In Cold Blood
POSTED ON Dec 16, 2013 22:18:45 GMT -8
Post by Deleted on Dec 16, 2013 22:18:45 GMT -8
catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon
There was something soothing about repetitive work. It could get tedious at times, which was why it was so rare to see a demigod pick up knitting, and the hours of practice it took to become mindlessly good at something put off a lot of them. Naomi preferred to spend meditation time kneading bread dough. A good workout with his dough left him sweaty, his muscles sore, and his bread delicious. The little rituals built into the things he didn't have to think about made the activity - an activity hundreds if not thousands of humans shared - his own.
Maybe it was a little odd to compare kneading bread dough to slamming a hammer into white-hot metal, but Naomi had slipped into the quiet state of mind he preferred just as easily while forging as he did while baking. The metal beneath his gloved hands, both the worked metal of the hammer and the unformed metal of his project, did not lie to him. It was up to him to divine the truths, to find the flaws and eradicate them, but such flaws were there to be seen, plain. Metal did not deceive, or pretend to be more than what it was.
And if there was bitterness in every strike, if he pictured a face in the metal as he forced the material to take form beneath his hands... Well, he was a little entitled. Bitter smithing made the sharpest of blades, just as stress baking made the best cookies. His stress bear-paw cookies were a wide-spread favorite. There would be nothing wide-spread about this blade, not if he was doing this right. Unlike the crooked blades many campers - including Naomi - used, this dagger, the second of a set, was a last line of defense for an archer who had run out of arrows. He had a recipient in mind, someone who had admired his own last-ditch daggers in the arena.
The metal was too cool to continue working. He shoved the handle of his hammer in the pocket of his shorts, and put his partially finished metal back into the fire to heat up. The temperature gauge in the corner of the furnace indicated that he did not need the bellows, not this time. Last time he'd heated his blade, he had spent twenty minutes pumping air into the embers. This time, he took a bandana from his back pocket to wipe the sweat off his face, and lifted a bottle of water to his lips.
Ensemble
Word Count: 420