Adrian looked up from his work, the intense heat was drawing beads of sweat from every pore of his body, but his spell of concentration was so great and overpowering that it would take a physical blow to stop him working at this point. Adrian allowed himself a five minutes break, and ladled himself a cup of ice-cold water from the trough set into the side of the Forge. This was where the horses drank, the iron was cooled, and numerous other of the Forge’s tasks drew their water, but Adrian didn’t mind. He liked horses, enjoyed their smell, their warmth, and their quiet company on the cold nights. Adrian didn’t mind the taste of iron either. He reckoned that working as closely with iron as he did, he was probably iron to some extent anyway.Prologue
Dawn, All over the world
As Adrian sipped from his rough-hewn wooden mug, his type not having the luxury of clay or glass, he began to contemplate his actions so far. Forty nine of the gems were complete, each crafted to the specifications that his vision had shown him, scrimshawed from amber before being immersed in iron, then silver. The gems were unusual in appearance
. A pattern of seven seemed present throughout his intrincate creations, which glowed with a certain iridescence that allowed a different colour of the unusual iron/silver alloy he had created to shine through whenever you saw them. The most unusual aspect of the gems could be said to be the inscriptions. Adrian prided himself on his abilities with the etching knife or the scrimshander, but these were something else. None of the tiny, intricate, faintly serpentine runes inscribed over the facets of each gem made any sense to Adrian, he had only moved his blade in the lines he saw behind his eyes when he blinked.Adrian sat down again at his tray. It was funny, now he looked at the gems, lying on the tray, they didn’t look like made things, not anything produced by human hand. He could see this was stupid, as he had crafted the things himself, over painstaking weeks, but somehow, they seemed to be creations of something unknown, from outside himself, which he had only assembled. The same could be said of the single line of poetry that he had thought up. There was no context to the line, it was simply a scrap of genius that had fallen into his head one morning:
"And the Seven rule their Seven,
whose lives are as their own,
The One may rule them, life to life,
but never claim their throne"
The gems looked, well, too perfect to be the product of messy human hands. Adrian thought that he had seen something of their class of appearance once before. These gems bore a striking resemblance to the products of Order.
Adrian was not a son of the Forge, but had lived in the Hall all of his life, and he knew the old tales of the battles between Order and Chaos as well as he knew the heat-scars and calluses on his hands. The Forge, the stable and the surrounding hall, were undoubtedly the products of Chaos. The Forge was a place where iron was cast, a place where it was worn out, and a place where it was put in to be re-cast. The forge was a shrine dedicated to the Birth, Death and Re-Birth of iron. The stables, and the hall were self-replacing in the same way. Adrian knew what it meant to be a product of Chaos, constantly changing, but in a strange way staying the same, being able to instantly adapt to change, but being bored with static. Adrian also knew what it was to be a product of Order, to be a controlled, fitting in part, to let yourself be turned into a function, to know that your most valued trait was what you could do, not who you were. There was great strength in order, but it was strength like a glass sword. Immensely strong, with a blade that could pass through the strongest armour, but after its initial slice, any change to the circumstance would shatter it instantly. Order was like this, strong but brittle. Adrian knew that to survive, a world needed to have both, the malleability of chaos, but with the strength of order. To Adrian’s eyes, what he had created pushed the balance towards Order. Adrian knew he had to do something about it.
Adrian rose to his feet, and picked up one of the gems, studying it carefully, as a cat
could study a mouse-hole. He realised that it was a combination of all the factors which made this a gem of order, the facets, both identical and different, the Mithril alloy, both coating and becoming the surface of the gem, and the runic inscriptions, at first glance just patterns on the facets of the gems, at closer inspection anathema to all followers of Chaos and Entropy. The gem was too perfect for any possible renewal, a change in its structure from Order to Chaos or even Balance. Adrian lifted his sharpest knife from his toolbelt, if the gems could not be converted, they could at least be destroyed, before what he had unwittingly created was unleashed.A sharp note sounded in Adrian’s ears, a note rising in pitch as the gem began to vibrate and warm in his hand. The note reached the point of pain in terms of pitch and volume, just as the gem in his hand reached the point of burning heat. Around the forge, the horses were whinnying in fear and pain, as all the gems began to resonate, setting up lethal vibrations as far away as the Goblets in the Banqueting rooms. Adrian fell to the floor, consciousness fading fast. The last thing he
saw was a golden line erupting from within each gem, drowning his eyes as the sound of the gems drowned his ears.When Adrian woke, the Forge was dark, the fire in the pit having died long ago. He raised his hands to his still-throbbing, still-deaf ears, they came away wet with a trickle of blood. Adrian staggered to his feet, his head pulsing and dragged a torch from his box under the Workshop table, lighting it and placing it in the wall bracket. The light from the brand revealed the Forge, and cast flickering patterns of light and dark over everything. Adrian was not surprised when he noticed that the gems had gone. He had finished the creation of a magic item and it had gone beyond his power. What effect his folly would have was now beyond his control. Not quite. Order’s main weakness was its love of patterns. Things had to be put into alignment to gain their power. Even the gems he himself had crafted were an example of this, seven
groups of seven, squaring to forty nine gems, patterns could be disrupted, damaged, shattered. Although Adrian himself could not destroy the pattern, the gems being out of his hands, he could use the skills Order had conned from him for Chaos.Adrian picked up the sharpened knife and located a discarded nugget of amber, the blood on his hands smearing slightly across the surface. His final gem would be his masterpiece.
click the gem to proceed
