"Growing up around the Forge, it was always a joke that I was born for it, bred and trained since day one. Considering how my parents were a part of the Royal Blacksmiths, it made too much sense.
My father excelled with metallurgy, altering the properties of any metal to fit even the most extreme of demands. Meanwhile, my mother could inscribe over a dozen rune combinations into any weapon or tool with ease.
The Brain of Magic and the Brawn of Metal as it were.
Of course they taught me everything I knew as I grew up, but it wasn't until I passed fifteen summers that I was allowed to see the royal workshop. I'll never forget that feeling of stepping inside here, just the heat and the sounds were something else.
The resources of an entire kingdom fixated on arming their soldiers with everything to conquer the chaos across the Continent.
Oh boy, lemme tell you that those first few years as an apprentice were some of the best stories I- Hey! Are you sleeping?!" Arkyn turned away from the forge fire he was tempering to see what looked like a pile of obsidian pieces just lying motionless.
The sudden raise of his voice made the pile suddenly shudder on the edge of the table.
A piece in the center of the cluster slowly rose to reveal its two pitch-black bulbs for eyes that stared sleepily back at him. The whole pile seemed to transform into a long, uncoiling snake as it unfurled. Its scales glistened like smoothed, black-glass but the dark tones and jagged edges were too rough for regular snake scales.
'What do you expect from me? You've been chatting away for hours and your hammering about the place makes it impossible to sleep at any other time.'
It hissed from the parting seam across the triangular-shaped head, and then finished with a yawn. The long, forked tongue and gray fangs betrayed its rocky exterior for what was really the internal flesh of a cold-blooded reptile.
The creature's disgruntled voice seemed to echo inside Arkyn's head, rather than speaking through the hot air around them like Arkyn's did.
"Dusk, you're a Fractal Snake. You shouldn't need to sleep at all, your race is considered more magical energy than anything, you lazy worm."
'And you've got more dirt than brains in that head of yours.' Dusk retorted with another flick of the tongue. 'I may not need sleep to restore my body, but the mind needs to rest too. When's the last time you slept I might add?'
Arkyn was about to argue back but paused for a moment, letting the fire poker in his hand go limp as he had to stop and think. He looked around the stone walls of his windowless forge and realized it must've been quite some time since he last stopped working.
He frequently lost track of time, but with the room having magical properties of over a dozen arrays compiled into a matrix; there was enough energy in the atmosphere to keep him awake for weeks if he wasn't careful.
That very same energy kept him operating without the need for food or water either, leaving no time wasted on trivial matters like rest or breaks.
Sure his body burned his fat content to nothing, but his muscles didn't deteriorate thanks to the matrix's intervention. So there was no point in stopping his projects for recovery, not when the world above him was waging war.
After some quiet pondering, he just shook his head and went back to working on the fires bellowing beneath his stone crucible. Once they reached the color he was hoping for, Arkyn tossed some of his personally mined ore inside the crucible.
He was careful to not throw in the extremely impure pieces inside. He would have to perform a few purifying procedures later to extract the metal sands from the rocks. Once the decent chunks were melting down to the base, he grinned at the volume he had collected.
"Good news, there is enough ore from my last trek to the vein. I can smelt two prototype ingots instead of just one this time."
'Uh-huh.' Dusk muttered questionably, lining himself up for another comment. 'And haven't you ever wondered why you're the one who has to be mining your own resources now?'
Arkyn's hand twitched for a moment before he just rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, well the kingdom is at war. You can't blame them for taking workers out of the mines. Clearly we are reaching a conflict peak of some sort and need all hands operating out on the field."
'What about work orders then? When's the last time you received a single sheet of those papers you once talked about? Inquiring about new tools and weapons. When was the last time you've even seen another human?'
Arkyn felt a headache he tried to ignore overtake his thoughts for a moment. The room suddenly felt too hot and cold all in one moment.
"It's war Dusk," He sternly explained. "We can't assume the kingdom has time to coddle every little workforce in the castle." Arkyn was speaking in a stricter voice now, losing his initial enthusiasm.
'Little workforce?! You brag about having designed nearly every magical tool the Odbrane Kingdom uses to even function! You crafted every high-power weapon they requested for the elite guards! You call your years beneath the castle grounds a little workforce?'
"Just leave it." Arkyn warned.
'You have been telling me all these years about the honor and achievements that come from being a part of the Royal Blackguard!' Dusk's body wiggled heavily on the table and his voice bounced around Arkyn's head with greater intensity.
'You know what I think? You're scared to see what's become of the war. The silence means it's over and you don't want to know which side lost.'
"Enough!" Arkyn shouted at a volume that surprised both of them.
The headache was pulsating behind his eyes now, leaving Arkyn's vision spotty. He stepped away from the crucible for a moment and thought of several things he wanted to yell at Dusk, but his final decision was to silently leave the forge.
The Fractal Snake watched and listened to the footsteps fade down the maze of underground hallways. Eventually the only thing he could hear was soft bubbling of the ore heating up in the red-hot crucible.
Dusk eventually laid his head back down, curling back up into a pile for some peaceful sleep.
Arkyn walked down the hallways carved out of the earth, trying to let the wild emotions leave him with every step he took away from the forge.
It turned out to be too difficult to let go just yet, and whether it was subsconscious or not, he ended up near the massive double-doors at the underground center of the castle.
It would have seemed strange to have a pair of polished, steel doors so far beneath the castle, but the pulsating waves of magic running through the strange, shimmering patterns in the door indicated that there was something extraordinary just beyond them.
It was known as the [Heart of the Castle].
Arkyn placed his hands against the doors to fully embrace the sensation and stared at his own reflection through the door.
His messy brown hair almost hid his blood-red irises, but the peculiar color stood out too much to go unnoticed. The red coloring of his eyes was a side-effect of a choice many mages in Odbrane made, but Arkyn never felt bothered by it.
The red-eyed mages showed who was willing to go through great lengths to research the endless capabilities of magic.
Being so close to the Heart, Arkyn could feel it pulsating softly all throughout the earth and air. It let out a wave of warmth with every beat, saturating his skin each time.
The heat of the forge was always a comfort to Arkyn, but something about the gradual rise and flow of the Heart's heat made it soothing. Dozens of others would tell him the same thing when they came near these doors.
He thought back to when the underground hallways were actually full of miners and forge assistants. It didn't feel so long ago, yet the details seem blurred and mashed together.
As the only Royal Blackguard currently underneath the castle, Arkyn was the only person with the permission and knowledge to open the doors. The workers would always ask him for just a glimpse at such a wonder, but he was stubborn in following the commands of the King of Odbrane.
"Never open the [Heart of the castle] unless you feel it's no longer safe."
Arkyn never forgot those words. It was one of the very rare instances he got to speak with the king, and it wasn't just a command either.
The King had quietly sought out Arkyn and asked him for his trust, it was a plea to keep his people safe and Arkyn felt honored by the situation.
No matter how tempting the idea had been, Arkyn had never opened the vault to the Heart since it was first assembled. His pride as the last forgemaster still in the castle forbade him from disregarding the royal request.