by Melody Rose
After what felt like an eternity, Phae led me to the mouth of a well-lit cave. Instantly I felt the breath return to my lungs as we stepped inside, and the death drop to the rocky ocean below was out of my purview. We walked a little further, deeper into the mountainside, until we reached a forge beyond my wildest dreams.
I thought the one we renovated at the Academy was beautiful, but this was an antique work of art. It combined the old techniques of blacksmithing, like coal fires and hand sharpening stations with the modern amenities like power hammers and conveyor belts. A machine whirred above our heads as tools traveled around the forge. Suddenly it stopped, and the tools swung precariously, but not a single one fell from its perch. Machines moved on their own, the symphony of pounding and metal on metal ringing in my ears. Magic filled the room as multiple creations were being made at one time.
The conductor of this whole operation stood several yards away from Phae and me at the back of the workshop. The first thing I noticed about the figure was that he was huge. He stood at least seven feet tall, with bulging muscles that seemed unnatural even for a supernatural being. His skin was a burnt orange color, and he was bald. Sweat trickled down his shirtless back down into the belted jeans he wore.
“Arges,” Phae announced. She had to raise her voice over the continuing machinery.
The minute the goddess said his name, all of the action in the forge ceased. There was a steady hum from the lights, but other than that, the once-bustling smithy fell into a tense silence.
“She’s here,” Phae proclaimed as she took a step back so that I could be front and center when Arges turned around.
A sudden level of discomfort came over me. I didn’t like having so much attention on me, even when it was only in front of one person. I clenched my fists around the strap of my bag and waited for the monster to turn around.
“Cheyenne Paulos,” the cyclops said. His voice was crisp and clear, more sophisticated than I would have thought from an ancient creature, especially one that large. “Daughter of Hephaestus, god of the blacksmiths, a blacksmith herself. When I heard of your existence, I knew I had to meet you.”
“Thank you?” I said, my voice turning the phrase into a question. I cleared my throat to begin again. “I’ve been anxious to meet a great smith such as yourself too.”
A light chuckle came from the cyclops, making his massive shoulders shake. “Flattery will get you nowhere with me, daughter of Hephaestus. You will be judged on the quality of your work.”
Just then, Arges finally turned around to face me. I thought I was prepared for the sight of this well-known monster, but I wasn’t. I swallowed a gasp, but I wasn’t sure I could get my face to comply. Sure enough, as expected, the cyclops had only one eyeball placed right above his nose, where the space between two eyebrows might have been on a human. It was large, without eyelashes, and burned a severe blue, nearly matching my own turquoise eyes.
“Are you ready to get started?” Arges asked me, raising his single eyebrow as a smirk curled at the corner of his lips.
I knew right away that he was challenging me. I could see that despite my reputation, and what he had said just seconds ago, he didn’t think I could do it. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in a lot of things, but the one thing I prided myself on was my skills as a blacksmith. No matter who this ancient creature was, I was determined to prove myself as a master smith.
“Yeah,” I answered as I straightened my shoulder and raised my chin. “I’m ready.”
16
“Excellent,” Arges said as he clapped his hands together. They were the size of baseball gloves, so they made quite the echo when he smacked his palms together. I flinched at the sound but did my best to keep my composure.
“You have six hours until you fight Phae,” Arges informed me. “Use that time to make what you need for the battle.”
Then the cyclops walked past me unceremoniously and headed for the exit of the smithy. I blinked, stunned for a second, thinking I had missed something.
“Hang on a minute,” I said as I whirled around to face my new teacher.
He and Phae paused, both of them turning over their shoulders simultaneously. The cyclops blinked at me innocently. “Yes, Cheyenne?”
“That’s it?” I wondered. “You’re just going to throw me a task like this without any instruction or guidance?”
“That is one way of looking at it,” Arges said calmly. He folded his hands over one another, and his expression changed to one of patience, like a parent trying to teach a child a lesson. “The only instruction is to make what you need. It must be new and created within this smithy in the next six hours. You will meet us on the training grounds, and we will see what you can do.”
With that proclamation, the cyclops and his assistant walked out of the cave, leaving me completely alone in the smithy.
I looked around the room, my mind completely blank. My eyes wandered around, searching the cave ceiling for an answer or solution. I didn’t know why, but I expected some kind of introduction or mini-lesson. But he basically threw me into the fire without any rhyme or reason. Normally I liked free-range, being able to create whatever I wanted, but I really wanted to impress the cyclops. How was I supposed to do that when I didn’t know what kind of fight I was getting into? Or what he really wanted?
I dropped my bag of supplies down on the ground. The tools clattered about noisily, accompanying my sigh of dismay. For the first time in my life, I didn’t even know where to start.
Luckily, my eyes drifted over to the blazing fire in the stone fireplace, and I remembered the secret I had around my neck. Quickly, I scrambled for the necklace and popped it open. Without wasting a second, Erich came out and stretched into his ghostly form.
“Took you long enough!” he complained as he bent his neck from side to side. “It was getting cramped in there.”
“Calm down,” I said, exasperated.
“Hey,” Erich said admirably as he took in our surroundings. He put his hands on his hips and twirled in a slow circle. “Nice digs. Is this where you’re going to be working?”
“Yeah, at least for the next six hours,” I said with a growl at the back of my throat.
“What’s wrong?” Erich asked, instantly picking up on my bad mood. “I figured a smithy like this would be heaven for you.”
“I just met Arges, and he told me that I had six hours to make what I needed to fight Phae tonight,” I told my half-brother. “But I don’t know what that means!”
“I think it means exactly what he said,” Erich said plainly. “Just make whatever you would want for a fight. What’s so hard about that?”
“I don’t know what to make,” I complained. “What is he looking for? A spear? A sword? Some obscure weapon that’s super complicated? A simple Bowie knife? Like, I don’t even know where to go with this.”
“I think you're overthinking it,” Erich told me with a blank expression. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the workbench. “He gave you little instruction for a reason.”
“Care to share the reason?” I asked.
“I don’t know what it is!” Erich exclaimed. “That sounds like something you’re supposed to figure out.”
I groaned and rolled my eyes, putting my hands on my hips. “Okay, if I’m supposed to fight Phae, presumably, she’s going to bring that copper staff she got from her dad.”
“Why do you assume that?” Erich questioned.
“It’s her most prized possession,” I reasoned as I reached up and tapped my chin with my pointer finger. “She’s had it for basically a million years and is well trained with it.”
“So, what would be a good counter weapon to that pokey staff?” Erich asked, voicing the quintessential question.
I huffed out a heavy breath of air, and my eyes wandered to the rack of steel that covered the far wall of the smithy. I bit the inside of my cheek as I scoured the different types of metals. There were familiar types of steel but also softer metals l
ike copper and gold that I normally would never touch. But seeing the copper gave me an idea.
I reached out and picked up a pipe in my hand. It was light, and I knew from my studies that copper was an easily malleable metal. That was the main reason I didn’t use it to make weapons because it didn’t hold up well when struck hard enough.
“I need something hard enough to break her staff,” I whispered the words aloud.
“And that would be?” Erich prompted.
I held the copper pipe in my hand and ventured over to the anvil in the center of the room, like a museum piece. Erich watched with a skeptical expression as I picked up the hammer that had been pounding against a now cool piece of steel only a minute ago. I hesitated before wrapping my fingers around the handle, thinking the tool might spring up and start working on its own again. But the inanimate object stayed still as I picked it up and held it over my head. The pipe was in position, and with one solid stroke, I slammed the hammer down on the copper.
There was a sharp twang that pierced the air, a signal of the copper breaking. When I looked down, I saw the once circular pipe now flattened to a pancake where I had smacked it. I felt a smile crawl on my face.
“Hey Erich,” I said, even though I continued to look at the damaged copper.
“What?” the ghost said hesitantly.
“I’m going to need your help with this one,” I said, a confident laugh tickling at the back of my throat.
My half-brother and I spent the next six hours creating a maul destined to smash right through Phae’s copper staff. The head of a maul was like a hammer, but it was thicker and flat on both sides. That required a lot of steel to forge together. It was difficult to manipulate that much steel at once. Where I needed my ghostly brother’s help was with the fire.
“No way!” he protested the minute I asked him for the favor. “I’m not going to do that.”
“Come on, Erich,” I begged. “The coal fire isn’t going to get hot enough to heat up this much metal. I need as much time as I can to carve out the shape of the metal, and the Eternal Flame is the hottest element I know of.”
“You’re asking me to be a flame for the next six hours,” Erich laid out.
“Essentially, yeah,” I agree, not understanding what the big deal was.
“It’s really uncomfortable, you know,” Erich informed me. “And I wanted to watch you work.”
“As flattering as that is,” I said, calling out his bluff, “you’ll be much more useful as a flame rather than an observer.”
“Fine then,” Erich said as he crossed his arms, an ultimatum coming to mind. “I don’t want to go back into the locket while we’re in Italy.”
“What? No!” I said, reacting instinctively. “I don’t know if Arges will want a ghost wandering his villa.”
“If you put me back in there, then I’m not going to help you,” Erich restated defiantly.
I rolled my lips over my teeth and sucked on them. As much as I didn’t want Erich running around the Italian countryside freely, I needed the Eternal Flame, especially on such a short deadline.
“Fine,” I relented with a grumble. “You don’t have to go back into the locket until we go back to campus.”
Erich released a triumphant cry into the air, complete with a jump and a fist pump. “This is going to be so great!”
“Yeah, yeah, now flame on brother boy,” I said as I ushered Erich to the fireplace.
“Flame on?” Erich asked skeptically with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s a modern reference,” I explained, “you wouldn’t understand.”
Before I knew it, Erich transformed into the Eternal Flame and zipped into the fireplace. I extinguished the other regular fire that had been blazing when I first entered the forge. Soon, the Eternal Flame reignited the coals and burst upward. It adopted the perfect greenish color I needed for the ideal temperature to melt metal.
“Let’s do this,” I said to both Erich and me, as I threw a chunk of steel into the fire.
We quickly fell into a rhythm. My muscles settled into their familiar pattern of pounding and shaping metal. The maul appeared to be nothing more than a square block of steel on the end of a wooden handle. However, there was much more to the weapon. The trickiest part of the whole weapon was the balance of the handle versus the steelhead. While the piece would be top heavy, it still needed to feel natural in the wielder’s hand. It had to have enough weight to smack into the other weapons but be light enough to pick up and maneuver with ease.
The final trick was the shape of the head. While a small square would have worked fine, I wanted to show off my technical skills and, as such, decided to craft the two ends into octagon shapes. It was a challenge to get each side even and straight, and while I could use the grinder for the main part of that, I wanted to make sure I did everything I could with my own two hands before I resorted to the machines.
After I quenched the metal head in oil, I moved on to the handle. While I considered woodworking a necessary evil when it came to making weapons, I took my time with this particular piece. It couldn’t be a simple straight handle. I needed to work some curve into it for maximum balance and maneuverability. I carved out two places for my hands, a two-handed grip near the end of the weapon, so I could hold it like a baseball bat, and another indent near the top so I could leverage it like an ax.
The wood wasn’t anything special, just a plain pine I found on Arges’s rack of materials. It was one of the few pieces big enough for what I needed. Right as we hit the thirty-minute mark, I began to assemble the weapon together. They slipped into place like a glove, and I left them to set, clamps pressed around the connecting parts so that they held together while everything dried.
Erich evolved out of the fireplace at this point and became his humanoid shape. He also returned to his regular blue color, which I found instantly calming rather than the sickly green needed for forging.
I leaned back and crossed my arms confidently. “Now, that’s a beautiful weapon.”
“It looks like a large hammer,” Erich said with a shrug.
I reached out and pushed him playfully. “It’s called a maul, you dolt.”
“I know what it is,” Erich protested as he rubbed his shoulder where I had pushed him. “I took blacksmithing too, you know.”
“Were you ever into blacksmithing?” I asked curiously. “You know, when you were alive?”
“Not really,” Erich admitted, his voice dropping an octave. The disappointment was clear, and I almost felt guilty for asking the question, but this was my half-brother. Not everyone had the chance to get to know their older and deceased family members. I wanted to know more about him, and maybe this was the chance to do so.
“Much to Dad’s dismay, of course,” Erich said with a half-hearted chuckle, but there was nothing amusing about his statement. “I just wanted to play with the fire I could create. I didn’t have an interest in making anything else.”
“Wait, you could conjure fire?” I said, jealousy pinging at me. “That’s cool. Even I can’t do that.”
“Yeah, but you can do plenty of other things,” Erich pointed out. “Conjuring fire was my only ability from Dad. Blacksmithing was something I could have learned sure, but I didn’t really have an affinity for creating. I much preferred destroying things.”
“I see,” I said softly, though that instinct was completely foreign to me.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you get your ass handed to you,” Erich said, changing the subject while his voice returned to its normal tone.
“Oh yeah,” I griped, “thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Before I knew it, six hours were up, and it was time for me to face off against the goddess Phaethusa. I journeyed up the stone steps from the cliffside forge, which going up was much easier than going down because the massive drop was behind me, and I didn’t have to look at it. The maul rested on my shoulder as I crossed the property, confidence increasing with every step.
I had made an excellent weapon, and I knew it. Given the limited knowledge I did have about how this fight was going to go, the only thing I could do was be confident in what I had made and do my best against this goddess. I didn’t really expect to win this fight. It was against a supernatural being, and I wasn’t a big fighter, to begin with. But if my weapon could hold up, then I could be proud of that.
Erich followed behind me, gasping in awe at every little thing that we passed. He pointed out the marble statues, the intricate fountains, as well as the stone pathways. I nodded along, placating his enthusiasm, but I tried to stay focused as I walked.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do, but I continued to walk the grounds of Arges’s villa until I saw the cyclops and his assistant standing by some trees conversing with one another.
“Is that them?” Erich whispered over my shoulder.
“That’s them,” I confirmed with a stiff nod. I sucked in a sharp breath and picked up the pace.
I found them standing on the edge of a square plot of dirt. It was quite a contrast from the lush green grass everywhere else on the land. In the square was a white circle spray painted like the lines on a baseball diamond. I instantly recognized it as a sparring ring like the ones we used at the Academy. There was a brief reprieve from the worry as I thought I might actually go into a fight I knew something about.
Arges eyed me up and down when Erich and I approached. “Hello, Cheyenne. Who is your friend?”
“Uh,” I gulped, not quite sure how to introduce the ghost. “This is--”
“Erichtonius, son of Hephaestus,” Erich said with a nod of respect to the cyclops. “I have been sent by our father to help my half-sister in her quest.”
“Quest?” Arges said at the same time that I said, “Erichtonius?”
“What?” Erich said sharply to me. “I was named after the king of Athens.”
“Who was also a son of Hephaestus,” I pointed out, still blinking incredulously at the ghost.
“What can I say?” Erich shrugged. “My mother did her research.”