Demesne 177 - Preparing To Smelt (Patreon)

Building a roof over her furnaces took Lori an annoyingly long time. Outside of her demesne, she no longer had the control over wisps that she had become used to, and so things she had taken for granted, like turning stone into a fluid, viscous consistency and having it flow to move the mass, were far, far more difficult in River's Fork. If it weren't for her connection to her demesne still giving her limitless power, she'd never have tried to move so much stone so far, as the amount of magic necessary would have been beyond her short of consuming a wisp bead.

Still, she managed to raise the roof, a simple curving stone arch not unlike the baths, shelter and some of the storage sheds back home. It was low, but that was all right. She didn't care about the soil of River's Fork, so once the roof was up, she bound the earthwisps of the ground beneath it, compressing it into walls to support the arch, hardening it into a proper floor, and the excess was pushed aside so that the furnaces could be moved under the roof's protection. It was open at both ends so that the wind would be able to keep the air circulating and any air that resulted from the smelting wouldn't be able to just gather.

It also meant the little improvised smithy wouldn't become outrageously hot. While it would probably be more efficient to give the firewisps a directionality so that all the heat would remain inside the furnace, given the freezing cold around them excess heat was preferred, they just didn't want it to be so hot they couldn't approach the furnaces. The furnaces were made of water after all. If they ran out of imbuement while they were filled with molten metal, 'steam explosion' would be an understatement.

With everything in place, they were ready.

Lori had assisted in smelting metal before, back when she had been a student earning beads for school supplies or, in her later years at school, for magic to digest for extended exercises that required a lot of binding. She had melted scraps of copper, bronze, brass, lead, tin, pewter, jasada, magan, iron and steel back into stocks and ingots, ready to be reused and made into new things. The latter had been difficult, given how hot it had needed to get, and she had actually taken turns with another whisperer to maintain that binding, the two of them switching out imbuing it and keeping the contact wire they were using from getting too hot to touch by making ice to cool it.

However, those had been refined metals, already purified by previous processes and only needing heat to melt. Ore, by definition, was unrefined, alchemically impure metal, which significantly changed the temperature it would melt, as well as affecting its structural integrity and durability. Lori didn't know how to purify those. She was a Whisperer and Dungeon Binder, not an alchemist… or a blacksmith.

Fortunately, they had those in her demesne.

The smith she'd be working with was introduced to her by Rian as Lanwei. He was clean shaven, muscular from repeatedly carrying heavy things for most of his professional life, he had worked with Whisperers before, he knew how to smelt raw ore into useable metal, and, most importantly, he wasn't the talkative sort. They had already worked together before, refining one of the ferrous dragon scales into some of the tools they'd be using for this. She also didn't need to explain the particulars of the furnaces made of ice to him. While furnaces were normally made out of special clays, quartz, or other minerals that were durable in the face of extreme heat, she'd used bound ice as a perfect insulator before with the blacksmiths. As long as it didn't run out of imbuement to keep the binding active, and no one decided to trying using a hammer on the furnace while it was in use, it was perfectly safe. Or at least, as safe as any other furnace could be.

They had other tools as well, brought over on from the Coldhold. A mortar and pestle, the wood still light and new from having been freshly formed on the carpenters lathe. Buckets, which she knew there were never enough of. Ceramic ingot molds, which she'd hopefully be able to fuse back together if and when they cracked from the heat. A ceramic crucible, which like the mold had been made by the potter earlier that week with her help. Tongs for the crucible. A metal rod with a wide spoon at the end. The wand that Lori had commissioned the smiths to make for this occasion, with her assistance.  Personally, Lori didn't think they'd need all that just yet, but then she wasn't a blacksmith. Perhaps he felt more comfortable with all the tools nearby.

Lori watched as the blacksmith poured large pieces of charcoal into the furnace, part of her concentration on the binding of the furnace they were using, sending more magic to imbue it. Unlike the binding of firewisps, the binding of waterwisps keeping the furnace solid was a static thing, the imbuement draining at a steady, predictable rate, so no external force on it would consume its reserves any faster, but Lori still worried. The others she also imbued so that they would continue to keep their shape and not start melting if her mind were absent for too long. She could fully imbue them later so that they'd last through the night, but for now she just had to have them last through the afternoon…

A cart load of ore lay outside the little smelting hut, already recorded in the accounting. The pile lay on a trough made of solidified dirt, so that none of could get lost or go to waste. It was a bright, vibrant green, and Lori could understand why it would be used for dyes. She'd seen that shade of green before. Next to it were four of the buckets, all filled with ore that the smith had ground in the pestle. He hadn't been idle while she had been working, preparing the materials for when she was ready. The buckets of ground ore went into the furnace on top of the charcoal, and the smith stepped back, nodding to Lori. It has her turn.

Lori gripped her staff, sighing and wishing she'd remembered to put a coal in her coalcharm. She'd let a lot of habits she'd used to maintain slip ever since she'd become a Dungeon Binder. The bits of quartz imbedded into her staff were still, not buzzing with lightningwisps held ready as they would have a year ago. Well, she had other options. Lori reached inside the furnace, picking up the largest piece of ore she could reach, about the size of a finger joint. Carefully, she altered the binding of firewisps around her hands, imbuing it as she did so. The cold piece of ore in her hands began to grow warm as the firewisps began to affect it, and soon it was as warm as the air around Lori's hands, filled with firewisps of its own.

Reverting the binding in her hands, she claimed and bound the firewisps in the ore as she put it back inside the furnace. Her hands still inside the tube, she began to form the binding. Firewisps, anchored to but not—and this was very important—part of the binding of waterwisps that solidified the material of the furnace. She moved her hands, the firewisps trailing after her as she made a rising spiral inside the tube, the firewisps anchoring to the sides of it in her wake. Carefully she imbued the firewisps, and the air inside the tube began to grow warm.

Lori extricated her arm from the furnace slowly, then stuck her staff inside. Careful not to let the steel-shod butt of the staff touch the ore piled at the bottom, she smoothly switched from binding the firewisps with one hand to binding the firewisps through the metal wire running down her staff which pressed into her other hand. Taking, deep, regular breaths even though she didn't really need to because of her connection to her core, she imbued the firewisps, binding them to slowly radiate heat.

The heat spread through the tube, warming the ore beneath the firewisps she had anchored and bound. Contiguous with her binding, she claimed the firewisps in the ore, making them part of her binding as the heat slowly progressed downward. Eventually, the heat reached the charcoal and the air around it, and then finally the bottom of the tube, and Lori anchored the firewisps into place. With the firewisps now completely filling the interior of the furnace, she aligned them into a lattice.

There were gaps, of course. The charcoal's internal changed temperature slowly, but that was fine. She didn't need to change their internal temperature, she only needed the charcoal to get hot enough to start partial combusting, and of that the outside was fine. She imbued the firewisps through her staff wire as the firewisps maintained their temperature. While she couldn't feel it through her clothes and the binding that warmed her hands, there was probably a mild updraft coming from the opening of the furnace as the air in the furnace grew warmer than the air above it.

Finally, once she thought the firewisps were sufficiently imbued, she carefully deactivated them, then drew out her staff. The wire under her hands was warm as she looked around, shrugged, then stuck the staff into one of the nearby, unused furnaces for lack of anywhere else to put it where it wouldn't fall. While she coulduse her staff for what she was going to do next, it was mostly made of wood. Sticking it into a vessel intended to be heated such that metal would melt was inadvisable, at least not without a binding to protect it from the heat. Given how busy they were likely to be, maintaining such a binding was likely to be forgotten.

Which was why she had commissioned a wand.

A pace long, made from part of the anatass dragon scale they had found—because why not, when they had no other use for it—the metal rod was as thick as her finger, and was blue from end to end, a deliberate aesthetic choice after it had been forged. A wooden grip long enough for both her hands was at one end, a metal strip running down the length of the grip to give her a contact point to conduct magic through. At the other end was a blunted, rounded point. The whole thing had a noticeable weight that was still lighter than her staff, and more importantly it was a metal conductor that was very unlikely to catch fire, quite unlike her staff, the grip easily replaced.

Lori pick up the wand from where she had placed it next to the wooden tube-form and other tools she'd prepared for herself, placing her thumb on the contact strip just to be sure. It had been a while since she'd used a wand—she'd used them in some of her jobs where using a staff wasn't practical—and so she handled it carefully as she placed the tip inside the furnace's opening. The wand made contact with the binding of firewisps, and she activated it, imbuing the binding as she did so.

She increased the heat slowly, giving time for the heat to spread within, letting any moisture warm and evaporate to avoid the possibility of a steam explosion. Despite the lack of directionality to the binding, between the open nature of the temporary smithy, and the breeze, the air didn't become all that hot yet. Eventually, Lori drew out her new wand and, as a test, stepped outside the smithy and tapped the tip that had been just inside the furnace onto some snow that had fallen from the dome. The snow melted, sizzling into steam, and Lori nodded in satisfaction.

The materials were preheated. It was time to truly begin.

Thrusting the tip of the band back inside the furnace, she altered the binding slightly, and activated the firewisps at the bottom of the furnace, imbuing them as she caused the heat they were generating to spike up sharply.

Through the transparent side of the bound ice furnace, one of the coal began to glow with heat.

Nodding, Lori reverted back the binding of firewisps to what it had been before, continuing to imbue as she began increasing the temperature.

Inside the glass-like tube, more and more coals began to glow, and smoke began to rise.