Lore:The New Steelworks
| The New Steelworks | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
The New Steelworks – A Fable of Fidelity
By Dr. Maggie Adder
Preface: Of high interest to any adept researching the history of Antaloor is the tradition of local folklore. The inherent folk wisdom contained within is staggering, pointing to historical trends, cultural evaluations and even scientific facts often omitted from the actual historical records.
Case-in-point: the Chronicles of Carlo Pomo, a merchant and traveler whose extensive accounts of his journeys across the Eastern Isles formed the foundation for many popular narratives about those places and their traditions. It was only two centuries later, when Hon. N. Legovik, then librarian of Veneficus University, confronted Lupo’s Seventh Chronicle with the folklore of the Eastern Isles, that he noticed a curious amount of discrepancies, including the utter lack of any reference to Pomo’s supposed term as governor there – described in detail in his chronicle, but conspicuously absent from the province’s oral tradition from that period. That discovery led to the revision of the general consensus about the authenticity of Pomo's stories.
The author of this work has spent the past year collecting and compiling tales from various regions. The eventual aim of this project is to compare the oral traditions with established historical accounts.
The first of the tales is a folk narrative referencing the manufacture of steel in the Tinia Mountains, as well as the founding of the first steelworks in the region.
The author hopes this will be as engrossing for you, the reader, to read, as it was for her to do the research.
- Dr. Maggie Adder
Once upon a time, in a small village at the foot of the Tinia Mountains, famed world-widefor their beauty and elegance, there lived an ironmonger named Faradh. He had ran an iron monolopy in the region for decades, and the locals knew it was a racket.
That is, until a traveler arrive from the East, one windswept night in the lengths of Autumn.
“Good sir,”, the traveler began, entering Faradh's workshop. “I am a blacksmith, whose village has been decimated by plague. I was told this was the place to find work. If you are he who does the employing, I am ready to enter your service... so long as three square meals and a place to sleep are involved.”
Thus did the young blacksmith come to live and work in Faradh the ironmonger’s place. And thus did the ironmonger see how much better the quality of his weapons were when stood alongside those of his fellows.
The ironmonger was pleased, for he now had goods moving through his stores at record speeds. But, he knew this boy's skill was something well beyond his means to control, and that angered him.
Time advanced, and the boy's skill earned Faradh and his good wide renoun. When he asked the boy what he did differently than his fellow ironworkers, he said simply "I work hard and dream only of making the perfect blade. But, it's always one more hammerstroke away."
“Sir!,” he exclaimed one day, rushing into Faradh's workshop. “Look! I've breached the gap! I thought it was impossible, but... this metal seems unreal! It can hold an edge unlike any iron, and is durable, besides! It doesn't break even under heavy stress." Faradh was skeptical. "Show me. I've never heard of such a metal, and I've been in this business a lot longer than you."
“A new alloy I've been thinking of,” the boy said, beaming and full of pride. "I figured air is what richens life, so it must also richen other things. I found an ore rich in air and, after many days of hammering out the imperfections, I successfully mixed it with iron. This was the result."
He handed Faradh a silver-colored blade, much lighter than the dull charcoal black of the iron Faradh was used to seeing. Weighing it in his hand, the old ironmonger's jaw fell into a steady drop.
"Isn't it beautiful?" The boy mused. "It took me a long time. But, it's finally finished."
A long silence passed. Then, without warning, Faradh lunged into the boy blade-first, turning it hard when he felt it catch a lung to quicken the boy's passing. The boy slid to the floor, fear and wonder in his eyes, and expired there. His body was dropped to the bottom of a nearby lake, and no one ever asked where he went, for there were few who knew him outside of work.
Ten years passed, and the village boomed with prosperity. Steel became its major export, and Faradh its mayor. His wealth grew beyond that of anyone else in the region and he was quite adored by the local nobility. The peasants, on the other hand - many of whom slaved in his factories and often whispered hopefully of his demise - hated him.
Ten years is a long time, but surely not so long that such a trespass can be wiped clean by time alone. When a factory worker learned, by overhearing a drunken, rageful conversation between Faradh and one of his many wives, that the old steel tycoon had not in fact discovered the alloy, but usurped the discovery from one of his employees and taken the credit - word spread like wildfire. Soon the whole region was up in arms and even the noblemen, who had cottled him at their busom for now close to a decade, kept their distance from Faradh.
A change of heart is not always out of character for one of wealth and power, but a change of moral nature is. So, when Faradh made his public apology in what was an obvious attempt at saving face, the people saw this for what it was. In a fit of manic mob rage, a group of disgruntled workers present at the speech tore him from the podium and bashed in his skull with a sledgehammer - which, ironically enough, had been a newer model invented specifically to handle the stress of forging steel. Reports from that day, both scholarly and folkloric alike, described the look of the tycoon's brains on the cobblestones like "spilled caviar", a delicacy of the upper class.
The body of Mayor Faradh was buried in an unmarked grave, while the murdered young apprentice's bones were plucked piece by piece from the bottom of the lake by skilled divers hell-bent on seeing him given a proper burial. Maliel's wooden Cross was placed over his gravesite, and in the decades that followed he became a hero of the people, even being immortalized in a marble statue in the heart of a city now lost to the annals of time, where there is nothing now to remember him by but a title: "The Nameless Peasant Who Became a Nail in the Foot of a Tyrant".