Theurgy: The Journey's Dawn (Book One)

Chapter 58 The Forge of the Gods

The city was the heart of a small kingdom that ruled thousands of years ago. It was a place known for many crafts of luxury items and beautiful weapons. In fact, kings would often travel to this city to have heirlooms made from the precious metals and jewels brought up from the nearby mining quarries spilling with riches. It was a lively place, a major traveling destination on the trading network of old, and most definitely a center of many arts made popular at the time.

With this in mind, it is no wonder why this city became the home of one of the volcanic gods' most prolific forges and why the people worshiped him as the protector of the city. Few other gods could appreciate the crafts as much as he does, so he relishes in the bed of inspiration that he made from the humans. He blessed them with knowledge, wishing to see what things the humans could make, how far they could come, and if they could if at all, surprise him. Sadly, they never did have this chance, as, at the very height of their civilization, the ideas from far-off lands began to proliferate within the small kingdoms. Ideas of the god's place, the conflicts stirring, and the end of days. The prayers that Hephaestus had become privy to ceased ever so slowly, and they turned to curses. As he walks among the rubble and standing pillars of what's left, he can only recall the faint anarchy that had risen when the war in the heavens finally came. Humans coward in fear, while others were given the power even to slay a god in hopes for any side to win this exhausting conflict. And sadly, he was one of the first to die, as a human armed with a weapon he himself designed dealt the final blow. But gods can not die. So he thought that he should spend the rest of his existence as a mere string of conscious force, occasionally taking up vessels to comune with the physical world. But he was not granted such a fate. What waited for him was something worse. His existence, his presence, locked away, his power stripped from him, and what he had coveted as his domain divided infinitely. Hephaestus was no more, and the forge had gone cold.

But he remembers that he had prepared many things in that time of war in case he was ever to lose himself. A vessel, or maybe a weapon to replenish the power he had lost. He doesn't remember; all events from that time were mere blind emotions that he had no way of comprehending. It was like he was a ghost drifting through the familiar events, those events just as ruined as what lay in the thick pact snow that fluttered away from him as he walked. He looked down, seeing that the wound that the human gave him with that weapon still hadn't healed. None of his injuries have, in fact. He shambled along, as he was so used to before, nearly limping and lumbering his way across what used to be a courtyard. The writhing fire within him had dulled tremendously, and he could only feel himself get weaker and weaker. That faint voice that annoyed him before was gone now, nearly consumed to keep him going. His body grows stiffer by the second, the rocky plates that make up his form grinding against one another. Coming off in flakes to litter the ground. Those humans and their cheap tricks have most definitely hindered him, But he was far from defeated. He can not fall to them again. But even so, he still weakens. If they were to come at him, all at once, they might actually stall him long enough so that the last whimpers of his power sputters free, and he is jettisoned back into the abyss.

He looked around for a moment, seeing something metal peak through the snow. Not rusted at all, but obviously some sort of bronze or golden metal. He walked over to it, his form melting the snow as he walked and revealing a metal creature resembling a dog of some kind. Did he make this? The design was beautiful, perfect, so it must be so. He looked around to see more and more such creatures, all inactive and wasting away silently in the frigid ground. He held his hand out in the air, and with surprising effort, was able to breathe some life into them all. Immediately the eyes of these creatures blared as pistons and gears creaked into a new life and sentience. One after another, these automatons rose and took ready, getting and grinding as they scanned their surroundings. They were made for war. Most resembled monsters, while others were merely sets of armor armed with swords ad spears made from the same metal as their own hardened flesh. This army stood by as if waiting for something, and Hephaestus shouted to them all.