Several more weeks had passed.
Tension hung over Ironhaven like a poisonous mist before a storm. Amanda lived in a state of permanent duality, switching between her roles with cold-blooded cruelty.
In the sterile corridors of the Guild she was the capricious, venom-tongued consultant whose casual flashes of insight now made senior mages mutter under their breath and glance warily at her door. She wove tiny, exquisitely veiled questions into her “consultations”: about the properties of orichalcum, about forgotten theories of light-bending, about long-lost spells of dispersion. Every word was a shot fired into darkness, every syllable another tessera in the mosaic.
And in Torglin’s filthy, smoke-reeking shack, far from prying eyes, true blasphemy was being committed.
The first days were reconnaissance. She tested him not with gold, but with work. Simple commissions: sharpen a set of surgical scalpels to a razor’s edge for “medical research,” repair an intricate mechanical lock she herself had stolen from the archive door. The dwarf grumbled, cursed “human contraptions,” but his scarred, gnarled fingers moved with a surgeon’s grace, and his gaze, sliding across metal, saw its very soul. In those wine-clouded eyes the old fire began to rekindle, drop by drop—the fire of a master facing a challenge.
She watched in silence. No stupid questions. No unsolicited advice. Her wordless, intense attention was the highest praise he had ever received.
(Perfect…) she thought, watching him grumble while polishing a mithril inlay for the dagger’s hilt to an impossible mirror finish. (He’s coming back. Piece by piece.)
Then came the night everything had been leading to.
She arrived not at dusk, but in the dead of night, when even the alley rats fell quiet. Over her shoulder hung not a backpack, but a small yet brutally heavy canvas sack. Without ceremony she upended it onto the only clean corner of the workbench with a dull thud.
Not ore. Not shards.
Ingots. Dozens of small, cold, blindingly white bars of purified mithril. Her entire stock. Weeks of nocturnal, back-breaking labor. They lay in a gleaming heap, bathing the dusty workshop in ghostly moonlight that cast razor-sharp black shadows.
Torglin froze. The whistle that escaped his lips was more eloquent than any prayer. He reached out without touching, palm hovering a finger’s breadth above the radiant pile, feeling the strange, living warmth rising from it.
“Is this… everything?” His voice was hoarse with barely contained emotion.
“Everything,” Amanda replied. Her own voice was calm, but inside her everything knotted into ice. This metal wasn’t just a resource. It was her blood, her sweat, her stolen time. “Is it… enough?”
The question hung in the air. Torglin closed his eyes. His lips moved soundlessly; his fingers twitched as if working invisible abacuses—weighing, dividing, multiplying. He didn’t see ingots. He saw plates, rivets, articulated joints, helms.
“Full noble plate harness… articulated, with arming cap, gauntlets…” he muttered. His eyes snapped open, sharp and sober. “Three suits. No more. And only if I count every filing like a lost kingdom.”
Three suits.
Amanda’s heart plummeted for a single heartbeat. Not an army. Not a legion. Three.
But before disappointment could take root, her mind—honed sharper than any blade—raced ahead, already building a new strategy on the ruins of the old.
Three invisible assassins who can walk through any wall.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Three commanders invulnerable on the battlefield, directing troops from inside an unseen bunker.
Three ghosts sowing panic in the most impregnable fortress.
“It is enough,” her voice rang like tempered steel. “But listen to me, Torglin. Forget everything you ever knew about armor. Everything. We don’t need protection. We need disappearance.”
She paused, gathering herself for the killing blow. Her right hand still rested on the mithril. Slowly she raised her left and opened her fist.
On her palm lay another ingot—much smaller, dull, gleaming with a sickly, venomous green. It radiated cold and a faint, almost mournful sorrow—an energetic scar.
Orichalcum. A sample obtained at insane risk from the Guild’s most secret vault, under the pretext of “testing for phantom corrosion.”
She set it beside the shining mithril. The contrast was obscene: purity and corruption, light and shadow, sanctum and curse.
“I don’t want armor,” her voice dropped to a dangerous, intimate whisper that rang with reckless daring. “I want an alloy. These two fused into one.”
The air in the workshop shivered. The very laws of metallurgy seemed to recoil. Torglin’s eyes—moments ago clear and calculating— blazed with primal terror.
“You’ve lost your mind, girl!” The words tore out of him in a strangled shriek. “That’s imperial filth! And mithril!” His trembling finger stabbed toward the two metals. “They cannot be joined! It would be like mixing a sacred spring with a festering wound! Their lattices hate each other at the molecular level! This is worse than heresy, this is—”
He choked, shaking his head helplessly, yet his gaze—traitor—refused to leave the ingots. Horror warred with the damned, professional fascination of a master staring at the impossible.
“They **can** be joined,” Amanda countered. Her ruby eyes—carrying knowledge from another world—met his without a flicker of doubt. “We just need the key. The exact ratio. The temperature where their hatred turns into symbiosis. The catalyst that becomes the bridge. And then… a metal this world has never seen will be born. A metal that does not reflect light and does not absorb it. It will let light pass through.”
Silence fell, deep and crushing as a crypt.
Torglin stood petrified, a pillar of salt. Decades at the forge, lore hammered into him with his mother’s milk and the hammer’s blow—everything rose in revolt. But beneath the dogma something else stirred: the intoxicating, forbidden curiosity of a creator facing a blank canvas.
“Invisible… armor?” His whisper was reverent horror, as if pronouncing the name of a forgotten god. “But… why? To skulk like thieves?”
“To win, ” Amanda’s voice was colder than the void between stars. “Imagine. A blow that comes from nowhere. A strategy the enemy cannot see even when it stands in front of him. A general in the thick of battle, untouchable by archer or mage, conducting every maneuver. You will not forge mere armor, Torglin. You will forge myth. A legend that will outlive your cursed clan and the Empire itself.”
The old dwarf’s hands began to shake—not with age, but with the tremor of a steel spring held compressed for decades. The air grew fever-hot from the war inside him. Fear fought desire, dogma fought hunger. The soul of the master he thought long dead burned.
“It’s… impossible,” he protested weakly, already performing the final ritual refusal before surrender. Against his will his hands reached out. One huge, scarred palm covered the mithril, drinking its warmth. The other, more cautiously, brushed the orichalcum and felt the familiar, repulsive chill of the damned metal.
“It is possible,” her word fell like a verdict. She stepped forward and laid her slender, ice-cold hand atop his ruined one resting on the mithril. “And you will prove it. But first… we start small. Not armor. Not even a blade.”
She nodded toward the smallest mithril ingot and a tiny shard of orichalcum.
“A nail. Just one nail. If we can forge a nail that dissolves before your eyes, becomes transparent as running water… then we move on.”
She stepped back, breaking contact, granting him space and the terrible choice.
The two metals on the bench were more than ore. They were the fork in the road of his destiny. The chance to remain forever the mender of broken kettles in a stinking hovel. Or to leap into the abyss and become the maker of the impossible.
“I’ll return in three days,” her gaze pierced him like a spear. “Decide, Master Torglin. Remain what the world decided you are? Or…” the tiniest pause, “remember what you were born to be?”
Without waiting for an answer she turned and melted into the night, leaving the door ajar. Cold street air rushed in, making the hearth-fire dance wildly.
Torglin was left alone.
At the center of a universe shrunk to the size of a dusty workbench lay two pieces of metal. Power enough to overturn the world.
And the first, laughably small step toward it: a single nail.
Silence thickened in the workshop, turning into a living witness.
It waited.
Waited to hear, three nights hence, the ring of hammer on impossible metal—or only the soft, bitter glug from the neck of a bottle.