Burning time

The sound of pounding steel and roaring flames was deafening. Rory's shirt was drenched in sweat when he walked away from the kiln, only to dry anew as he shoved his half forged blade back into the flames, the hair on his arms nearly singed as the fire leaped out from the new opening he made to insert his metal. He was exhausted, but he chugged what little water he had, and kept pushing. He only had so much time to forge a knife in order to satisfy the judges. Time was ticking, and his opponents were well along in their forging as well. He knew he didn't have to make one faster, just better - but seeing and hearing their process only served to push him to move faster regardless.

Each time he pulled the red hot steel from the flames and ran it below his hammers, its shape was drawn out, thinned, and strengthened. It was a careful process - beating the steel when it was cold would not only make forming more difficult, it would weaken it, breaking the bonds between the molecular structure of the blade, making it more likely to crack or break once fully formed. Too hot, and the steel would burn, creating charred bubbles in the metal, effectively making it useless. Drawing the blade too thin would cause it to bend, warp, or break, while leaving it too thick would make it unwieldy, or unsuitable for cutting. It needed to be a precise size and shape if it had any hope of being useful, much less good.

But being on a time limit made that difficult. They had only been given a matter of hours to melt down materials and forge their blades, when normally it took a matter of days if they wanted to maintain any sense of quality. This was a single shot - if anything went wrong in the process, there was no time for second chances.

As the second hour passed, Rory witnessed this happen to several of the participants, and slowly the number of smiths dwindled as one blade after another failed them somewhere along the forging process. But Rory pressed on. His blade was far from perfect - it had two cracks near the middle of the blade, though they were minor, and a very slight warp as well. But these were problems that could be fixed during grinding. Warps could be bent back into place, and cracks could be strengthened or eroded, depending on how deep they ran.

The pressure was almost as intense as the flames of their fires, but the reward was worth the sweat and pain. A lifetime of being the king's blacksmith meant a lifetime of work and comfortable pay. Rory would gladly participate in this competition a hundred times for those honors.