Chapter 4: Chapter 3: Forge

The crack was much deeper than Caleb had expected. The knowledge that a dragon waited upon backtracking to the open air wasn’t the balm against his claustrophobia he’d hoped it would be. As he’d initially feared, the crack narrowed, but after a stretch where he had to travel sideways to get through, it widened up once more. To traverse this part, he’d needed to take off his rucksack, throwing the unlit torches in it, then fumbled his way along, scraping his whole body along the unseen walls. Caleb was almost completely blind in the dark, only following the faint glow that came from his new iron friend’s mouth.

“I killed a dragon,” he whispered to himself as his mind caught up with current events. “Two!”

It had occurred just after dawn, which meant he’d have to wait nearly twenty-four hours before he had his chance at initialization. Had things gone to plan—and Caleb not just slain two of the dragons his village was likely to have hunted down this season—Caleb would have slain them with the other eighteen-year-olds of his village, and then they would have had a vigil until sunrise. Initializations—barring those of legend that occurred mid-battle—happened with the sun’s first light.

While they were all fairly certain you didn’t need to be directly in the sunlight for the system to see you, like with many far weirder and more disgusting things, no one was willing to skip the step and risk missing out on becoming integrated into the system, being granted the ability to internalize the magic of the world and the guidance of the system in its uses.

“And I’m travelling deep, deep, underground,” he said, after his thoughts went to the vigil. “That’s probably not important, right?”

The iron salamander looked back at Caleb, its red internal glow visible through the gaps in its teeth.

“Ignore me,” Caleb said, and they continued down.

What felt like hours later, the crack began to widen, and Caleb’s guide picked up its pace. Suddenly the walls ended, and Caleb was left in an open area with nothing to use as a guide save for the rapidly retreating red glow.

“Wait!” he shouted, and the red glow stopped, returning to him.

“I can’t see,” Caleb said. “And you… can’t understand me.”

He went through his bag, looking for his flint and tinder.

“Impietor take me,” Caleb cursed, not finding it.

Then he noticed the glow that was standing very close, watching him search his bag.

“Can you light this?”

Nothing happened.

Caleb opened his mouth wide, displaying what he wanted, and then saw the red glow grow as the salamander copied him. Slowly, as to not startle it, Caleb pushed the torch into its mouth.

The mouth immediately snapped shut with the crack of shattered wood. It chewed for a moment, and then spit it out with a disgusted gagging sound. The splinters burned faintly on the ground, illuminating a small area. He shoved another torch at it, but was too slow and the splinters went out by the force of his thrust.

“No!” Caleb shouted. Then an idea struck.

He held a torch up to his mouth, took a deep breath, and breathed on it. When the red glow angled slightly, he knew the salamander had tilted its head questioningly.

Caleb repeated the gesture, only this time he made the gross phlegmy noises of the ice dragon.

The red glow straightened and rose as it understood. It turned to the discarded torch and, after a moment of effort, spat out a small molten glob of steel. The torch went up in an instant, revealing the cavern all around, and all the giant bats above them.

Startled by the sudden light, black shadows filled the air as the flying cat-sized monsters swarmed. The cacophony of a thousand wings filled the air, echoes only amplifying them all in the cavern. Caleb was familiar enough with bats to know that they weren’t supposed to have talons or be this large, and he shielded his face with one arm as he put the torch in his hand into the flame on the ground. His thick winter gear protected his arm well enough, but he received a few scratches on his face as he retreated to the opening he’d just left. With his free hand he dipped a new torch into the lit one on the ground and began to use it to repel the attackers.

The bats completely ignored the salamander after the first two attempted to rake its iron skin and failed with screeches of pain. Revealed by the light of the torch, the salamander happily snapped at the bats, biting any that got close to it out of the air. Its attempts to leap and snatch higher ones were met with failure as it failed to lift its dense bulk.

Caleb swung his torch, striking two more bats out of the air with his attacks, until he reached the relative safety of the crack.

“I’m sorry, crack!” Caleb said, taking back all the negative things he’d thought about it.

Once nestled back in the crack’s cozy-scratchy embrace, he pulled his hammer out with his other hand and defended the opening as the air was filled with the flapping of wings and shrieking of bats. They came at him for a while longer, until he’d created a rather large pile of their dead in front of his opening. By then, his torch had long since gone out from the attacks and he was fighting by the light of the torch on the ground.

Eventually the bats gave up, some few snatching the corpses of their fallen comrades before they escaped out into the darkness.

Caleb collapsed again, exhausted from the day’s events.

“I hate caves,” Caleb said to his friend, who was busy eating some of the fallen bats.

“How do they taste?” he asked. “Actually, don’t answer that, you eat rocks.”

After eating a few more bat creatures, the salamander got up, sniffed the air, and ran into the darkness once more.

“Not again!” Caleb called after it, climbing to his feet and lighting a new torch to follow.

They didn’t travel far, however, before the creature stopped, having found an old rusted pickaxe on the ground, which it immediately began to chew on.

It’s not a cave, Caleb realized. It’s a mine.

His light lit up the remnants of a mine. The chamber they were in was large and natural, but he saw two entryways, supported by timbers on either side. Better yet, this place looked to have been a bunkhouse of sorts. Bunk beds lined the closest wall, and nearby sat a cast-iron woodstove, with a pile of wood waiting beside it. Further in he found something that surpassed everything else.

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A forge.

Along the far wall were an anvil, a furnace, a bin full of coal, and a variety of hammers and tongs all hanging neatly on a rack.

He approached the anvil with reverence. It was old, weathered and pitted, but when he tapped it with his hammer, a crisp ring filled the cavern, proving that despite its appearance it was well-maintained.

His joy at the discovery was ended when the salamander finished with its pickaxe and went looking for more snacks.

“No!” Caleb shouted as it moved to the rack of tools.

The creature looked at him inquisitively.

“Don’t eat those,” he said sternly.

The salamander sagged in disappointment, understanding Caleb’s meaning.

“How smart are you?” he muttered to himself. “Here,” he said, moving to a barrel of picks and shovels.

He kicked the barrel.

“You can have all of these,” he said. “I’ll put anything you can eat over here.”

While he knew the creature didn’t track everything he said, Caleb knew it understood enough.

At the word “eat,” it perked up and moved over to the barrel. It knocked it over with a shove, and began to feast on the heads of the implements.

Caleb watched, finally able to observe the creature up close with a light.

The skin of the creature was rough and lumpy, like the raw bog iron they sometimes purchased from the valley dwellers. But unlike the bog iron, it had the black coloring of forged yet unrefined steel, not the orange rust typical to the raw chunks of iron.

“Bog,” Caleb said.

The creature straightened at that.

“You like that?”

A questioning tilted head.

“Bog. A name? I can’t keep calling you ‘iron salamander,’” Caleb said.

The creature—Bog—seemed unconcerned and went back to eating its snack.

Leaving Bog to his work, Caleb explored the cavern in more detail. The chamber had two openings, both leading out into rough-hewn mine caverns. Going down one, he found it nearly collapsed with only a small opening at the top. He took a few boards, furs and the mattress from one bed to pack that tight enough that he figured the bats would struggle to get through it, and then propped a few pots along the top to alert him if they did.

For the other side, there was no handy collapse, but there was a broken door. While he didn’t have the energy to fix the door, he did have enough to prop it back up over the opening and push a bunk bed in front of it. After finding the first door, he went back and discovered the remnants of another one around the opening to the caved-in section. In his search, Caleb discovered a stash of oil lamps and a supply of oil. Abandoning the torches, he lit a lamp.

Once relatively certain he’d have some warning if an attack occurred, he took off his thick winter gear and attended to his wounds. After he’d spent a few hours in the cavern with Bog, the place had begun to warm up. While the creature itself wasn’t hot to the touch—something Caleb had discovered when they bumped during their descent—its breath was scalding if it didn’t control it.

“Are you a boy or a girl?” Caleb asked, earning a tilted head.

“Well, I’m going to guess boy, because Bog would be a terrible name for a lady,” Caleb said, deciding it didn’t really matter.

His left arm and face were rather cut up, but thankfully he kept bandages and ointments in a separate pouch tied to the side of his rucksack for easy access; this meant he hadn’t lost it in his flight over. As he worked, his stomach growled, and he realized it had been a long time since he’d eaten, or even drank, anything.

His waterskin was long gone, along with his food. He turned his head to the bat carcasses, and then to Bog.

“Let’s hope your taste isn’t as bad as I fear.”

***

The bats weren’t actually bad. Caleb had heard that the further a monster got from an animal, the less palatable its meat became, as the Impietor and his minions corrupted the creations of the old gods and they became—well—corrupted. These bats, it seemed, were not too far off from their base stock—or they were some sort of animal Caleb had just never heard of. They must not have lived in this room very long, for it wasn’t as filled with guano as Caleb would have expected, with only a scant few droppings about, which he swept up and out the door.

With a full belly, Caleb felt revitalized—and really thirsty. While the meat wasn’t terrible, it was rather dry, as he’d badly misjudged the heat the wood-burning stove could achieve and had overcooked the bats.

He thought his odds were good he was in a mountain in the Great Frost Range. Each mountain there had once been an active ice volcano, serving as a path for the mana-rich ice from deep below to rise up to the surface and bring treasures from the deep with it. Ice veins ought to be plentiful, he just had to look.

“Want to go for a walk?” he asked Bog.

Bog hadn’t gotten through nearly as many of the picks as Caleb had expected, still only halfway through the first. He watched the creature chew, marveling at him. Another tooth had fallen out in his snacking and had already regrown to match the rest of the new ones. His hide too had begun to change. Where before he had been all lumpy black rock, he now had patches of smooth scales. These were still the same dull black of the rest of his body, but smoother with definite scale shapes.

The creature looked up at the words and read from Caleb’s posture that he was going to leave. He let out a whimpering whine.

Caleb gestured at Bog and then himself, and then the door.

“Come with? Walk?”

Bog seemed to understand, but then looked back at his trove of steel.

“We’ll come back,” Caleb said, sensing the hesitation.

To emphasize this, he took his ruined jacket and placed it on a table. This put Bog at ease, and he waited patiently as Caleb cleared the blockade from the door. Before leaving, however, Caleb grabbed a fur from one of the beds. While Bog and the stove had made the cavern comfortable, the tunnels wouldn’t be so hospitable.

The cave beyond was another rough-hewn cavern, with an ever-so-slight downward incline. After only a few minutes of walking by lantern light, Bog sniffed the air, and bounded ahead.

“Stop doing that!” Caleb yelled after him, running to keep him in his light.

The rock of the walls flickered in the light, and Caleb caught a glimpse of an ice vein as he ran. But he continued, now at least relieved that he wouldn’t die of dehydration if his iron friend didn’t get him killed.

Bog slowed quickly, the heavy beast seemingly not built for speed or endurance. Shortly after Caleb caught up, Bog stopped next to an innocuous section of wall and began to claw at it, pulling chips of stone with each swipe. Caleb was going to offer to help, but Bog needed none, quickly revealing a vein of faintly glowing white ore.

Which he immediately bit into.

“Stop!” Caleb said, falling to his knees and shoving him away.

Bog stopped and looked from Caleb to the ore timidly.

“You can have some, but save some for me.”

Caleb sighed, seeing he hadn’t gotten the point across. He pointed to himself, then the ore, and pretended to take a bite.

“Share!” he said.

Bog’s eyes widened, and he moved back in. He clawed at the vein, breaking off a chunk, and pushed it toward Caleb with his nose.

Caleb patted him gently on the head and Bog closed his eyes at the gesture, as if he could feel the light touch through his tough iron skin. After a moment, he opened his eyes and—satisfied he’d been a good boy—went back to digging. Caleb waited a bit, watching Bog dig out the vein of glowing ore.

He studied the creature as he worked. Bog’s eyes were large and round like those of the amphibian he was named after, but the pupils were vertical slits, like the eyes of the frost dragons they’d just faced. The eyes stood out. While his skin was made of iron, his eyes looked to be no different than any other animal’s, white and vulnerable.

But as he watched Bog work, he saw the creature furrow his brow, closing the eyes to mere horizontal lines. Fragments flew from the wall from each strike and bite, but they all bounced off his face to no effect. Once Caleb was sure Bog was consistently nudging every other chunk to a separate pile, he felt safe enough leaving his strange friend to his foraging as he went to go harvest some ice.

***

A few hours later, Caleb had a few pots full of ice and a bucket full of the new strange ore. He wasn’t sure what it was, but Bog seemed to regret agreeing to share it, the way he eyed the bucket.

“Don’t even think about it,” Caleb warned him. “I need to figure out how to get the metal from this.”

Bog cocked his head, not seeing the problem. He nudged the bucket to Caleb.

“Tomorrow,” Caleb said. “I’m exhausted.”

In his fortifying of the chamber, Caleb had left one bed undisturbed, and piled most of the fur lined bedding on it. He’d not found a good way to secure the crack they’d entered through, but felt confident the dragons on the outside wouldn’t fit through the long passage, and would serve as guards against anything else that would fit.

Caleb took off his filthy clothes and washed them as best he could before putting them near the woodstove and climbing into bed. He had no clue what time it was, but he had nothing left in him. As he lay dozing, thinking about Kelia and his family, wondering when they’d start to worry about him, an enormous weight crashed onto the foot of the bed, collapsing the frame down to the floor.

Bog seemed as startled as Caleb, looking at him with wide uncertain eyes.

Caleb restrained a shout and blew out a long sigh.

“Stay down on that end,” he said, making himself comfortable on his new, slightly inclined bed.

He quickly fell asleep, only to be woken up what felt like moments later by his world changing.

Ding!

Words filled the darkness of his vision.

Initializing…