Chương 19: Immutable

Then I suggest you stop looking at my face." Solstice's voice came out flat.

"You got a nerve, kid. Talking back like that." The Kharuun took the molten metal and hammered again, the sound of it landing right against Solstice's ears.

"Never seen someone like you before." Solstice tilted his head, curiosity winning out over the throbbing in his leg.

"Why are you here?"

"Never seen someone so irritating." The Kharuun didn't look up.

"Do me a favor and get out of my forge, will you." A pause, the hammer stilling mid-swing.

"Actually, no. Grab that pincher over there." He jerked his chin toward the wall.

"And help me hold this junk down."' He's ordering me around like I owe him something. Does he think I'm one of his kids?' Nonetheless, the nameless brat took the pincher. Heavy. Dense enough that his wrist protested immediately.' Play along for now. See where this goes.'

"Brat, you're too slow. Hold it right here." The Kharuun gestured at the handle without looking up from the glowing shape between them.

"Is this a sword?" Solstice asked.

"What do you think, punk. You blind?"' This short bastard. I already hate him.' CLANG. Sparks burst off the forge in a bright, scattering arc. Solstice flinched back on instinct. The Kharuun didn't. He raised the hammer again like the sparks weren't even landing on him. CLANG. Again. CLANG. The same rhythm every time. The same force behind it, never dropping, never building.

Solstice felt the vibration travel up through his own arms with every strike, the strength behind such a small frame absurd for something barely taller than he was. His bad shoulder should have been screaming by the fourth hit. It wasn't. Not even a twinge. He filed that away for later and kept his mouth shut about it. Heat rolled off the forge in waves thick enough to taste, smoke curling up toward a ceiling he couldn't see through it.

Then the sting hit, sharp behind both eyes, familiar in a way that made his stomach drop. Solstice inhaled sharply as the colors began bleeding into his vision. The walls, The forge, The raw metal scattered across the floor. Even the piece he was holding down as the Kharuun hammered it. Everything was suddenly covered in them. He blinked hard.' Not again. Did my Saltis activate? Without Pale Salt?'

He looked past the Kharuun's shoulder to the furnace at the center of the room, its heat rolling off it in visible waves. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.' Must been the heat. Thirty-seven degrees. Has to be close to that, right around the core to activate my saltis.'

"Turn it over, you brat." Solstice turned it, both arms straining against weight that shouldn't have needed both arms at all. The Kharuun started hammering again, the rhythm picking back up like it had never stopped. Off to the side, a few of the kids working the room threw glances their way, quick and curious, gone the second Solstice caught one looking. None of them said anything. He noticed anyway.

'They've probably figured out I don't belong here by now. Doesn't matter. What matters is why a children's orphanage needs a room like this at all. And why make weapons?'

"Alright. Remove the pincher." Solstice did, and the Kharuun reached in bare-handed and pulled the metal free, still glowing, without so much as a flinch. Like heat had simply stopped being a thing that applied to him. He plunged the blade into a bucket of dark liquid, and it hissed, bubbling up around the edges before he lifted it out again, wet and dripping. Then he raised his other hand and hovered his fingers just above the blade's edge. That's when Solstice saw it.

Color moved along the Kharuun's fingertips, threading down toward the metal in slow, deliberate lines. In real time, the blade shifted under it, edges sharpening, the whole shape drawing tighter and denser like something invisible was pressing it from every side at once. The Kharuun's hand moved with total precision, never touching the wrong strand, only ever pulling the exact formation he wanted and nothing else.' This bastard is Alteration.' The sword took its final shape in one smooth motion. Long. Black.

Every thread of color along its edge compact now, buzzing faintly, almost singing under the Kharuun's palm. Solstice's eyes narrowed, caught somewhere between watching and staring. The Kharuun glanced up.

"Why's your face like that? Something wrong, brat?" Solstice didn't answer.

'This guy.' He'd never forged anything in his life. Never so much as sharpened a knife properly. But something in him, some part he didn't have a name for yet, told him without question that the blade sitting in front of him was perfect. Not close to perfect. Not good for a rush job in the back room of an orphanage. Perfect.' I need to learn how he did that.' Solstice opened his mouth.

"You. Can you see what I'm seeing?" He kept his eyes open, deliberate, waiting. The Kharuun stared back at him, blank.

"What are you mumbling about, brat?" Solstice didn't answer that either. His eyes swept the room instead, looking for anything worth testing the theory on, and landed on a slab of dark, dense-looking metal stacked against the wall.

"Hey! What are you doing with that Uron!" Despite how it looked, the slab weighed almost nothing in his hands. He turned it over once.

"Drop it. Now." He didn't. The buzzing had already started under his palms, the same colors from the sword bleeding into view in front of his eyes, sharper this time, sharp enough to sting. He pushed through it anyway.

'Show him. Do what you did back on the mountain.' His free hand moved through the colors, no real plan behind it, just motion, dragging and shoving and hoping something gave. Something gave. The Kharuun's eyes went wide.

"You brat—" The slab of Uron began to shrink. Rust bled across its surface in a slow crawl, and the metal folded in on itself, crumbling at the edges like it had forgotten what held it together in the first place. Like bread gone stale in seconds instead of days.

"You're Alteration?" The Kharuun's voice came out somewhere between disbelief and something closer to alarm. Solstice met his eyes head on.

"Yes." Whatever had been sitting on the Kharuun's face until then, irritation, amusement, all of it drained out at once. What replaced it wasn't anything Solstice had a name for yet either. His voice, when it came again, had lost its edge entirely.

"Do you have any idea what you just did?"

"No?" Solstice let the ruined slab drop from his hands, rust flaking off it where it hit the floor. The Kharuun didn't answer right away. He crouched beside the wreckage instead, picked up one of the crumbling fragments, and squeezed it between two fingers. It broke apart like ash. His eyes came back up to Solstice, slower this time.

"Alteration can never touch raw Uron."