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The Forges

 I remember looking dismayed at the shield I’d given her. An jagged crack ran along its moon-pale surface, inlaid gold and bronze chipped, streaked with blood, plastered with ash in grimy pockmarks. 


“Can you fix it?”, Athena asks, watching me. It’s a challenge just as much as a question, the fierceness in her voice hasn’t dissipated yet. I run a hand through my dissident hair. I grin.


“Stay awhile.”


It rains. Thunder cracks, rolls. A great downpour drenches the trees nestled in this part of my forge, splashes and muddies the ground, rivers flowing down into dark channels leading far below. It’s chilly, steam hisses from urgent heat. 


I am everywhere. In everything. My gauntleted fists crash at the metal, refining. Elegant hammer blows singing. Metal against metal. 


I am dexterous, lithe bronze fingers mounted on countless turrets. They spin and shiver and claw at eager metal, unraveling, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. 


Bronze crashes. Iron splinters. Obsidian whines. I feel great, shaking concussions that make the ground sway. Pendulums back and forth, spires rising and failing. A symphony of iron motion. Everything dances like mountains rising. I know every intricacy. Every geometry is recognizable, every interlocking cleft a signature. 


The blue eyes on me are pure, pristine frost. Perfect as Tethys tides. Sapphire on sapphire. Steady. 


“Why”, she asks, “do you not come to the Mount?”


I chuckle. It is a mighty reverberation that for one pure moment dethrone the thunder outside. 


“Not my kind of place. Nothing beautiful to make, to bend. Iron, bronze— all of it can be shaped. But the personalities there? Inflexible.” 


I can sense a smile on her lips without looking.

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