Reaping the Harvest

[Julius Sedaire]

Theme Music​

Ijaat had begged leave from his various duties after meeting Anija and getting his armor done with various peoples help. And graciously, the interim CEO had granted him both leave and, surprisingly, access to the best forges Ijaat had ever seen in memory, those being the forges of Mandal Hypernautics. There was literally any and every thing he could want there... And as he trudged in, he smiled at the smell of burning coal and the sound of ringing hammers.

Here is home he thought as he breathed deeply and rolled his shoulders.

Here is where I /really/ belong

With that, the beskar smith trundled over to an empty workbench, flashing a newly made credential and setting out his tool roll. The equipment here was probably better. Kark, it was better, he knew that. But here on this tool roll were things he had used for years. He knew their heft, knew their weight. Each hammer had it's own ring, and he knew it just as well as a master conductor knew every instrument in his orchestra.

His bare fingers ran over their work smoothed and polished hafts for a moment, a sad look in his eyes. He and his wife and child had harvested the veshok wood of their handles themselves, him teaching his young son how to shape the wood on a lathe and polish and stain it to accent the natural curves and flow of the wood, rather than aesthetically minimize it. Their heads were some of the finest and purest beskar alloy available on the market. It had cost so much, and he had originally opted for duasteel again when the time came for new hammers. His wife, bless her, had ordered the beskar anyway and told him he deserved it. That was always her way.

Picking up the hammer, Ijaat unrolled the last of that beskar. The same bit as his hammers had come from. He had ended up getting a lot more than he needed for the hammers, and so he figured he had enough for a weapon or two. He was more used to bar stock to start, the round stock gave him a bit more to work with when hammering. One saber, at least, remained in this collective pile, he knew.

Selecting a rod of about the right length, he began by spinning it in his hand three times forward and back, a completely useless superstition he had developed over the years. Smiling, the man pulled goggles down over his eyes and one hand at a time slide on the bantha hide workgloves he adored. He stuck the rod into the coals and watched it intently, noting the color and such of the piece as he turned it and raked the coals, absently puttering with other things as it heated.

He would draw a crowd, he knew it as soon as a few of the others paused to look. Most of them used invection ovens for heating, precision instruments and the like for every step of the process. Those like him, beskar smiths who forged the old way, were rare. He smiled as the metal reached just the right glow of color and grabbed the tongs in one hand, selecting the third from the right hammer, a big rough shaping beasty at almost three pounds in the head. Swiftly he began hammering, swaying slightly to the beat of the hammer as he hummed. The humming was barely above a whisper, and was an old coreillian love ode to a lost wife from the singer.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Hammer, turn, hammer and turn. The process was done without thought as Ijaat created showers of sparks from the glowing bar of beskar, slowly forging it out and folding it back in a specific pattern. His blows were measured, exact, creating, eventually, a pattern on the rare iron itself. If lucky, it would come out the style he particularly liked. He kept a pouch of flux on his hand as he turned and hammered the block until it began to loose it's glow. Wouldn't do much good to forge-weld the metal if he didn't flux it and didn't do it right.

Shuffling, the smith put the bar back in the coals and worked the bellows, flaring the spark showers into the hood above the old fashioned forge as he kept the bellows going by a foot pedal. The bar of beskar was turned constantly, keeping the heat even. More than that, it also kept the welds going right. Plus, to add all above it, it looked pretty when it glowed that yellow orange. It made him feel like he was holding the sun itself between his tongs.

Swiftly, he dropped one hammer back to the roll, selecting a hammer about the same size but with a flattened face to it. It was time to draw out the bar to an approximate length and width. Pulling the glowing stock from the fire, he swiftly put it to the anvil, holding the butt end of it between the jaws of his tongs as he swiftly began to beat time on the piece. Swift strike to the fore, to the middle, to the back, then repeat.

In between each strike he made sure to keep the hammer head well quenched in the slack tank next to him, and turned the piece every few sets of blows. Swiftly the bar began to lengthen and grow, and in between he stuck the stock bar back to the coals to keep it from loosing heat too much, sometimes turning it to the thinner side to give it a measured blow, keeping the piece from growing too fat or thin.

Each hammer blow seemed like a year of time to him. He watched his father showing him the colors of the various ores and metals, how to know if the furnace for smelting was running too much slag, how to adjust the tuyere and more. The right color to the metal was hard to get, but once you did it a few times it stayed with you, just like riding a bike.

As he hammered, part of Ijaat's mind narrowed to a razored hyper focus on the task at hand. Another part was lost in the memory of what had been, his family, and their loss. His face grew in equal parts hardness and wistfulness. His onlookers grew, albeit slowly, as they began to see this was no onerous brute task, but a masterful smith making a weapon of some sort.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Hours passed.. Feth, it could have been days for all he knew. He drank only enough to keep from dehydration, and ate little. Finally came the moment of truth. Hammering slowed, to fine details. The shaping of the back spine, the thinning of the metal near the edge, just a bit to create a marker for the bevel. Here and there were high or low spots he noticed, and did his best to fix. Such things happened inevitably.

For this part of the work, he used a much lighter hammer. It also lacked the flat rectangular facing of the second and was a solid block wedge of beskar with a blunted tip at the back used for creating folds and other likes. Quick and light blows rained down repetitively, and he felt his arm beginning to tire, but he growled a bit and pushed on. Maybe it was a little less like riding a bike, when you were away from it long enough. Maybe it was more than that, and maybe he had grown a bit around the midsection and lost some muscle in his arms. But he would see this through.

Like a man possessed of a singular will, Ijaat used the smaller hammer to help shape the wicked curve of the blade, leaving enough to allow for the curve from quenching. It was rather like sculpting more than the process suggested. There was an elegance and deftness required. It was less raw muscle and powerful hammer blows and more just the right force at just the right spot. He had met smiths that thought strength could make up for finesse. And frankly their work was crap. Just crap.

When he finally had the blade fairly much shaped, he began checking over it with an old magnifier, looking for cracks, thin or high spots still... Anything that might indicate something bad. He hadn't seen any during the process, but the difference between a master and a journeyman, and between a journeyman and an apprentice, was the realization of how little he actually knew, and the process of always assuming anything that could go wrong would and did go wrong.

At last he set aside the hammer and began a quick process. Running the blade to the little back forge off the main one, Ijaat opened a valve and watched the heat billow in with flickering tongues of fire as he pumped the bellows fiercely for a moment.. This part would anneal the blade, keeping it from getting too stressed or the like. Work hardening wasn't a risk except with much inferior metals, but the process had been ingrained in him as something one should do. It just made sure. And he was ALWAYS sure of himself when forging.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

With the blade annealed, he moved now to a draw file and various grinding implements. Right as he bent to the task, he attached a respirator to his face, securing the thing tightly and flicking on the overhead fan on the station next to the forge. Wouldn't do for him to breath in bits of coal dust and beskar shavings. Not sure that was healthy, precisely.

And if he was honest, he should have had the karking thing on from the beginning, working with the flux he was using, and working beskar raw. But he was getting old he guessed, finally, or just less with it than he had thought. There was something within him that refused to admit that though. And it seemed the longer he worked, the more he remembered. Maybe it was like riding a bike.

The blade tang was wrapped carefully in scrap leathers and fabrics, and then mounted on a vise just so. Standing above it, Ijaat began to further shape and contour the blade, removing scale as well. There was a slow and methodical hissing rasp as the equipment drug across the blade surface and began to reveal, when the light hit it right, the final element of the pattern in the steel.

As once such beam of the harsh over-head light hit the blade, he smiled. He couldn't be for sure, not without polishing it here and now, but the gleam of it seemed to indicate he had pulled off the pattern he had wanted. Which was excellent. Taking his time, he slowed, the strokes across the side of the blade becoming slower, deeper, trying to even out high and low spots specifically now, and more firmly establish the bevel and angle of the edge, though leaving some meat on it as to not weaken it too much for the quench and heat treat.

This was the tedious stage of the process for him... Scrape, file, wipe clean. Check. Scrape, file, wipe clean again and check. But this was also really the birth of the weapon to most people. The stage where it finally began to look like something they might wield, even if only just vaguely. It was here, as his father said, the weapon would speak to you. Every weapon had a personality, even the non-alchemical ones. Their weight, balance and more were how they revealed their character to you, their way of 'talking' if you would. And if you got that right, they practically sang through the air when used right.

Finally ready, Ijaat turned and grabbed several bags of powder and a container of water, sitting them on the bench.

Onto the next step... He thought.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Mixing quickly with a bristled brush in a container, Ijaat began to make a coating for the blade. Made of several minerals and clays, it would allow the part of the blade it covered to not harden, or harden MUCH slower, thus keeping a relatively 'soft' spine with a super hard edge. And when one wanted, you could get artistic with the edge bit and make some pretty fancy patterns that would be revealed via a rather laborious but elaborate polishing method.

In precise lines he began smearing refractory clay across the blade as it cooled enough for the process. There was even a patterning to the whole thing, almost like waves on an ocean, his signature notare-gunome blended hamon. It was complicated, but really beautiful. And beyond that, he knew it was something almost impossible to do in beskar, so he did it to prove he could. It would be the same with his father, who sometimes would even use folded durasteel for armor, which had no purpose at all but to prove the smith was capable. And a bit of a show off.

After the clay was coated across the blade and scraped from the spaces the blade needed to harden in, he quickly set about wrapping it in a soft iron wire. When he quenched it the blade would bend, causing what old smiths knew was a natural and even desirable curve due to the quenching medium Ijaat liked - water. Not fancy oils and the like. Just plain water. Oil had a much less volatile nature in that regard with the bending. But the wire would help keep the hardened clay on the blade and keep the coated areas soft, relatively speaking. Which is what he wanted in this blade. The quick quench would harden the edge superbly, and the slow cool at the spine would keep it durable and relatively (for a sword) flexible, a tricky combination.

Walking over to the forge after the clay dried, Ijaat eyed the onlookers with a quirked brow and nodded, taking a swig from his canteen. They were gawking now. And he was preening a bit, if he admitted it to himself. He hadn't intended to differentially harden the blade. That was foolish. Only a handful of people or less knew enough about beskar. And he and his father were two of those. Might as well have hung out a sign with his name on it. But he wasn't hiding anymore, he had to remind himself of that. He was who he was, and he had been forgiven. If there was still resentment, well... He would pay for it in one way or the other. That was his way.

After another drink of water, he capped the canteen and walked over to the blade. Looking and checking to make sure the clay was dry before beginning to heat the blade in a little side box off of the forge, a heat treating oven, if one would call it thus. He watched the glow carefully, waiting. A slow red dull glow began along the entire thing, absent on the tang and spine. He hummed a little to himself as he waited, a snippet of a song a wandering band had played back in his brief stint of owning the Mad Strill cantina on Keldabe.

Soon... Patient, this is the really tricky part...

 

[Julius Sedaire]

The dull red built to orange, and then an almost yellow-orange. With deft ad practice hands the middle aged mandalorian flipped his goggles back down and grabbed the glowing saber-brand with long tongs and turned immeadiately to the quench tank set up next to him, clipping it into the vertical vise. This would be the proving ground of hours upon hours of work. Men and women around him began to mutter quietly as he moved quickly, heart pounding in his ears. Sweat beaded down across his brow, trickling and tickling his eyes and he stubbornly refused to wipe it away, blinking rapidly as he watched the metal. It would be ready... Almost..... Almost...

NOW!

With a swift punch of a lever and turn of a crank the vise lowered into the tank a pre-set amount and stopped, the tang resting just above water. There was a hissing and a sort of shrill song as the water in the large tank literally roiled and almost *boiled* as the metal hit it. This was good! There was no dread bing or *ping* of the spine contracting so quickly it literally sheared apart the hardened edge and ruined the work. This was *very* good. Very good indeed. A ping meant lots of cursing, ranting, raving, and more. And he had an audience now, a veritable crowd of fifteen or so people built up at a respectable distance. Most appeared to be smiths as well, contracted to the company or using it's facilities.

Swiftly, he turned the krank upwards and retrieved the blade. With welders mitts on outside the work gloves, he carried the still smoking sword to the work space and cleared it a spot rather brusquely, and laid it out. Now he readied the tempering oven as he let the sword cool a bit more. He stoked and raked the coals, adding more fuel as he watched the thermometer on the side read the little side-ovens temperature. This was something he didn't mind precision on. Too hot and it could ruin the hardening and start him back at square one. Too cool and it wouldn't reduce the strain from the quench enough and he'd end up with a brittle edge to the sword. One that would chip with use. Crack and even shatter if it hit right. And that was a shame Ijaat refused to have staring at him on his record.

Working quickly as the oven heated, Ijaat unwound the soft iron wire, watching the clay fall off in hunks and chunks. Deftly his fingers broke off or removed the rest of the clay, revealing the blade surface. Smiling, he watched the heat reading and waited. When the temperature was just right, he would place the blade in. Then came hours of working the bellows to keep the temperature just so. He didn't want it glowing, he just wanted to temper the blade and restore some of the ductility and flexibility and the like. Just quenching it made it far too hard and brittle for use.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Push breathe, push breathe. It was an endurance race. Sweat covered his body. The supple leather apron was certainly not helping him rid himself of excess heat. But he dare not take it off, for the sparks flew fast and steady from the forge in front of him at this point. The flames lit his face with an almost fiendish cast, his honey brown eyes seeming to glow golden, stark shadows and lines almost making a caricature of his strong chin and prominent nose. Indeed, he had even donned a long green bandana, wrapping the tail around his face to keep the heat off even the respirator, the whole thing soaked with sweat.

Quivering had started in his left arm, the muscles jumping. He was working the smaller, less efficent hand bellows and the foot bellows at the same time, alternating the rythymic pace of all of the four air bladders. This served little in truth, but the little things mattered. By working and alternating all four, he kept the temperature and the forge at just the right level. It was not a frantic pace, but a steady slow roll and release. Long ago he had stopped counting the number of fiery little pecks the sparks from this had given him. Usually he favored long almost elbow length gloves for exactly that reason, but there had been only the shorter gloves available.

Finally, Ijaat let the bellows die, to hushed murmmurs from the crowd. He grabbed a pair of long, thin tongs and moved the still black piece of metal from the tempering oven. Most people seemed to mutter in curiosity. Why was he holding a piece of metal so far from himself with tongs? It wasn't hot, was it? And, despite what most believed, this was indeed very hot, except for part of the tang, and even that was... Shall we say... Warm, after a manner of speaking. Indeed, grasping it now, even though it looked cold, would burn ones hand to a third degree mark quite easily.

Taking the blade in tongs, he deposited it on a layer of bricks he had arranged on an open work table and sat, pulling out his canteen and emptying it's contents over his head as he unclasped the respirator's top straps and let it hang limply from his neck. Using the long tail of the bandana, once unwound from his face, he mopped up his face and tried to steady and ease his breathing, gasping a bit from the exertion. He had easily spent an hour to three running those bellows, and those watching him didn't really contain any face he recognized from the beginning.

Forging a sword was one thing... Forging it in one sitting from beginning to end was madness.

With that thought, Ijaat merely chuckled low in his throat and cracked a wry grin, resting still.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Focusing his eyesight, Ijaat emerged from the meditative like trance he had been in. He had picked up a few tricks running with a rogue Jedi hunting the Sith who had killed his clan. That form of meditation was one that worked even for non Force users. It relaxed the mind and let the muscles recoup. Of course, if you used the Force, it worked even better supposedly. But that wasn't something Ijaat would ever find out. He didn't even really know if he was force sensitive or not. He just shut that part out. Never was the force used for much good in his mind. Almost never.

Standing, he wrapped the now cooled tang portion of the blade in the same scraps as before and began to hold the blade in a rather awkward looking grip. He took a bucket of literal stones, taking rough ones and getting them wet, and began to scrape them across the blade. Now began the part he loved. He would first put a base 'foundation' polish on the blade to assure there were no cracks or irregularities and check the blade steels pattern and temper line. Then after that, he would begin the real fun work.

After that came the progessively finer and finer stones, until they practically dissoled into paste on his finger tips. When he was done polishing the blade, it would fairly glow in the light from the mirror shine he had given it. All thanks to these marvelous little stones he had discovered on some back water world while hunting down a bounty. They were a rainbow of hues and a whole plethora of grits and grains. The brighter the hue, the finer the grain. Like sandpaper, really. The duller colored ones took off steel almost as well as a draw-knife. Often times he'd wonder about the mineral and molecular make up of them. Then, like he always did and like he did now, he'd shrug and get back to work.

Selecting a slate grey stone, and wetting it as the almost black one was discarded, he began to swirl the almost pumice like rock across the sword blade. It produced a sort of grating, bass rumble that wasn't quite pleasant, but not quite unpleasant either, to the ears. Swirl and twirl, as he called it, the stone slowly breaking free bits of it, which he added to under his fingers and used until he was just coating the blade in a fine paste of mushy grey, before running a damp white towel across the body of it.

For some reason he declined to even examine, he always checked the color and mess left behind as he cleaned. Ostensibly for pockets of trapped flux he had freed which would indicate a bad weld. In reality, probably because it made him look more professional and knowledgable about a process he was still trying to understand himself really.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Sharpening the blade would be next. Quickly and swiftly he set aside the bucket of stones, dipping his hands in the water of the quench tank rather than the murky, slop like one he had been dipping the stones into. He left that. The blade was in a foundation polish, and already the pattern was stunning, if he allowed himself to praise his own work such. It was possibly one of his best forge jobs so far as artistic and aesthetic purposes went. Already the hamon, the temper line, displayed a stark and solid demarkation that did not waver or fuzz one bit. Thanks in part to his little 'clay' mixture using an actual refractory cement often used to insulate the forge engines that made star ship plating. It was expensive, but it worked true wonders.

Now he would sharpen it. This would be done by a subtle little blue stone from the same backwater world as the polishers. It was almost a cerulean or sky blue, pretty looking. He had at first thought of trying to polish the rocks in a tumbler of some sort and make ornamentation out of them, but they had proved illsuited for that task. They left behind few abrasive marks though, and did the fine shaping an edge honing needed. As was his want, the edge he put on now would be a 'service edge'... When he was done hilting it he would go back, put the final edge on it, and then polish it up to a mirror burnish for the 'show' so to speak. He could feel a growing anticipation build in him that he never felt anywhere else but in the forge. Even battle lust couldn't touch it.

As the fingers of one hand whirled the blue stone along the edge, sloping and sculpting, his mind did it's wandering again, humming slightly in tune to the love ode he had been humming when folding and forging out the billet. It was what he used to sing to his wife as she helped him in the forge. She would laugh, and call him a flatterer. Such grand words were not meant for such a simple woman as her, or so she would say. All he would reply is that they were the only grand words his poor lips could pass on to her that approached her radiance. Usually this earned him a swat on the ear, a peck on the cheek, and a reminder to mind his work as she minded hers, the raising of the young hellian of a child, their son.

Swifter the fingers moved, swirling in time and pace to the beat of the music, his whole body almost swaying with it. The finer the edge got, the higher pitched the scraping, 'til the whole piece hummed almost like a tuning fork. For some reason he never understood, this stone and this stone alone produced that sound. It did nothing else extraordinary, but against beskar, when rubbed or run across quick enough, it produced a song like melody. Undoubtedly, if he cared to look, what remained of his onlookers would be staring agape as the blacksmith turned to a conductor. Here was a simple man making music, the very stuff of life according to his mother, from an instrument created only to kill.

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Leatherwork... He had carved the core for the scabbard out while waiting on the thing to cool, using measurements and now he checked the fit, nodding as the two halves slid together just so. As an added touch, he lined the scabbard slowly with wool dipped in mineral oil until it was saturated. It was a tricky, and messy process. And smelly too for that matter. Not that much of ANYTHING about forging smelled good. Well, to most normal people. The addition of the wool was an affectation from his father, and basically made the questionable addition of helping oil the blade every sheathing and drawing, and keep the blade from retaining any moisture.

Though in reality it probably mostly did the second, as within a few days the oil was ninety nine percent gone or more. But still. Tradition. His change to it from his father was the addition of a few drops of clove oil, which gave it a certain smell. Like anything, the smell triggered memories of a young boy tugging at his shirt tail, asking to help. That was the first task his father had given him, and so it was with his boy.

"Mix the sword oil up boy, and soak that wool. Make sure it drips when you pull it out."

Grinning, Ijaat glued the two halves together, and using a large sheet of paper traced out an exact pattern for how much and what size of the hide he was using for the leather on this. It was expensive stuff, this, and dyed very exactingly. He left the leather motly untooled, just stitching and wetting and stretching it around the scabbard after it had dried. There was much smoothing and finesse work here, making sure nothing was bunched or wrinkled, and nothing interefered with the very cunningly concealed butted seam. And once he was done, you could barely see the seam of the leather, and only catch it just so with a fingernail dragged around the scabbard. Tricks his wife had taught him.

Carefully, he then took thin sheets of electrum, and with thin pliars and strong hands bent the sheets into shape around them, rolling one side of the top piece to form a throat for the scabbard, which he then took an electro etcher to. Thinly, and quickly, he brushed the crest of the Mandalorian Protectors on the intended outside face of the throat plating, and wiped it clean after the exhaustingly tedious work. Doing the same to the locket, he actually brazed a small ball of electrum onto it as a cap for the 'chape' (that's the technical term dontcha know!) and then began the same process of etching it, but with a simple Mythosaur skull emblem in honor of his people.

His fingers were cramping, so he wiggled them almost jazz hands style and then nodded, standing up and grabbing the belt he had done prior to this event. It was of the same hide, studded with small shield-conches of beskar and electrum, with a buckle shaped rather like the Clan crest of his family, a cunning bit of work making it a simple parachut like buckle that with a quick press could be released easily. Threading the belt through the scabbard, he set the whole assemblage aside on a hammer peg and picked up the sword and began his final belt of polishing and sharpening, grunting in relief, waiting to see if anyone from the crowd came up to bug him. Usually they did if he forged such things in the open.