Chương 34: Chapter 111: Love Letter From Holdna

On the day of their wedding, Holdna gave Ouroboros a feathered cape that allowed him to fly. In return, Ouroboros twisted himself into The Tower, so she would have something limitless to observe, explore, and hunt with her equally limitless gaze. Jason Salazar, Basalt Tavern C'mon, finish your food, we're on a deadline. Literally. William Oh They didn't get mobbed the instant they stepped into town, which was good.

In Will's imagination, the instant they set foot inside the town, an old crone pointed a wizened finger at him and began shrieking, then every retired Climber in the place attacked him like a rabid animal. Reality was rarely so outlandish. Nobody gave him and Jason more than a glance. Due to the massive amount of caravans using the town as a waystation, no one bothered themselves over a stranger.

Loth, though, had never even entered the city, instead breaking off to lay traps around the village to slow their pursuers and secure them an escape route. Being a kobold in the center of an all-Graneshian town would probably end badly anyway. They only had maybe a day before the army caught up with them. Will made a mental list of what he needed. Soudough, Check. Huge Reserve of deceiver ash, check, A way to concentrate it… check.

In the center of the underground smithy buried in the mountain was a large, circular depression of shiny black stone in the ground that Will had personally witnessed being filled with ashes and used to bake new relics made of Blessed steel. Ash placed in it began glowing with miasmatic power, swirling in place as though some invisible giant were stirring it, with brighter ash moving towards the center and dimmer ash lingering on the outside.

The Crafters working with it simply used a large shovel to scrape the outer edges of dull nonmagical ash as a helper poured new ash from a collection of monsters in, to create whatever blend of miasmatic ash the smith in charge wanted. Once it was done refining, they scooped up the vibrantly glowing 'good stuff' into a wooden box, labeled it with the smith's name and project, then scraped the entire thing clean, washing it out for the next crew. Simple really.

It made sense that they had stored the Deceiver ash in a place that could use it. It also made sense that the Deceiver's miasmatic ash hadn't been used at all: Deceivers were taboo in Graneshian culture. That likely extended to making anything out of them or using anything with their Abilities. So over time, nobody had wanted to use the Deceiver ash, and the urns just kind of… accumulated, taking up their own storage tunnel of the underground smithery.

Now, the last thing on my list: Will glanced down at the shortsword on his belt. It felt ungrateful to abandon his new sword… but he wanted what he wanted. The last thing on my list is a good tomahawk.

"Excuse me," Will stopped a pedestrian.

"Where can I find a good weaponsmith?" In a matter of minutes, Will and Jason walked into the shopfront of a smithy, glancing around. It smelled of a typical smithy. Smoke, oil, wood. Portraits of women were placed on all four walls, even one above the door. They had large, expressive eyes, and they were totally out of place in a smithy. The portraits were placed slightly offset from each other, so that one of the portrait's eyes were dead center, opposite each other.

It wasn't something Will would have noticed without high Acuity and a suspicious mind. Hmm. The environs themselves were a little more disorganized than the other shops in town that will had scouted with Phantom Eye. There was a fair bit of clutter here and there, the weapons presented in a haphazard manner, as if they had been placed wherever the smith found a place for them between sales, rather than being organized by type or quality. It was a far cry from the other smitheries in the city.

Each and every weapon on display was plain an unadorned… and entirely flawless. Every person in the city had recommended this shop as the place to get high quality weapons, with a price to match. The rumor was that the smith would eventually put himself out of business, because every weapon he sold would still be in the hands of his customer's grandchildren. That was a good enough endorsement for Will. The man behind the counter was reading some sort of trade magazine, smoking a pipe as Will entered.

He grunted at the sound of the bell, but didn't otherwise acknowledge Will's presence. Will scanned the shop, his gaze landing on a tomahawk hanging beneath the painting of a young woman against the east wall. Will reached up and grabbed the tomahawk, feeling as though he was being watched from every direction. The painting above him had the faintest smirk. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Hmm. Will hefted the axe and swung it a few times.

It cut smoothly through the air, moving effortlessly, like it was made for him.

"Try'n steal it, L'cut your balls off," the merchant rumbled around his pipe, his words slurring together through over-repetition.

"I'd like to buy this one," Will said, placing the tomahawk on the counter in front of him.

"Get outta here kid, I don't sell to Aspirants." The man muttered without looking up from his magazine.

"Waste of a good weapon on dead meat."

"I'll have you know that you are addressing the William Oh!" Jason said, stepping up to the counter with a thunderous expression.

"The tamer of dragons, conquerer of leviathans, wooer of armies, and-" Jason cut off when he saw Will's expression. The smith glanced up, his gaze stopping at the tomahawk before travelling up to Will's face. THWAP! The magazine flew out of the man's hand as he sat up bolt-straight, staring into Will's face.

"Like the tomahawk do you?" He asked, eyes narrowed with suspicion.

"It's not a popular choice around here."

"I've got a soft spot for them," Will replied before he paused for a moment, thinking.

"…You don't happen to have one like this that you can also use as a pipe, do you?" Will asked. He would need that if the ashes from the Tomahawk of the Serpent were to add the contract ability back onto his new weapon. It wasn't necessary, by any means, but it was nice.

"So you're the one, huh?" the shopkeeper asked, rising to his full height.

"…What?"

"Few years ago I got a burning itch to move up north to Basalt." The grizzled shopkeep said, ducking behind his display and rummaging through the cabinets behind him, punctuating his speech with curses as he began digging through the cabinet, hauling one thing after another out of the way, aiming for something buried deep in the back.

"Aha!" The smith returned with a plain wooden case.

"Then about six months ago, I started having nightmares, and they only went away when I began working on this…" The smith placed the case on the countertop.

"Show me your hand." He demanded, pointing at Will's gauntlet. Will glanced around the room.

"You worship Holdna, don't you?" Will said, noting the paintings slightly larger than average eyes. A Holdna worshipper liked to put eyes at the four cardinal directions of their home as a sign of devotion. This man had been more subtle by using paintings with people attached to those eyes, likely to avoid persecution.

"That's not a crime. Show me your hand." Actually, in this town, I think it might be a crime. Will took the gauntlet off, revealing his left hand. It was skeletal and weak, pale from being trapped in the gauntlet. The bone had finished forming, but the muscles and tendons were still sorting themselves out, so the whole thing looked like Lumesh's bony hand.

"Just like my dreams," the shopkeep chuckled before his face turned serious.

"The hand that'll usher in the end."

"You don't want this shit," he said, flinging the tomahawk on the counter aside and sliding the case forward.

"You want this shit." He opened the case and revealed… the Tomahawk of the Serpent. Wait, no, Will frowned as he studied it. There were several differences, large and small. The handle was leather-wrapped steel, for one, and the snake head at the top of the tomahawk had an actual body that wrapped around the handle, disappearing into the haft about halfway through. Those scales aren't carved into the metal, the metal actually has a scale pattern. How the Abyss…

There was a crescent moon inscribed into the blade, and a sun inscribed into the bowl of the pipe. The snake seemed to have a feathered crown that trailed down its back.

"Holdna commissioned this for you, I think." The smith said. Will reached out to the work of art, his breath suspended in his lungs. SNAP! The box slammed shut inches away from his fingertips.

"Obviously you still have to pay."

"Why, is Holdna not good for it?" Will asked. The case slid an inch backwards, the smith's expression unamused.

"Wait, wait!" Will said, holding up his hands before producing three ivory ten-pieces.

"Will this do?" Will asked.

"That'll do nicely," The smith said, his expression overwhelmed with greed.

"Timmy!" He shouted towards the back room.

"Stop polishing your knob and grab the go bags! World's about to end!" A younger man with a metal doorknob in one hand and a polishing rag in the other emerged from the back room.

"Dad, the world is not about to end!"

"Yes it is, you damn fool boy! Let's skip town and go to The Ring and live it up while we still can. You can grab that Doris girl if you want, but you'll have to convert her-" The conversation faded as Will closed the door behind him. If the display piece felt effortless, this thing felt alive, moving with the barest nudge of intent, almost like he was following it, rather than the other way around. It felt… sinuous. How did he get it so light? And is it going to break my wrist, using it?

Part of the reason normal weapons weren't steel all the way though was that steel was excellent at transferring force from the head back into a man's wrist, whereas a wooden haft absorbed some of the jolt. Will tapped the head of the tomahawk, his enhanced senses telling him the smith had buried some kind of deadening agent somewhere around the neck, where the scaled coils surrounded the haft, because none of the vibration a solid piece of steel should have had made its way down to his hand.

Best not carry this thing out in the open, Will thought, tucking it away under his coat, not willing to waste a Charge. While they were on the run, every Charge counted, and Will knew he'd be pulling the axe out of storage again soon, anyway.

"Next time we're in a town filled with worshippers of the church that's actively chasing us, maybe don't tell them who I am." Will said, glancing down at Jason while they walked.

"It just kinda bubbled out." Jason said with a guilty shrug, his gait awkward.

"Hmm." Will didn't really have anything to add to the discussion, so he let it lie. Together they headed for the southern border of the town, where Loth waited for them in the wilderness outside the town, directly above the tunnel filled with Deceiver ash.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen, did you find what you were looking for?" Loth asked from where she sat beside a perfect hole punched through the earth and the stone beneath it, hidden from the town in the distance by a stand of bushes.

"We did." Will said, showing Loth the axe.

"Ah, Quetzalcoatl," she said, turning the axe over in her hand and nodding appreciatively.

"…What?" Will asked.

"A chief toltec and aztec god identified with the wind and air and represented by a feathered serpent." Loth said.

"At least, according to my dictionaries. I personally think it is a borrowed disguise of Ouroboros, Holdna's consort. Odd to find on a tomahawk since they came from completely different cultures, but the imagery is still striking."

"She commissioned it apparently."

"Who?" Loth glanced up, frowning. Will explained his encounter with the smith, causing Loth to look at the axe with wonder.

"Perhaps this is Holdna's way of saying 'look how handsome your sire looked when he was in his feather-wearing phase. It was my favorite.'" Loth mused as she handed the weapon back.

"It has that prideful feel to it, like a young woman drawing exaggerated pictures of her boyfriend."

"No way," Will said as he lowered himself into the pit.

"If it were vengeful and angry, it would be a completely different feel," Loth said, dropping in behind him and moving out of the way so that Will could catch Jason.

"And given how many of her consort's spawn have been slaughtered…" Loth said, pulling out one of her torchlike glowbugs and holding it up high, revealing hundreds, thousands of black urns with the names of Will's deceased siblings.

"…You'd think she'd be a little more pissed." Loth said, taking in the silent testament to a thousand years of Granesh hunting his kind.