I waited until Bran and Elle were away from the palace and had stepped into a secluded, agreed upon alley, then I activated a portal directly in front of them. They stepped through the glowing portal and into the throne room of Stonekeep Castle. I got up out of the Throne and activated my mithril bracelet, switching out of my armor and into my more comfortable common clothes. I needed Mordon’s helm to use the thrones and portals well, but adamantine armor was extremely heavy. With the way my body was remade by the Icosahedron, my strength was very great compared to that of a regular person, but why work up a sweat?

  “Thanks for the portal, Jeron,” Bran said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said as I met them. “It’s nice not having a death sentence hanging over my head. Thanks for that.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Bran said.

  “I nearly wet myself when you all but admitted knowing who the sorcerer is,” I said.

  “Bah. You worry too much,” Bran said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he already knows it’s you.”

  “He didn’t look very surprised by anything you said,” I commented. “I wonder if he was guiding the entire conversation just to get it out in the open in a way that wouldn’t cause a panic.”

  “Of course, he was. I think he wanted to give you legitimate thanks for all you’ve done…” Bran began.

  “We’ve done,” I interjected.

  “That we’ve done,” Bran continued with a sarcastic little bow, “and now he’s done so publicly. There was just that bit at the end about making yourself known to them…”

  “Yeah, I heard that,” I said. “I’m not so sure I trust his word on that. Maybe I should think about it for a while before I go strolling into the palace.”

  “King Korban knows a turning point when he sees one, and I think he’s a decent person,” Elle said. “I think he’ll be a great ally when troubles come.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Do you have any idea of how to proceed with regards to the temple complex?”

  “Sure do,” Elle said. “We’re going to hire engineers to draw up the plans I was given by dreams, and other engineers will be hired to begin deconstruction of the Xerith’s temple. By the time we’re done tearing the old building down, we’ll have filled in the chambers below ground and built a strong foundation for God’s temple. The new materials will have begun coming in by that point, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I’ll be happy to help in any way I can,” I said.

  “Thanks. We’ll definitely need your help for a few things,” Elle said. “Not for demolition, though. I don’t think it’s a good idea to show everyone how destructive a Mordonian Sorcerer can be the moment after the death sentence is lifted.”

  “That’s too bad. I really like destroying things sometimes,” I said sarcastically.

  “Try to resist that urge, brother,” Bran said with equal sarcasm.

  “Speaking of resisting urges, you aren’t still hung up on Mira and spying on her, are you?” Elle asked.

  “No, I haven’t done that in weeks,” I said. “She’s living a life of her own, free from my interference. Besides, it made my chest hurt.”

  “Good man,” Bran said.

  Elle nodded. “I think there’s someone better suited for you out there somewhere. Be patient, Jeron. You’ll find her.”

  I chose to avoid the whole conversation about danger, secrets, and the like, so I changed the subject. “I’m going to start making a couple of shields from adamantium for us. Our regular, old, steel shields are not up to the task of protecting us from the attacks our enemies can dish out.”

  “Yeah. About time you got around to that,” Bran said.

  “Will you be working in the smithy?” Elle asked.

  “It won’t be possible,” I said. “The heat needed to forge adamantium is intense enough to burn down the house, and a coal forge isn’t nearly hot enough. Do you have any requirements in mind for the design of your shield?”

  “I’d like it to be rectangular, but slightly curved from left to right like the Reflector and our other shields. We’ll need to be able to fight in a shield wall from time to time,” Bran said. “As far as a design goes, do you think you can emboss a dove on top of a sword?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Although maybe a giant phallic symbol might be more to your taste.” I laughed at the thought of riding into battle with the sun gleaming off of that.

  “Highly inappropriate,” Bran said dryly.

  I still chuckled some. It was still funny to me, even if no one else saw the humor. “All right. Do you want the sword vertical or horizontal?”

  “Vertical, point down.”

  “What about the dove? Descending like at the temple at Seacrown, or with wings flared, or maybe at rest?”

  “I think the descending dove like Seacrown would be best,” Bran said.

  “Anything on the edges?” I asked. “The Thickbeard clan drinking song, perhaps?”

  “That would require alcohol to be eternally present,” Bran said.

  “I could make a beer mug and mount it on the edge. You know, for the sake of convenience,” I teased.

  “I think just the sword and dove will be fine. No gilding is necessary,” Bran said.

  “All right, all right, Mr. Sensibility,” I said. “You’re no fun at all.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So you’ve said a thousand times,” Bran said.

  “Will you be eating dinner with us?” Elle asked, breaking in.

  “I think I will, yeah,” I said. “It’ll take many hours, maybe all day, to make one shield, and I’ll have to do it all at one time. I may as well eat up tonight and hit it hard first thing in the morning.”

  “Good,” Elle said. “I’d like to ask Whizzbang to join us as well. He’s been quite the recluse since you gave him access to the library.”

  “Good thought,” I said. “I sometimes forget he’s here. He’s a very unusual Seeker.”

  “Because he’s studious?” Elle asked.

  “Because he doesn’t accidentally blow things to bits,” I said. “Remember Goldsprocket?”

  “Boy, do I,” Bran said. “I wouldn’t feel safe in my armor in that place.”

  “Oh, do tell,” Elle said as we began walking out of the throne room.

  “Well, there was this one Seeker who had some kind of fiery, mechanical wings…”

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  -----

  I hefted the two ingots of adamantium in my left hand to get a feel for the weight. The shield would be a lot heavier than a normal soldier would be able to use in battle for any length of time, but it was the only way to make something that would deflect the blows from something monstrous like an ogre’s greataxe or a giant-sized Xerith like the First. Bran could handle dragging around a shield this heavy until he was able to pray for strength, and I would have no trouble regardless. I knew from experience about how much metal went into making a shield, but adamantium was a lot heavier than steel. It was also a lot harder to work with, especially when there wasn’t a framework of wood to work with like most shields had. Because of the unique properties of the metal, the smith would have to get it right the first time. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t relying on a hammer to forge it, but magic.

  I walked through a portal, down a hallway, then through the portal in the midst of the illusion of a sunny meadow with red flowers, and suddenly I was in Stonekeep’s forging level. This was the place where the Adamantine Legion was created at the time of the Breaking to fight the Crix War. There were four identical forges in this level, but I chose the forge in front of the portal to work in. I opened the double doors and walked inside, whistling a tune. My whistling echoed strangely in this room, so I decided to let the tune die.

  Each of the four workshops consisted of a sixty-foot square room with a forge and anvil on both the left- and right-hand walls. There were carts pushed against the walls that still had some of the casts used to form the various parts of golems in them, but most of the casts were stored on large shelves on the far wall. The carts were very heavy and couldn’t be moved if they didn’t have wheels, but even then, they were difficult for an average person to maneuver. There was a smaller portal in the center of the far wall between a couple of the huge racks. That portal led to the smelting room, which would be too hot for anyone to survive without the use of magic. The forges were of ingenious design because they incorporated the use of small portals for fire and air that channeled the heat the smith needed for his work.

  From reading about this place, I knew there were slumbering elementals of different types in specially designed chambers on this level. Those chambers were inaccessible except for portals, and those portals were restricted to everyone but me currently. The elementals were of air, water, and fire, and they were exceptionally dangerous even while slumbering. The notes I read on the subject said that the makers of this castle put them here when the planet was broken because the elementals no longer had a safe place to dwell. I had thought it was cruel to imprison the elementals here until I learned that the elementals asked permission to slumber here. Like Cuddles, they didn’t want to hurt anyone and each of the individual twenty-one worlds was too small to hold them without damaging the carefully crafted environments. Knowing that they were gentle, sentient creatures instead of ravening monsters hell bent on escape and destruction eased my mind, and I felt even better to not have to wake them up for me to do my work.

  Before I forgot, I cast a protection spell on myself that was effective against fire, then strengthened it as much as I could. I conjured a little bit of flame above my finger to make sure the shield was working, and I didn’t feel a thing even when I put my finger directly into the flame. If I’d forgotten to cast that ward, I would’ve been incinerated as soon as I opened the portal to the fire elemental’s chamber. This place was not to be taken lightly, and I ran through a mental checklist of things I needed to do before I did them. I set the thick straps of leather I just bought to the side of the right-hand anvil near the tools I planned to use, then I entered the portal to the smelting room.

  This room was a cylinder forty feet in diameter with a total of three portals carved into the walls. Having used this room before, I didn’t pause to consider the portals, but set the two ingots into the crucible in the center of the room without fanfare. Normal forging of steel didn’t require the entire selection of metal to be red hot at one time. Adamantium, on the other hand, did require that because once it was set and crystallized into rigidity, it was practically impossible to change the metal in any way. I was going to use magic to shape the metal, so I wanted the entire mass to be whitish yellow in color and to be a more homogenous temperature throughout. I activated the portal to the air elemental’s chamber, and immediately there was a blast of cool, fresh air circling in the room. I then activated the portal to the fire elemental’s chamber, and a blast of heat I could feel even through my protective wards ripped forth into the chamber.

  The fresh air fueled the fire, and it created a firestorm. With a bit of telekinetic magic, I lifted the two ingots out of the crucible and held them together in the hottest part of the flame as I stood at the wall. This was going to take a while, so I tried to relax as I kept the telekinetic magic working, all the while keeping constant vigil over how hot I felt. It took almost a half an hour for the two ingots to glow yellow hot and then fuse into one amorphous blob. I manipulated the magic, mixing the blob thoroughly, then deactivated the elemental portals and hustled through the remaining portal to the forge. As I stepped up to the forge I had chosen, I activated the much smaller portals in the forge to create a furnace almost as hot as the one in the smelting chamber.

  I telekinetically moved the metal into the furnace to let it cool very, very slowly, then I got to work. As long as I was taking the time to make something out of adamantium, the rarest metal on our world, I was determined to do it as close to perfectly as I could. This involved having a magical sense of the metal and manipulating it at its smallest component level. I started from the inside and center, and flattened it, rotating the metal horizontally. I planned to let the metal at the center cool first to give it some rigidity as I worked it out into an expanding plate. I kept the thickness a uniform quarter of an inch except for where the shield’s embossing designs on the outside would be. I had to form those places at the same time I was making the rest of it, which was a very difficult thing. It took hours for the basic shape to be complete as I kept the entire piece the same bright orange color. If I let it cool to a dark reddish color, I knew from experience that the adamantium would be too difficult to work with.

  As the metal crystallized into its final form, I made the interior sides smooth and the outsides in the right shape to look like a sword and descending dove. I gave the shield a slight curve from left to right so blows would glance off better. The concave rectangular shape was a tried-and-true design that had served Mithram’s army well through the centuries, and I knew the measurements without having to look at an original. When I was ready for the fasteners inside, I made them from small pieces I took from the edge, melding them into the existing structure. Nothing could be riveted to the shield later, so I had to fasten the straps to something that was already there. I telekinetically held the leather straps close enough that I could make sure the fasteners were in the right places, then I set them aside. I then worked on the handle, forming it to be comfortable to grip both with a gauntlet on and without. After that, I formed the outer edges and gave it a thicker, rolled edge to add even more strength. By this point, the entire shield was only red hot, and it was in its final form. As the adamantium hardened, I enchanted it with spells to resist kinetic force and to preserve it, though it hardly needed that. Then all I had to do was to magically polish it a tiny bit to make sure the outside was pleasant to look at and not dimpled or anything.

  Satisfied with what I saw, I deactivated the forge portals and let it slowly cool. There were a few small pieces of adamantium left over, so I quickly made a few arrowheads out of them, not really caring that much about how they looked. I was able to make them razor sharp, of course, but I didn’t check to make sure they were exactly uniform in size and shape. The main part of my attention was on the shield and keeping it from being deformed as it cooled. At last, it was cool enough that I could set the straps to it without them burning, so I let the arrowheads rest on the floor and moved the shield so that it hovered above the anvil. I took the leather straps and cut the places where the mushroom-shaped fasteners would poke through, making the holes a little too big. There were four fasteners to each side of the strap, so it would be attached very firmly when finished. I maneuvered the leather straps onto the shield and pushed them down onto the cooled rivets, then I used my mending spell to repair the slits I cut, which tightened the assembly considerably. I cast protective enchantments on the straps to keep them firm for many years to come. After all the enchantments were laid and the shield was complete, I made the magics permanent.

  At last. I held it in my own hands then and rubbed my fingers across the edges of the sword and dove designs on the front. They were very crisp lines, straight as an arrow, and very smooth. Arrows would deflect off of this shield easily, and an enemy’s blade wouldn’t get caught in any creases, possibly yanking the shield off of Bran’s arm.

  I was excited about giving it to him, so I immediately went to the throne room to use a portal to get to the Smith house. After scanning the common areas of the house, I saw no one was about. There was moonlight streaming through the windows in the common room. I’d been in a trance all day and half the night, it appeared. My stomach growled. It was worth it, though. I activated the portal close to the wall in the hallway outside Bran and Elle’s room and stepped through as quietly as I could. I set the shield down softly against the wall by their door, then I tiptoed downstairs to get the food that was left on the table for me. My mother was always thinking of me, it seemed, and it made me smile. Not wanting to wake anyone, I took the plate of food with me through the portal. I thought I would rest tomorrow, then make my own shield the day after.

  As was my habit, I used the Amber Throne to try to find Kromwell, Raynold or Bermin, but I still saw nothing when I focused on them. They must have been in Fell Keep still. Mira came to mind, but I resisted the urge to spy on her. She was probably living a good life with her new boyfriend anyway, and I especially didn’t want to have an image of the two of them in bed together. With my memory as good as it was, that image would probably be in my head for as long as I lived and haunt me the entire time. Instead, I brought the plate of food to my suite and read a book before I called it a night.