’t satiate her hunger for creation, though they tried. She had visited the forges and workshops of mortals and absorbed as much as she could from them, and then she had moved on the itinerant craftsmiths who could make quasi-artifacts, items with a hint of spirituality to them that in themselves could supply one with a lifetime’s wealth.

She wasn’t content with her journey ending there. Hope had blossomed for Eloise with a referral from one of these masters to the Celestial Ascendance Academy, that far away beacon of learning and mastery. Her loving parents had sacrificed much, had scrounged every pebble of essence stone and every coin of rainbowgold that they could, and had managed to get her a placement here.

Eloise had taken to the craft like a fish to water, ecstatic at the expansion of her knowledge and the acquisition of new expertise. Her cultivation advanced by leaps and bounds as well out of necessity rather than focus; to ascend to the pinnacle of forging, she couldn’t let that stagnate. She had crossed through Meridian Circulation and stepped into Foundation Building before she was twenty, eager to obtain the necessary power to craft an artifact on her own.

After years of education and preparation, Eloise stood on the threshold of forging true artifacts! And for her first work, she had produced a fine longsword, a beautiful blade that could channel and unleash arcs of flame with every slash. It was a perfect sword, perfect in length, in strength, in sharpness, in essence conductivity. The Forging Institute had been filled with praise for their bright young star. Several students and not a few teachers had offered generous sums for the blade, but she decided to hold onto it; this was her first masterpiece, the pinnacle work of her life so far, and she could not bear to part with it.

That bright new beginning had turned into a dead end, though. When Eloise moved on to create another artifact, she failed. The instructors had smiled ruefully and reassured her; a perfect success rate wasn’t possible, and that her first forging had gone so well was far from the norm. She would have to get used to failing four out of five times, they said, but that was just normal. Soon she’d make another artifact, and another, and with those she could have the merits to ascend to the next tier of the Academy and continue on her road.

Another artifact never came, though. It seemed that there was always something Eloise was doing wrong in each attempt at forging. The temperature was wrong, the materials weren’t melding, the internal diagrams were flawed, the structure was too coarse or too brittle or too soft. She stopped innovating then and made an effort to make another sword just like her first, but she couldn’t even manage that.

Her appreciative fellow students waiting to cheer her on had evaporated. The instructors with their pointers had found other students to help out, and it seemed that with every visit to the institute that the gazes she met with were flintier and more unforgiving.

Finally, Eloise was left with only one instructor in the Forging Institute willing to give her time at the forge. Far from the mountains of advice on where she could possibly be going wrong before, now Master Harford told her that she needed to figure it out for herself and that when his patience failed she would have no recourse but to seek help at the Remedial Institute.

That admission had been like a plunge into ice water for Eloise. Everybody knew that the Remedial Institute was the end of the road. Back when she had hangers-on they had quipped about it, a morbid reminder of the fate of those who couldn’t measure up to the Academy’s standards. None of those people remained now, of course, but the old light commentary had taken on a far darker tone as it played back in her mind now, right on the verge of being cast into that pit.

And then she had screwed up for the last time. Eloise had given up on making masterpieces at this point and had simplified the process to try and make something that could at least be considered an artifact. The process seemed to be going off without a hitch, but she had a moment of inattention as she was quenching, and when the smoke cleared she had been met with the red face of Master Harford, tossing her out of his forge and hurling the scrap of her failed creation after her.

Eloise was finished. No instructor would now take her. Without a teacher on hand, even if she could forge an artifact now it wouldn’t count. Tears spilled out of her eyes as she wept unabashedly, clawing at the scraps of smoldering metal to put them in order.

“You’re going to burn your hands like that, you know,” a cold voice from above informed Eloise.

Eloise’s sobbing turned to bitter laughter. “Wh-what does it matter? I c-can’t make anything w-worthwhile with these hands anyway.”

“So you’re going to mutilate yourself and ruin any chance of getting back up from this disaster, then,” the cold voice remarked dryly. “How very bright of you. And here I was going to see if you were deserving of one last chance.”

Eloise choked back a sob and a laugh. “Who are you to speak of second chances?”

“Well, I’m a teacher, so that must count for something, shouldn’t it?”

Dashing the tears for her eyes, Eloise glanced up. Standing over her was a pale woman in a blue dress, her lips quirked disdainfully, no doubt at the pile of human wreckage strewing the ground before her. She was beautiful but in a terrible way. She was the coldness of the unreachable moon whose reflection the foolish sought to touch in the water.

The cold woman flicked a finger, and the heat radiating from the fragments stopped as though it had been severed from reality. “Why don’t you put those away and we can go have a chat somewhere quiet?”

Eloise nodded wordlessly, scrambling to her feet as she called the scrap materials into her storage pouch. Even if this woman wasn’t a master smith, she was obviously extremely gifted in magic; the young smith couldn’t help but admire the mastery of that single finger flick, the nicety at which it turned the fragments to room temperature and not a bit cooler than that.

Leading the way in silence as she composed herself, Eloise picked out one of the general meeting rooms inside the Institute. The cold woman procured her teacher’s token, the proof her of claim, and the door unlocked and allowed them entry. The room was a mostly bare chamber designed for small group project discussions, only having a single round table in its center with six chairs around it.

“Have a seat,” the cold woman commanded, and grabbed a chair herself, turning it around backward and placing her hands on the top of its back as she sat with her legs together off to a side. Her rested her chin on top of those hands and stared at Eloise, who rushed to grab a chair and sit down herself.

“I’m Eloise,” the young woman introduced herself.

The cold woman’s head bobbed in what wasn’t exactly a nod, given how she was sitting. “You may call me Miss Sable, Eloise. You seem to be having some problems with your artificing. Luckily for you, I’m an expert on fixing these problems. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, from the top, so I can get a feel for what can be done here.”

“Of course, Miss Sable,” Eloise replied obediently, and she started her tale. Miss Sable listened in silence, expressing no surprise, amazement, or much of anything else during the recounting of the young woman’s history; the teacher might as well have been a flawless sculpture posed in the chair there, except for the occasional blinking of her eyes and cadence of her breathing.

“…and then you saw how that turned out, Miss Sable,” Eloise said, finishing her story.

Miss Sable’s head raised and she took a deep breath. “That’s quite the journey you’ve had, Eloise. And now you believe it is at its end, don’t you? You’ll get shunted off into that crappy Remedial Institute, where nobody could possibly fix your problem, and you’ll eventually end up dropped from the Academy and shipped back home, where all the sacrifices your parents made to send you here will have been in vain.”

Eloise nodded in silence, again on the verge of tears as she thought about it all.

“What if I told you that you are wrong, Eloise?” Miss Sable asked. “Wrong about basically everything. What if I said that by the time I permit you to leave this room, your confidence will be restored, and with it your ability to forge artifacts? That you will walk out of here with a new artifact of your own making?”

“Well, um, no disrespect miss, but this room is hardly the place to forge something,” Eloise remarked, suddenly very worried. Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t heard of any Miss Sable inside the Forging Institute, nor did the woman seem familiar with the layout of the premises. If she had an office here, wouldn’t they have met there instead?

Miss Sable laughed. “That’s where you’re wrong, my dear. Again. I can make all of that happen, but it won’t come without strings attached to it. I will give you back your confidence and your path of forging, and in return you won’t go crawling back to those morons who discarded you once things got difficult. They would only abandon you again if it became convenient anyway, right?”

Eloise didn’t know where the woman’s bravado came from, but she recalled that single twitch of a finger and decided maybe it was worth an attempt. “If you can make all of that happen, I will gladly agree to those terms. It has never been about the acclaim or the praise; I just want to create things.”

“You’re certain of that?” Miss Sable asked with a corner of her mouth quirked wickedly. “No, I can see you’re very pure in that regard, Eloise. I can’t promise this will be painless or easy for you. Creation doesn’t work that way. So you accept, then?”

Eloise nodded. “I accept.”

“Bargain struck, my dear.” Both corners of Miss Sable’s mouth now turned up. Eloise probably imagined it, but she saw a flicker of cruelty in that smile. “Can I take a look at that masterpiece you created?”

Eloise felt a jolt at the question, but she had committed herself now. “Of course, Miss Sable.” She retrieved the sword from her storage pouch and unsheathed it, laying the flat of the blade over her palms in ritualistic form as she presented it to her new teacher.

Miss Sable straightened her posture as the blade flew, the edge slicing through the air and just shy of taking a layer of Eloise’s skin with it before it stopped to hover in front of the cold woman. The teacher stood and plucked the sword out of the air, examining it with her brow furrowed. She flicked at it with a finger and listened to the sound. She grabbed it by the hilt and gave it a couple of soft swings.

“Tell me, Eloise, does this perfect blade of yours have a name?” Miss Sable asked with an eyebrow quirked in curiosity.

Eloise shook her head. “No, not yet.” The sword, a blade the shade of rose gold, had brought to mind several flame related names, but none had struck her fancy enough yet to call it something that could match its perfection.

“That’s good,” Miss Sable commented, placing her other hand on the blade.

And then she snapped it cleanly in half.

Eloise gave a muffled cry as she felt the entire world drop out from underneath her. If the ring of the academy they now stood on had plummeted to the earth, it wouldn’t have felt as sharply as this.

“Perfection is a lie, my dear, one you need to get over,” Miss Sable remarked with that cold voice. “Don’t fret. You’ll soon be producing much better. It’s best if you just forgot about this old piece of trash; I broke it with my bare hands, after all. When I’m done with you, you’ll make artifacts worthy of being named and remembered, my dear.”