Elevation of Mana Chapter 36 Knife

Father and I looked over our handiwork, and I smiled.  We'd come to some terms for safety after our disagreement, and this was a part of it.  I needed to work here, and under his supervision, if I was going to be using magic to make fires that hot.

The area in question was just outside the village, about ten feet around in a circle with some poles holding up a little thatched roof.  Most of that had been my father's doing, my work had been focused on the ground instead.  It was barren, charred to a crisp then wiped clean and compacted.  There were also a number of stones and holes for making fires, and a small pile of both wood and charcoal sitting to the side, though the latter was of poor quality if I had to guess.

It was odd that of all things charcoal was known, but it was so easy to make you could almost do it by accident, just leaving the wood burned the right way out during a rainstorm, and bam, there you went.  It had been noticed long, long, before my birth, and while there were few uses for it, it was something one could get.

I'd also brought in some rocks under father's eyes.  There were some that would serve as good makeshift anvils, as well as a few around the main fire-pit.  That alone was another thing I'd brought in.  Reaching back through my memories I'd seen a few variants that were supposed to work better, and even if it was poor in comparison to other's works it would probably serve well.

I'd been going through those with a fine toothed comb over the past several months, pulling out what useful bits and bobs I could.  There were some that were really good, but many that also didn't help my current objectives, or were too obvious to explain without drawing lots of attention.  I could do one or two things at a time, and needed to slowly grow, at least for now.

“Look ready to you then?”  I asked my father.

“Hmm, almost, but there is one more thing you'll need, wait here.”  he left me there, coming back quickly with a small item in his hand, which he handed over.  “Don't make me regret this,' he said as he returned my copper.

It wasn't much, but it would be enough for what I wanted.

“Let's try to make a knife,” I said.

“Can't chip away on that well I think,” dad replied.

“No, but when I was playing with it before it melted I noticed it bend when you hit it, maybe we can hit it into shape.”

We worked on forging it, but cold didn't work well, and even with heat is was pretty sub-optimal.  My dad watched, but it was clear that he didn't think that this would work.  I didn't know how to forge metal, and it was hard work to try.  Soon enough the misshapen lump was there, slightly elongated and very bent up.

“I don't think this is working son,” dad said, looking at the bit of copper that nearly resembled the native form.  No matter how hard I tried it just seemed to bend weird.

“It isn't... maybe if I melt it and put it into shape then?”  I seemed to remember some shows and stuff casting copper, and that looked like it worked pretty well.

“Give it a try and we'll see how it goes,”

The first thing I needed was a mold, and I was sort of already an expert at making physical walls of force from my magic, so I just used that.  It was the easiest method, and let me do things quickly.  With a few movements I snapped together an outline of a simple knife, one that was a little straighter than most of the flint ones we used, and with a rather thin handle, but one that anyone could understand.

The point went down, and I put the copper into a sort of sphere over the end of what would be the tang, keeping a blockage between where it was melting, and where it would flow through.  Then I began the process of heating it.

No matter how much I learned, or how much I did it, magic never ceased to bring me a smile.  It wasn't like anything else, it was like pure imagination given form.  I was reaching out with little more than my mind and making the world bend to my desires.  I couldn't do anything, but I could do so much, so much I'd never been able to do in either of my lives without it, so much that would just let me act in ways that nature wouldn't.

Once the metal was liquid I opened the separation between the two constructs of force, and watched the liquid flow in.  It was brightly glowing and beautiful, flowing almost like water as it filled the shape I'd given it, and then slowly cooling.  I could try later to see if rapidly cooling it would be feasible, but for now I just watched with joy and the heat slowly bled away.

It took time, time for the object to cool, but that was fine with me, it just meant that I had plenty of time to watch.  The layers dimmed and dimmed, showing a slightly mottled surface to the metal, with odd places where bubbles had been, or still were under the outer layer.  The casting, even in a nearly perfect shape had been imperfect.  The metal was probably full of other elements, and maybe not at the right temperature, or properly handled, bu none of that mattered.  What mattered was that I'd succeeded, a major first step in advancing the world.

“That's different,” dad observed, looking at the blade, it was perhaps four inches long.

“Is it still hot?”

He put his the back of his hand near it, and frowned.  “Yes, very, water you think?”

At my nod he summoned a ball of water around the little knife, and we got to watch as it sputtered and spat steam.  This did not seem to reassure my father, who'd of course never seen anything quite like this metal.  He spent the moments rubbing his chin in thought as he hummed until the bubbles subsided.

“It was hot because I made it hot, but I think we'll need to remember that it's a rock, and gets hot without looking that way,” I said by way of reassurance.

“Yes, and make sure it doesn't get hot on its own,” he said.

“... are there rocks that do that?”  I asked.

“A few things that are  like rocks, but this isn't really a rock.  You should name it.”

Names were hard, because a lot of them just didn't quite fit in our lexicon.  The sound could be made sure, and even put in the same place sometimes, but that didn't mean they sounded right in the language.  Sometimes words just had feeling to them, and that was how it was.

“How about Cypri for this type?”  I said, remembering that copper was derived from the name of Cyprus.

“Sipry huh?” dad said, unintentionally changing the pronunciation almost instantly.  I was just going to go with it.

“And if there are others we can form like this, let's call them, Mae-atal.”  That was about as close as I could get to metal, so I was going with it.

Dad waved his water away with a smile.  “I like that, and others will too.”  He cautiously took the small knife, looking it over before handing it to me.

“Needs a wrap for a handle,” I mused.  “And it's dull, think we can sharpen it like an axe?”

“I'll get some stones of the right grit and we can try, but don't get your hopes up.  Normally to get a good edge you need to break things the right way.  For a handle I think I've got some older leather from the cold season we could wrap it in, that would work well.”

Together we continued working, there was just something about doing so with my father that brought a smile to my face.  Perhaps it was the encouragement he sometimes gave, or the light caution, I didn't know.  Hopefully one day I'd find out though, so I could treat my own children the same.