36th of Frost, 119th Year of the Age of Steel
Talon situated his aura glass goggles in place. He adjusted the strap so that they sat comfortably on his face before he slipped on his fitted leather gloves. Picking up his tongs, Talon grabbed one of the nearby hammers. This one was larger and had a heavier head designed for awakening and disrupting the aether pathways on a broader scale than some of his smaller more refined ones. He began at the base of the blade where it connected with the hilt. All of his structural work would be for nothing if he made the blade so resilient to breaking and it snapped off the handle. He struck the handle and the blade where the two met. The muddled and clotted clumps of aether in his sight were smashed and smoothed out but quickly began to clump back together. Talon repeated his strike. The light of magic being struck and nudged into motion illuminated the interior of his workshop.
The Avialae continued to pound down the unruly aether so that it was less likely to grow brittle and unstable. He hammered things into place until a clear structural pathway became obvious. Once he could see it, Talon set down his hammer and grabbed a pair of more specialized tongs. He grabbed the aether pathway and dragged it all the way to the very tip of the jewel that he had shaped into the pommel of the grip. He then hammered that end of the pathway firmly into place so that it did not snap back and destabilize all of his structural work. He took a smaller hammer and lightly began tapping backwards up the pathway that he had created. He stopped intermittently in order to drag branching structural aether pathways into each curve of the sword’s interior shape. When he reached the blade again, he really put his skills to work.
Stirring the aether pathway into motion, Talon began grabbing latent strands of aether and folding them into the pathway that he had built throughout the whole interior structure of the blade. He could feel the resistance in the aether not wanting to fold upon itself. Still he forced it to lay atop itself then took a hammer and pounded the folded aether into place. He repeated this step of dragging latent aether into the core structural pathway that he had built into the sword. Each time it got a little harder to do. The aether was beginning to layer upon itself and the more he stretched, tugged and folded it upon itself the less there was to work with for this particular portion of the forging. When he felt it had reached an acceptable point where the sword would be far superior to anything available on any mundane market that Talon knew of, he moved on. The folding of aether combined with the weight provided by the silver and steel presented a challenge but one that Talon had adequately prepared for.
He began by taking the aether of the sword and more evenly dispersing it. He sifted through the static aether until he found properties related to weight and balance then began using a flat stone like tool upon that strand of aether. First, Talon struck those strands with his hammer in order to make them pliable and amenable to being reshaped. He then gabbed them with his tongs, took his smoothing stone and began the work of pushing and smoothing those properties across the expanse of the blade. Each time he repeated the steps. Hammering those strands of aether and then tugging on them with his tongs in order to pull them to the forefront of properties in the blade. He then smoothed them out over the full expanse of the blade. That had seemed to be a primary focus of Taelian’s concern when it came to the implementation of his powers in swordcraft. The weight and balance of the blade, while a concern for any swordsman had been especially poignant for the Siltori. He supposed it must have had something to do with the way he Enmeshed his sword in fire if he was a fire mage. Talon didn’t fully understand it as he was not an elementalist but he’d seen Riven perform the technique more than a few times either during training or during one of the incursions that happened in the city.
Drawing upon the mundane properties related to weight and balance would only get Talon so far however. That was where the essence of his feather, an Avialae’s wing feather, came into play. He again sorted through the properties of the blade as they presented themselves to him through the aura glass goggles. After a moment or two, Talon sighed and lifted them up off of his face. He drew upon his own powers of Semblance. It would be far easier to recognize the presence of his own aether if he were using his own gifts. He extended his senses to the blade and touched upon the aura of the sword. Magic sprung out from every part of the unfinished blade and Talon got a sense of its raw strength. It filled his with brief pride but he set that aside as he caught the strands of aether that belonged specifically to him.
His blood.
His feather.
His magic.
Talon set the aura goggles back onto his face focusing on those aether strands before releasing his hold on his powers of Semblance. He picked up a pair of forceps and a smaller hammer. Lightly he began tapping on the strands of aether then pulling them up to the forefront of the sword. It was...shocking to witness first hand the magical properties inherent in himself as they manifested in the blade. He found the aether from his feather and began to tug that particular strand of aether so that it flowed from the very tip of the sword down to the pommel. It was here that Talon could see first hand a piece of the gift of Windstepping that was often spoken of. The touch of icy winds and the sense of open skies that Talon got from the essence of his own feather made his wings fluff up before settling.
This was the gift that had been given to his people by Von Rabe. The Pale King of the Kindred. Talon did not linger on that for very long before he set to work on webbing the strands of aether across the entire structure of the sword. It was slow going. The aether had to be carefully distributed so that no part of its flow was interrupted by another inherent property and that is meshed with the rest without clashing. It required multiple rehashing of the shape of the structure and Talon was fairly certain that he spent at least an hour figuring out how to spread it evenly throughout the elaborately shaped and carved hilt that he’d devoted so much attention to.
When he was finally satisfied with how the aether stretched across the sword, Talon began firmly hammering it into place so that it did not deviate from its purpose. He did not know the effect that Taelian’s magic would have on the sword that he wielded but the combined work of Talon’s mundane enhancement augmented by the magic inherent in his own wing feather would certainly make the balance of the sword and its versatility and maneuverability far, far above that of anything available in a common market.
It took some working but Talon managed to settle the weight and balance properties intermingled with the magical aether of his feather into place. His amount of working had dislodged a few of the structural reinforcement pathways that he’d built so Talon devoted more attention to reinforcing them.
Finally, Talon sifted through the aether of the blade searching for gaps in the aethereal structure. As he found them, Talon worked carefully to fill in those gaps by either layering reinforcement pathways across them or taking clumps of latent aether and filling them. He did not stop until he had scanned, filled and patched every inch of the sword showing no signs of breaking in the entire aether flow of the weapon’s structure. He then pulled the lustrous and clean nature of the silver threaded into the viscerite to the surface. Talon coated the weapon’s outer most layer with these properties and then reinforced them. He took the aether and folded it upon itself, hammering it into place, cutting away broken portions and then rethreading them back into the overall fold until the property was as iron clad as he could make it.
Talon stood upright with a yawn. He had again worked through the vast majority of the day pouring over as many details as he could. Rolling his shoulders, the Avialae rubbed at the back of his neck. He would be sleeping at Rien’s tavern again that night. He was nearing completion on the sword and the less time he spent dallying with other tasks, the more he could focus on something that was presently bringing him joy. There were many burdens on his mind as of late. This simple freedom to just create something with his own two hands and with his own skill was a far greater pleasure than many other things at that moment in time. Hanging up his tools and leaving the sword humming on the anvil, Talon made his way out of his workshop. Before he left, he sat down to pen a letter to Taelian. It was a missive to be delivered to him in a few days time. Talon was nearly done. He had no doubt that the Siltori would be wanting to be informed of the status of his sword.
Once that was finished, he sealed the letter giving Taelian the time and day when he could collect his sword. He then set it upon his desk, ready to be sent with a messenger in a day or two.
