Page 3 of A Kiss of Hammer and Flame

‘What do you make of it?’ Lumsden surveyed her over his steaming cup of tea, his brown eyes ringed with lavender. Smoky quartz and amethyst, she’d decided long ago.

Cahra slid a cool glance at the old man, lifting her hammer and giving it an airy swing. ‘The job, or him?’ She shrugged, watching the lord go. ‘Just another high-born,’ she said, returning to the safety of the forge at last.

Or so Cahra told herself.

That night, Cahra sat in her homespun hammock in the rear corner of the smithy and sketched, her scratchy blanket half falling off from leaping out of bed that morning. A candle’s tiny flame straining her eyes, she squinted in the dark at the firelight bouncing between the chunks of ore, workshop tools and coal that littered the path to the front counter. And felt… excited, she realised in surprise.

Balancing her scrawled notes on her lap, Cahra overlaid them with a fresh piece of paper and began. An outline, rough at first: the sword’s geometry, based on a scale of the young lord’s height, and arm and hand length. Then the sword’s handle, the hilt ending in a round pommel with a metal disc insert. Forget the Steward’s new rapier or any other sword, Cahra wanted this to be her masterwork. Lost in her thoughts, she continued to draw as she glanced at the smoking flame and absently sketched a few lines, the candle flaring wildly. Then looking back, she inhaled. She’d drawn an oval, in a triangle, tip down, in a circle – and while the design was simple, it triggered a cascade of ideas: gems in a multitude of blues, maybe even a few sapphires, etching paint with a metallic cobalt to match—

Cahra kept going, not stopping until she’d refined the pommel motif, which would be simple yet stunning and set the aesthetic for the longsword’s handle and its extravagant blade. It was midnight by the time she finished and she knew she’d feel her exhaustion the next day, but she had it, she undeniably had it. This would be her best weapon yet!

With a satisfied smile, she stuffed the pile of sketches under her hammock, blew out the stumpy candle and snuggled into her blanket.

In minutes, Cahra was asleep, oblivious to the magicks stirring in the symbol she’d unknowingly drawn – the Eye of the All-Seeing – as it flared with brilliant light beneath her bed, and the first omen of the realm’s ancient prophecy manifested:

‘For when the Seers reappear…’

In the lost capital of Hael’stromia, the weapon awakened.

CHAPTER 2

At the heart of the realm’s fallen empire, the capital of Hael’stromia lay dormant. From afar, the obsidian pyramid loomed so high above its pike-mounted barriers that they felt quaint. But up close, the fortress city was a monster, rooted like petrified wood in ancient sands, its pyramid’s three corners pointing with ominous, skeletal fingers towards the warring sister kingdoms of Kolyath, Luminaux and Ozumbre.

The pyramid – the capital’s palace and temple – stood as a monument to past glory. But it was not Hael’stromia’s keeper. Within the pyramid’s colossal structure, swathed in the silence of unrelenting years, of death, stirred a weapon fuelled by magicks older than the capital’s jet sands. A weapon that the tri-kingdoms of Kolyath, Luminaux and Ozumbre had each battled to control for generations.

A weapon; not an inanimate tool of force, but an immortal, born of the Netherworld beyond the earthly plane. A being with the powers to shape or shatter worlds.

Not merely ‘a’ weapon.

Theweapon.

Hael.

The flaming eye sockets of Hael’stromia’s weapon flickered open, guttering as if his fires starved of air. A mortal concern that Hael found almost laughable, for the Netherworld’s infernal bonfires fed him still. As had the suffering ripped from the skeletons around him.

Hael’s imposing form arose from the black sandstone of his altar. Arcane power rippled within him, and like an asp perceiving the faintest tremors in the air, he extended his mystical senses beyond the room, his shrine and its stone columns etched with the tales of his death and rebirth. Bound to the Netherworld, his magicks enabled him to feel the slightest whispers of dark energy in this, his sacred domain, and the passages of the capital’s pyramid. But there was nothing; no Oracles, no scrying Seers of any kind. Hael frowned, pondering. Hael’stromia was a necropolis yet. Why had he awoken?

Not a soul had dared to goad the capital’s walls in several years, leaving him the warden of long-departed memories, now faded into myths. He had not sensed the warmth of another life form’s presence for so long that it aroused in him a near-forgotten ache for the world beyond his confines, beyond the solitude and roaring silence.

Springing soundlessly to his feet, Hael blinked, the sensation in his eye sockets akin to the stinging of crushed glass. Despite the pain and crypt-like darkness, his vision was perfect. Hael beheld his pallid skin, delicate as moonlit paperbark, a labyrinth of inky veins pulsing beneath the surface. His fragility laughed in the face of the centuries that had tried and failed to end him, ravaging his immortal form. Hael stilled himself, seeking a remnant in the ashes, an ember of his unspeakable powers. His destruction.

But, again, there was nothing.

A thread of frustration unspooled within him. He was a blade in its sheath without a call to arms, locked in this, his chamber, until the prophecy transpired.

The prophecy.A phrase deeply entwined with his existence, for the last High Oracles had foretold the rise of both a new Scion and the pyramid that served as palatial temple. And, of course, Hael – the dark weapon of the tri-kingdom empire, bound to the destiny of its capital of Hael’stromia. The prophecy’s fulfilment promised change, an end to civil war. Without it, the realm’s divisions would persist.

But not forever.

‘For when the Seers reappear,

When the Key has been bestowed,

When the mark walks the path to enter the Nether inlife,

Then shall Hael rise again.’

Hael had been awaiting the first omen of the prophecy, ‘For when the Seers reappear’, as long as he had been sealed inside this room. When the following two omens were enacted, he would be liberated, free to defend his empire’s city seat, this pyramid, the capital restored.

---