"Hold!" Ugyok screams. "Hold your chains, Lekudr! Do not throw yet!"

"He's dying! Have you gone mad? Are you blind? Let us save him!"

Zathar is burning as he works. Flames wreath every inch of him, scorching his leathers black. They are salamander skin, should be strong enough to resist the heat of even the fiercest magma. Yet they are as paper to the flames of runeforging.

Any ordinary dwarf would be dead from this heat, his skin melted, flesh scorched and white bones blackening. Zathar seems immune to it. Through the flames, his eyes glint madly. His fingers move with precision and incredible speed. He is far from dead—Ugyok has never seen a dwarf more alive.

"Honored runeknight?" another of the dwarves asks nervously. "Not yet?"

"Not yet. Hold. He's still working."

Zathar continues to twist, place, and ignite. Dark and bright power burns in alternation. What is he writing? Ugyok cannot see past the fire, and besides must keep his eyes closed for most of the time, for the flashes of almergris have lost none of their danger for being mixed with incandesite. But whatever the poem is, it must be a masterpiece. The power emanating from the metal is too great for its quality to be any less.

This is why Ugyok joined the Runic League! Why he helped establish it in the first place—to bear witness to, and be part of, a new birth for dwarfkind! Until now they have been a race on the retreat, a people whose time was ending. The humans and trolls were growing too numerous, replacing them first in the mountains and now in the caves also.

Guildmaster Oludek used to say, in his darker moments, when the gold was drying up, that before long the great kingdoms would fall apart. That the power of runes was no longer enough. But watching Zathar, Ugyok knows this not to be the case. There can be no power greater than that of runes—or else how could Zathar be able to stand the kind of heat that would kill even a salamander?

The Second Runeforger reaches the tip of his glaive. Ugyok shuts his eyes for the final flash. When he opens them, he sees that Zathar's fingers have stopped still, become motionless. Zathar opens his mouth and cries out—his right hand flies to his chest. He gropes for something there, something tucked beneath his leather apron.

"Now!" Ugyok screams, and he and the nine others let loose their nets of chains and buckets of freezing water.

I awaken on the floor. My head is leaned at an awkward angle against the anvil, making everything oddly tilted. Ten or so dwarves are staring at me, clamoring, shouting. I don't recognize any of them—my mind remains filled with spinning runes.

"Zathar!"

"Guildmaster!"

"Runeforger!"

"Guildmaster!"

They are shouting in my face, yet their voices sound distant. All my senses are blurred by the myriad pains coursing through me. My bones feel like they're hot steel, my flesh like boiled pork. My skin is stinging, and it seems as if my hands have gone through a storm of razor-blades. I glance at them. They're scarred like gauntlets that have been through ten too many battles.

"Zathar!"

The dwarf in the middle, whose face is even worse scarred than my hands, screams loud enough to finally shake my stupor away. I grimace, push myself up to a sitting position.

"Ugyok... Thank you. I'm still alive."

"We thought not, for a few minutes."

I look at my hands again. Blood is leaking from them.

"Get some bandages!" Ugyok orders someone, and a few seconds later my hands are being wrapped tightly with both fabric and more chains.

"Thank you again," I manage to say.

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"You're welcome."

"Must have been a spectacle."

"It was glorious," one of the younger dwarves says—Lekudr, I remember. "A true honor to witness."

"That's good. But I'll reserve judgment until I see what I've wrought for myself." I laugh softly, shake my head. "Ah, what a fight. What a test—and I came out worse."

My dwarves look confused.

"Never mind," I tell them. "I'm still addled. But I should get this over with. Help me up, Ugyok, would you?"

He grasps my forearms and pulls me to my feet. I notice that my salamander skin gloves are tattered and blackened. Through the rents, I can see that my own skin is rippled red and white.

Ugyok lets go of my arms. He's staring over my shoulder. I turn quickly to see my craft.

It does not glow. It hasn't gone black, either. No power is visible from it—yet it hums with potential.

I still need to join the two halves. Only then will its strength, or weakness, or evil, become apparent. Yet this is the first sign that everything's gone wrong. All the power of light was meant to be written onto the weapon's head. Whether or not it's linked to the shaft should be immaterial, more or less, but in my frenzy—or in the thing in the sphere's frenzy—the poem along the shaft has become a series of verses that bear no resemblance at all to what I planned.

Sore hands trembling, I reach out to grasp the shaft. I lift it and feel that it's heavy. It'll be awkward to wield. That's just the first failure, though. I read, and see that nearly every rune is dark. And it speaks not of dark being defeated.

My worst fears have been realized. This craft speaks of dark destroying light. It is akin to the sword Benkal created. My hands, warm until now, turn cold despite the layer of bandages insulating them.

"Guildmaster?" Ugyok says.

I ignore him and place down the haft. In turn, I examine the head. At least here there seem to be more runes of light than dark. The proceedings of the saga, however, are again not quite how I envisioned them:

The light bursts from the cavern to turn the night-sky into day—a day where the whole sky is as bright as the sun. The beam sweeps across the black like a brush of pure white across a slate canvas, cutting the substance of darkness apart.

Back and forth it goes, wildly. The mirror-surfaces within the cave shudder with the power. Heat is not mentioned, otherwise I would have had to write of them melting.

Yet the light cannot wipe out the darkness fully. Always some corner remains, from which it spreads back over the horizon. The battle continues, and repeats, no one side ever able to claim total conquest. There is no final victory for the light as there was on my mace. The darkness is a fundamental force here, not an opponent, and thus cannot vanish.

"Leave me be for a while," I say quietly. "I will weld alone. Wait up in the guildhall. I'll come up soon—either wielding this thing or without it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I just said! I told you before we started that things might go wrong. Well, they have. How wrong remains to be seen."

My dwarves look at each other. Their worry is obvious. I attempt a smile.

"But we'll see. It's possible that things have gone so wrong that they have circled back around, and become right again. We'll see. Once I weld, we'll see."

"Very well, guildmaster," says Ugyok. "We'll be waiting. Should I call in the rest of the guild also?"

I consider his question for what feels like a long while. "Yes," I eventually say. "Call them to await me. Victory or defeat, you are my guild. We win or lose together, Runic League."

"Then I shall call on them, guildmaster."

"Thank you."

He hesitates for a second, then says, "Goodbye for now. I look forward to seeing your weapon's power—whatever manner of power it might be."

They bow and exit, filing out through the door and leaving me standing before the forge, draped in thin chains that still gleam with water-drops. I pull them from me, cursing under my breath.

How can I have failed so badly, been defeated so utterly? Has the sphere grown in strength just when I thought I was beginning to master it? I thought I'd struck a balance between light and dark. And I had, with my previous crafts. Why not this one, then? Because of the true metal?

The purer the true metal, the more life it has. Does that then lend further life to the craft and the runes? Is this what's affecting my powers?

And why did my amulet not save me? I pull it out for the first time in what feels like years, examine it closely. For a piece made when I was so unskilled, the runes are remarkable. I was fully in a trance when I carved them.

I push away some distracting further thoughts as I tuck the gem back under my tattered apron. I must weld. I can't keep my guild taut with tension.

After pulling the healing chains from my hands—I can stand the raw pain for a little while, must stand it—I mix quizik with incandesite and brush lines of the sticky grains along the top, unruned section of the haft. The lines spiral parallel to one another. Once I'm satisfied that the pattern has no flaws, I push down the hollow base-section of the weapon's head, turning gently as I do so. The reagent crunches gently. Once the head is fully on, I turn on the furnace and hold it in.

My mouth goes dry with fearful anticipation. My hands ache both from the cuts and from the strain of keeping the weapon exactly steady. Through the curling smoke, the head of the weapon begins to glow slightly red, then yellow. The reagent will catch any moment now.

I feel it coming and shut my eyes. Power cries out. For a moment I can see, even through my eyelids, the shape of the weapon. It's as if made of pure white light. But in the next moment, everything is darker than dark, and it's as if I've got my echo-eyes on in a silent cavern. There is nothing. Nothing but my thoughts; I cannot even feel my own body.

That feeling soon fades also. The runic power calms—does not abate, its intensity stays the same—but it has become a constant intensity.

I withdraw the glaive and back away from the furnace. I stand my heavy weapon upright and slightly at an angle so that the head is in line with my eyes, which are still closed.

Then I dare to open them.

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