When she first opened her eye to darkness, Maer-doth, Daughter of the Dancing Sun, knew something was terribly wrong. The way the shamans spoke to her in low, grave tones as they assured her of her recovery, the way they hovered in the doorway to the healing chamber, she knew there was something they did not want to tell her. She knew she would be blind for the rest of her life.
Frost Cat
Maer-doth had joined the Markadonian army while she was still very young, barely twenty winters, during the Winterreach War with Larocia. She was tall and well-built for a cyclops woman, having spent much of her youth alongside her father at his forge in Lurnnok. With long, tousled, golden waves of hair and a lively, blue eye, Maer-doth would have been considered impressive on appearance alone, regardless of her fighting talents. She had chosen the way of the spear, a weapon which appealed to both her agile, sure-footed movements and direct, forceful attack style. Maer-doth not only fought with great skill, but with inspiring flair, as well.
After two years of service, she became well-known amongst her fellows as a fierce and friendly warrior, as quick to strike with her spear as she was with a smile. Her battalion was stationed in Hagr, not far north of the Noctrian Peninsula, and clashed with the Larocians many times. In every battle, she distinguished herself, whirling and dancing with awe-inspiring maneuvers that made an impression on soldiers from both sides of the battlefield. Off the field, she bolstered the spirits of her comrades with adventurous tales and legends while repairing weapons and armor around her trusty field forge.
Brimming with admiration, her commander bestowed a suit of shining, rose gold mail upon her and named her Daughter of the Dancing Sun. She was the pride of the battalion, beloved by many, respected by all. Until a simple running contest held during a prolonged lull in the conflict with Larocia turned into disaster.
Maer-doth had accepted a challenge from another highly-respected member of her battalion named Narag, one of many potential suitors, and faced him in an endurance race westward across the tundra from Hagr to Telneg. The pair began their good-natured competition running at top speed, each testing to see how long it would take for the other to drop down to a marathoner’s pace. They had almost reached Khrushok’s Cairns without slowing when a lone frost cat that had been separated from its pride sprang upon them.
Both Maer-doth and her rival reacted quickly, but the cat had been driven half-mad by hunger and attacked without fear. Maer-doth went down under a flurry of wildly slashing limbs, fighting desperately to keep the creature from ripping open her mid-section with an inevitable kick. Normally, a single starving frost cat wouldn’t have been much challenge for either warrior, but both were unarmed and startled by the bold attack.
Narag seized the beast from behind, locking his thick arms around its neck and dragging it off Maer-doth. As she twisted out of the animal’s grip, a wild swipe caught her across the face and sent her whole world into blackness. She remembered lying on the ice in shock, staring blindly with blood spilling from her ruined face, while Narag assured her that a shaman was on his way. Between the cold and blood loss, she began to see things in the darkness, visions or perhaps hallucinations.
She saw a great mountain of ice, where a mountain of a cyclops knelt on one knee, wounded but triumphant with the severed head of a frost giant clutched in his fist. In his other hand, he wielded a massive studded staff that revealed the warrior’s identity without question. Khrushok, the Greatest of All, was looking down at her, watching as her life slowly ebbed away.
The shamans came and took her back to Hagr where they called on the power of Rethess to mend her wounds. While the slashes across her face had healed with barely a scar, her vision remained lost to her. After the shamans told her there was no more they could do for her, she lingered in the healing chamber for almost a week. She didn’t want to leave the close, warm darkness of the chamber. She didn’t want to go back to the world of light that now denied her.
When she finally returned to her post, the task proved more challenging than she had anticipated. Without her eye to guide her, simple things like finding her way around town or preparing herself a meal became monumental undertakings. Whenever other cyclopes offered to help her, she rebuffed them viciously, cursing and swinging her fists blindly in anger. She didn’t want their pity. She was the Daughter of the Dancing Sun. Even sightless, she was more accomplished than half of her battalion.
After a week of this behavior, the battalion’s commander approached her with dark but unsurprising news. She was to be relieved of duty. Without her vision, she could not effectively serve as a guard or on patrols. Even in training exercises, she posed a threat to the other soldiers. Her career was effectively over.
Angry and dejected, Maer-doth grudgingly accepted an east-bound escort back to her home town of Lurnnok where her parents took her in and saw to her needs. She found herself almost completely confined to their home with little to occupy her time but practice with her spear. Every morning at dawn she would feel her way out into the yard across from her father’s forge and start a few simple warm-up techniques before proceeding into more complex practices.
She practiced these routines religiously, for hours every day, more than she ever had during her time as a soldier. Frustration and rage pushed her to the point of exhaustion. The burning of her muscles, the strain against her tendons, these pains became both punishment and release, made ever more effective by a perpetual shroud of darkness. She didn’t know what else to do. She had no other way to cope with the tragedy that had befallen her.
One morning while training more furiously than ever, she found she could no longer keep her focus. The clanging of her father’s forge sounded in dissonance against the metered timing of her exercises. Each hammer-stroke grated on her nerves, setting her teeth on edge and interrupting the flow of her movements. In battle, she had trained herself to shut out distracting noises and concentrate on the goal at hand, but now, without her eye, every sound seemed magnified a thousand times. She could hear the hammer rise in his hand, and then cut swiftly through the air an instant before the deafening clang of metal on metal assaulted her hearing ducts. The faintest sizzle of glowing sparks as they landed in the quench-water was like the roaring of a wild mammalor and the creaking metal as it quickly cooled in the frigid air was like the thunderous grinding of an ice floe.
A torrent of directionless anger and resentment ignited her blood. She stormed into her father’s forge and caught his arm during an upswing, ripping the forge hammer from his grip and casting it out into the street. She thrashed and fought against him until his strong arms found their way around her in a comforting embrace and she collapsed against him with a shuddering, heart-wrenching sob. She was lost, utterly lost, and had no idea how to find her way back again. Her father held her tightly and sat with her on the floor of his forge until she cried herself into exhaustion. Then, with the dedicated care only a loving parent could know, he put her to bed and left his forge silent and untended for the rest of the day.
When Maer-doth awoke, she knew it was late at night simply by the sounds of the animals in the far distance and the silence of the townsfolk nearby. The scent of the air was different, as well, cleaner and crisper, without the smells of a town hard at work. Since her return to Lurnnok, she had begun to adapt to the loss of her vision. Her hearing had sharpened and she memorized the layouts of her parents’ house, the town and even some of the surrounding area. Now she made her way about flawlessly, almost as well as if she still had her sight.
Quietly, she padded past her parents' sleeping chamber and outside to her father’s forge. She recalled such happy times at that forge when she was a child, dutifully stoking the fire and pumping the bellows while her father worked wonders with heated steel. It was through watching him that she had picked up the basics of her craft, which she later refined doing field work for her former comrades in arms. Those times seemed an Age past now. She smelled ash on the breeze and heard the dull hiss of dying heat. The embers in the forge had burned down almost to nothing.
Absently, she gathered an armload of wood and fed it into the oven, piece by piece, then added a few good shovelfuls of coal until a steady fire burned brightly once again. The weapon her father had been working on earlier, the wide blade of a dagger, sat discarded on the edge of the hearth. The piece was flawed now, after being left at a critical juncture in its creation thanks to Maer-doth’s emotional outburst. She lifted the blade and tapped it a few times against the anvil, listening very intently to the dull ringing it made, and then gripped it with a pair of tongs and shoved it into the blazing forge. |
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It took her a minute to find her father’s smithing hammer, lying in the snow exactly where she had thrown it in a rage earlier in the day. Reverently, she lifted it in her hand, feeling how comfortably it fit her palm.
She hastily tied back her mane of blonde hair and waited for a long, drawn out moment, adjusting her grip on her father’s hammer. The heat of the fire singed her knuckles and made the skin of her face tight as she withdrew the tongs and held the glowing metal blade over her father’s anvil. She could hear the hot metal seething against the cool surface of the anvil, impatiently awaiting the shaping kiss of the hammer. It was like some otherworldly force guided her hand, raising it up to hold the hammer high. She didn’t know why she had come out to the forge in the dead of night, but something had called to her. She needed to do this.
She brought the hammer down with a mighty blow that sent sparks flying in all directions. The steel gave just slightly, bending almost imperceptibly closer to the image of the finished piece she had in her mind. She lifted the hammer again and struck at a slightly different angle, pounding the metal against the anvil with greater conviction. The motion became an endless repetition, like a mantra for her body which allowed her to face all the pain she had held inside since the frost cat attack. Ringing hammer blows stretched out until they reverberated like a single, endless tone that drowned out everything in the world save for her arms, the hammer, the anvil and a piece of heated metal. Every swing struck a chord deep within her, setting free a small measure of heartache. In this state of timeless peace, she found herself again.
Her focus intensified to the point where she achieved an instinctive understanding of her task. She could feel the metal, every dent, every flaw that needed to be hammered out. The scent and feel of the air told her exactly how hot the metal stock was, far better than she could have judged by vision. She continued tirelessly throughout the night, working the steel with feverish drive, heating it and pounding it until the final quenching rendered the piece complete.
Awakened by the first hammer blow, Maer-doth's parents watched her throughout the entire ordeal, first with worry, then with growing hope that their daughter had found the path to spiritual peace. The craft that had always held loving memories for her now helped her to channel and purge her personal demons.
In the morning, when they came out to the forge, they found Maer-doth reclining near the dying forge with a faint, satisfied smile on her lips and a gleaming, leaf-shaped spearhead in her hand. The piece was amazing, a tempered blade of exemplary weight, balance and quality. The steel was as silver as a morning cloud, with faint blue mottling that seemed to reside just beneath its flawlessly polished surface. Her parents, both very familiar with the way of the forge, were struck dumb with awe.
Maer-doth sensed their approach and smiled broadly for the first time since she had gone blind. Clasping the base of the spearhead tightly in her hand, she rose and threw her arms around both of them.
"I know what I have to do now." She whispered to them, a great tear of happiness gathering in her unfocused eye, "Thank you."
With the help of her parents, Maer-doth prepared for a long and arduous journey to the city of Ord Merdak, the fabled site where Ordeg's harpoon, Garradun, the Sky-Render, is said to have landed after his contest with his brother Jekard. There she hoped to present her spearhead at the temple as an offering to Ordeg. After a full day's rest, she loaded up a sturdy driss with supplies and bid her parents good-bye. As proud as they had ever been of her, they watched their beloved daughter set out in search of her destiny.
Maer-doth rode out with renewed determination and spirit. The loss of her vision hardly troubled her now. Outside the confines of Lurnnok, a whole new world of sensation presented itself to her. When she came to the Remembrance Statue, she paused and pressed her palms against the cold stone and felt the ages of dignity and history it represented. As she traversed Morch's Pass, she sensed the power of the surrounding mountains, towering over her in their majesty. Her skin prickled superstitiously beneath her parka as she skirted around the location of the Grand Wheel and followed the smell of the sea past Yauntu's Mountain and south around the village of Hrutok. She noted every experience in a whole new light and the weeks of anticipation she had expected to pass at a burrow rat's pace ended quite quickly.
She came to Ord Merdak at midday, with the sun shining high overhead and a pair of competing falcons in the clear, blue sky. She rode up to the temple of Ordeg the Immovable and dismounted, tying her personal gear to her mount. A pair of young Bastions of Ordeg met her at the door. She reached into a pouch she kept close to her hip and presented them with the spearhead she had forged. The young cyclopes took one look at her blind eye and then the flawless work she held and knew instantly why she had come.
They ushered her inside, to the main altar and then quietly left her to her task. Maer-doth knelt before the dais, preparing herself for a long and devoted vigil. If she was true and her work found favor with Ordeg, the spearhead would disappear to find a place of honor in the Immovable’s divine armory.
She placed the spearhead on the altar, its perfectly tapered tip pointed directly at her heart, and focused her mind. She allowed her thoughts to travel back to the day she had been attacked by the frost cat and to all the events which had followed and eventually brought her here. She thought of her parents and how much she cared for them as well as the epiphany she'd had at her father's forge when she discovered strength in her disability. She fell into a trance and lost track of time until a wave of warmth that heralded the rising sun rolled up her back. It was time.
Reaching out along the surface of the altar, she found the tip of her spearhead and her heart fell with disappointment. It was still there, exactly where she had placed it. Her ordeal had forged a weapon of unsurpassed quality, but for some reason she could not understand, Ordeg continued to find her wanting.
Tun-Baeru, the Sightless Eye
As she rose to her feet, her disappointment faded quickly. Whether or not Ordeg accepted her work into His divine armory hadn’t been the point of her journey, she realized. She needed to find confidence in herself and the strength to carry on despite her blindness. She needed to prove to herself that the loss of her vision wasn’t the end of her old life but the beginning of a new one. The moment she reached the steps of Ordeg’s temple, she had accomplished her goal.
As she grasped her spearhead and prepared to leave, her fingers brushed across the flat of the blade and she froze in amazement. Fine, intricate etchings had appeared in the metal, arcane markings of magical origin. She traced the designs with her fingertips, memorizing every turn and shape as the sheer power of the spearhead resonated under her touch. The base of the blade had been fused to an unerringly straight shaft of pure, perfect metal. She could almost see the warm, golden sheen of the divine gift with her mind's eye. Adamant, a rare metal said to have come from the highest reaches of the sky. Her work had not found a place in Ordeg’s armory. It had been graced with the blessing of Ordeg Himself.
Overjoyed, Maer-doth returned to her hometown of Lurnnok, brandishing the proof of her success with pride. She named the weapon Tun-Baeru, the Sightless Eye, and mounted it in a place of honor within her parents' home. In the years that followed, she continued to create weapons and armor in her signature style. After she inherited her father’s forge, she took on a number of apprentices and taught them the way of sightless battlesmithing and an understanding of the art on a new, spiritual level. All across Markadon and in some places beyond, weapons and armor from Maer-doth’s forge are recognized and valued for the obvious talent and care that goes into every aspect of their creation.
- From "Secrets of Battlesmithing" |
