The heat was oppressive.
It made her skin itch from the sweat that ran down the length of her body.
It made her lungs burn and eyes sting and tear up.
Before, it was a burden to bear for her craft. A necessary evil.
Now, with the Ember smoldering in her soul, it made her feel complete. It made her whole.
It made her blood roar and her heart sing every time her hammer struck metal. This! This what was it meant to be a dwarf! The heat of the forge! The ring of the anvil! Passion! Fire! Every time her hammer struck true she could hear the songs of her ancestors echo through her soul, every time she reintroduced the metal to the fire she saw her people's great history before it was stolen from them, and every time she quenched the hot metal she saw their great workings that were now in the hands of their foes.
She closed her eyes for a moment and reached within herself, to the place where the Ember rested, like a glowing coal in the darkness, giving light and life, and then she gripped it as she had been thought and let the warmth from it seep into her body before she laid her hand on the red hot metal resting on the anvil.
It hurt.
It felt like her flesh was blistering and burning.
But she knew that her hand was fine. Her flesh unblemished, untouched by the heat and the flame that licked at her fingers.
This was the price of the Ember, and its gift.
No fire could touch her, but she would still feel the pain, and to use the Ember to its fullest she would have to master that pain and push through it towards the goal. Drew's lessons in how to focus her mind had been a godsend for her. It allowed her to ignore the pain, at least for a short while, enough for her to infuse the power of the Ember into the piece she was working on.
It was the first step. There would be more as her mastery grew, but for now it was enough.
It didn't change the material any, not yet. It needed to be shaped first. She removed the piece and showed it into the burning coals again before pulling a lever and raising the airflow and causing a blast of heated air to bloom up around her, little embers, like fireflies at night, washed over her and into the air around her. The magic of the Forge, the mystery of fire.
She smiled to herself as she watched the metal in front of her slowly go from red to yellow and finally to white. It was beautiful. She ignored the pain as she pulled it out of the fire and placed it at the anvil and raising her hammer. Her hammer. One that she had forged herself, under the close watch of Alfrigg. No normal hammer could do after all; no normal hammer could shape metal filled with the Ember to its full potential. This was the wand of the dwarves of old, filled with her determination, with her focus and resolve.
She was darn proud of it too as it hadn't been the easiest thing to make seeing as she didn't have access to all the things she needed to even start to make it. First, with the help of several of her ancestors, and a few that weren't, she had managed to basically run through a millennia worth of dwarven ingenuity as she made the tools, that made the tools, that made the tools, etc, that she needed to actually make some headway. It hadn't taken to long overall, but it had been sweaty work.
She'd been damn disappointed that she'd not been able to use the Room to cheat; apparently, it wasn't up to creating fully-fledged Ember empowered hammers for her. But all her hard work had been worth it, she thought as she hefted her hammer up and took an admiring look at it. It wasn't anything fancy by the looks of it. It looked nothing more than an ordinary if expertly shaped, hammer made of burnished steel with some nice engravings on it to give it some personality.
But its simple exterior belied what it truly was, the first piece of Adamant to have been produced in nearly five centuries. And the first to be held by anything but goblin hands for just as long as the grubby murderous little devils had shared none of what they had stolen from her people. Wizards had tried to take some of it, but even several goblin wars had not yielded even a single piece to the wizards. Not that they tried too hard.
Adamant was useful, but not all that pretty to look at, not like its lesser cousin "goblin silver", which was that putrid race's best effort to replicate one of the crowning achievements of her people. Tried and failed. The goblins had the Ember within them as well. "Goblin magic" they called it in their arrogance. But the little blighters didn't know what she did, what the dwarves knew, and what the hateful little shits had tried to steal from them when they attacked the Dwarves ancient homes. They didn't know the deeper secrets of it, how to make it do more than merely make ones flesh resistant to flame. It was almost funny, for the answer was there, right in front of them. But they were too grasping, too petty and greedy to ever discover it for themselves. And even if they somehow managed to discover it Lys didn't think they could ever make us of it as they were.
Emotions. That was the secret. It was like tossing some copper sulfate into fire to change the color of the flame to green, or Copper chloride to make it blue. Infusing emotions into the Ember gave it properties depending on the emotion used, and the stronger the emotion the more powerful the result. The goblins used it unknowingly in the making of their "goblin silver", and it was why it had the properties it had. Goblins knew only greed and envy, they were a grasping and covetous people and so their works took properties from other things to strengthen itself. They had never discovered that other emotions had other properties because they didn't love the craft as Dwarves did. They only did it for the value they could get out of it. That was their failing.
And then there was the Hammer, filled with her determination and resolve. With it the effect could be further shaped, shades of other emotions added to the work to give it greater depth. One could infuse without it, but the result was weaker. The goblins could not make the hammers, but they no doubt still had the ones they stole from her ancestors, which allowed them to make their goblin silver.
The anvil was made of Adamant as well, of course, her second piece. With them she could shape magic and metal both at the same time, and with them, she had resurrected another lost art, another wondrous metal that most wizards today didn't know existed. She picked up the piece, a piece of plate for Drew little project. It was red, far more so than even copper.
Orichalcum.
The fabled metal first suposedly discovered, or created, in Atlantis, purportedly the only truly magical kingdom to have ever existed, and the birthplace of so many wonders, and even magic itself some said. Though that bit was hotly contested around the world of course. No one, not even the dwarves she had been able to summon could answer how the secret of the metal had ended up in dwarven hands, or how the Atlanteans, who had most certainly not been either dwarves or goblins had been able to forge it without the Ember, if they had ever existed in the first place. Lys personally thought it was a load of bull, but it didn't pay to anger her ancestors. At least not before they had taught her what they knew.
The piece of her hand was the base form of Orichalcum and for the most part the least valuable. It was prized for its immutability primarily and there was nothing known to either wizard or dwarf of any way to damage it once it was completed. You could shape it, with enough heat and magic, but the process was difficult and time-consuming. To the point that it was far easier to just make it from scratch, should you have the materials for it that is.
She dropped the still hot plate into a liquid-filled stone barrel provided by the room. It wasn't anything as normal as water or oil in that barrel, but an Alchemical mixture known only to the dwarves. It was an essential part of the process as it set the transformation of the metal, it gave it permanence. If it wasn't done, and if you let the metal cool too much, the damn thing would actually start to melt in stark opposition to what should have happened when metal cooled. The dwarves still didn't know why that happened, though the going theory was that its ductility in combination with the Ember was the cause. That theory was further enhanced by the fact that gold, if infused with the Ember, would just straight up melt no matter what one did. According to Affrig the dwarves of his time had once used this trait to create a fountain that used liquid gold instead of water.
Once that was done she would place it in another bath, containing a piece of True Silver and some electrodes connected to a small electric motor that Drew had made for her. This one would bond a thin layer of True Silver to it to disguise its true nature and allow for it to take enchantment, a neat little work around that Drew had suggested and she had beaten herself up over not thinking of herself. Affrig had felt much the same.
It had the added benefit of hiding its distinct red coloring so that the Goblins wouldn't catch wind of the stuff being in circulation again. She liked living thank you very much. And she rather liked the thought of her family living as well. No doubt the foul little creatures would go for them once this stuff becomes more widely known.
The thought of her family made her smile. Her brother would be coming to Hogwarts come her seventh year. It would be interesting to see what he made of the place, and where he would be placed. Once he was sorted she planned on starting to teach him the craft. She'd wanted to start earlier but Drew had cautioned against it, pointing out that if he was to come here he would have to go under a certain mind-reading hat, a hat that very likely shared things with the sitting headmaster. And the headmaster, while able to keep his mouth shut, did have a tendency of wanting to see the good qualities in people, even when those qualities were nonexistent. Drew said he wouldn't be surprised if the man tried to use the knowledge in an attempt to mend fences between the Dwarves and the Goblins. And that would be disastrous for the Dwarves.
A sobering thought.
She had tried to teach him how to shield his mind, but he'd been resistant to the whole endeavor. Her sister had been more willing to humor her. But the little scamp pretty much did whatever Lys asked of her so that hadn't been too surprising. Not that there had been much progress there anyway, her sister was just too young for it as yet, her brother too, she had to admit.
She had started to teach her mother over the winter break. Most of it revolved around how to reach for the Ember and some rudimentary smithing techniques that even her father was making an effort to learn, despite not having the Ember. Mostly as a way to share something more with his wife than any real desire to learn. Not that Lys felt any need to complain, it suited her just fine. She'd given a copy of the Wandless Magic primer to him hoping he would find it useful. Maybe in time, he could become proficient enough in it to add some wizard-style enchantments to what her mother might create.
That would be just wonderful.
Feeling satisfied that the plate was cool enough she grabbed a set of tongs and fished the piece out of the barrel before dunking it in a barrel of regular water to wash off the alchemical solution before giving it a once over. Satisfied that it was up to her standards she placed it in the electroplating container to cook for a while. After that it would go up on the shelf which already contained five other plates of the same design.
The product of two days of work.
She sighed.
She loved this new ability of her, she really did. She just wished it was a bit faster.
That would come in time, according to her teachers. Time and a lot of practice.
She hadn't liked the smile on Alfrigg's face when he had tried to reassure her.
She hadn't felt reassured.
Not even a little.
But whatever it was she would deal with it. There wasn't anything that those ancient dwarves could throw at her that she couldn't overcome. There was nothing she could not achieve so long as she did not give up. She would achieve her ambition, through hard work and unwavering determination.
This she swore to herself.