Frostbitten Wayfarer

A forge was a complicated creation, Zoe knew. She had some experience working with them in Flester before and had seen a few made in videos in her past life. At their core, a forge was two things. A bloomery — essentially an oven hot enough to melt iron. And somewhere to hammer the iron into form.

Simple in theory, but in execution not so much. If Zoe intended to melt hematite down into iron blooms, then hematite wouldn’t be a great material to use. Clay — or ceramic, she supposed, was a great material for it. But making clay structures was something that Zoe had never done before aside from a few classes in school.

Zoe decided that she’d build her first attempt outside, away from her cave just in case something went wrong. And she expected things to go wrong. She’d used bloomeries before, but never had she made one herself. She understood for the most part how they were made — clay formed into shape, dried out and then fired to harden.

But it was something she’d never done before. And that wasn’t even counting where she planned to get the charcoal. She could go buy some from Flester, but she had a massive pile of logs to burn through too and had just as good an understanding of the charcoal making process as she did the bloomery making process.

She decided to start with making charcoal. If she couldn’t at least do that, then there’d be no point to building her own forge. Zoe dug a pit into the ground a few dozen feet away from her cave, and then lined it with stone to keep the fire from spreading through roots that she might have missed in her pit.

Then, Zoe chopped up some of the logs she was storing near her home into large chunks and filled her pit with them and started the fire up with her firestarter gem.

Zoe watched the wood burn for a few hours and waited for it to turn black. In the presence of oxygen, wood completely combusts, turning to ash. The trick, Zoe thought, would be to let the fire burn away the majority of oils and water left in the wood and then cover it. When the wood began to turn black, Zoe covered it with more stone and sealed the fire off.

She made her way over to the river and started to dig up some of the clay with her Earth and stored it away in her bracelet. With the combination of her Earth skill and storage bracelet it was simple to gather pure clay, and Zoe hoped that pure clay was better than whatever the impurities did to it.

Would mixing in some ash from the charcoal process help make it stronger? Zoe had no idea but decided against it. Clay had a high melting point and firing it made it strong. Ash didn’t, as far as she knew. Mixing ash in would be an unfounded experiment.

She remembered reading about bone china in the past, where bones were mixed into the clay. But she wasn’t sure if it made them better. It might have made them look better but not be as strong? The whole process was confusing to her.

Zoe sat down on the ground not far from the river and began summoning clay that she molded into rings and piled on top of each other. Near the bottom Zoe made a platform for the hematite and charcoal to sit on and added a small spout for her to provide air through.

The next week flew by as Zoe waited for her charcoal pit to cool down and the makeshift bloomery she made to dry off. She spent the time relaxing in her cave and adding carved decorations into all the stone doors, each one related to the room. On her bedroom door was a rudimentary image of a bed with somebody sleeping in it, with ‘Z’s floating up off of them. On the kitchen was a pot with a roaring fire below it.

Zoe wasn’t sure what to do with the library, since it was also where her water was and where her enchanting room would be when she got to the second floor proper. But she decided on a waterfall with a book in front of it. The image didn’t turn out too well and Zoe wasn’t sure if anybody else would even recognize it for what it was, but she could try again another day.

At the end of the week, Zoe pulled up the stone and found a large pile of blackened charcoal, much to her surprise. She understood the theory but was surprised to find it to be such a simple process to do. Some of the bits were still solid in the middle when she tried to snap them in half, but many were brittle charcoal that crumbled with the slightest pressure.

The harder bits she could use for cooking, maybe. And the brittle charcoal would be great for her bloomery, she hoped.

Zoe walked over to the river and checked on her bloomery, it was still standing just where she’d left it and was dry to the touch. It had been dry to the touch for almost the entire week, but Zoe was hoping it was at least dry enough inside to not crack or shatter if she lit a fire in it.

She dumped some wood into the top of the bloomery and ignited it with her firestarter. There wasn’t much, she wasn’t trying to fire the clay just yet, just help dry it out a little bit more before the proper firing. The fire licked at the top of the bloomery, and Zoe kept feeding it from the spout below with her Wind.

The fire flickered away in her bloomery for a few hours as Zoe kept feeding it more wood whenever it burned too low, and Zoe didn’t notice any cracks to worry about.

When she felt satisfied the clay was dry enough, Zoe built up a stone shelter around it with slits at the bottom and filled the bottom of it with dry wood. She ignited the wood, and spent another few hours feeding the large stone structure with wood and air from her Wind.

The fire rocketed out the top of her stone structure and covered the bloomery in heat. She wasn’t able to see the bloomery, but hoped that it wasn’t exploding. There were no loud noises from inside her stone structure so she was hopeful that it worked out fine.

After many hours of burning, Zoe broke down the stone structure and stomped out the remnants of the fire. The clay bloomery was still standing, and while most of it was still intact, there were a few noticeable cracks that Zoe thought might cause problems. One large split down almost the entire height was the most concerning.

Zoe decided to give it a try anyway and a few days later returned to the bloomery with a storage bracelet full of charcoal chunks. She filled the bloomery almost to the top with her charcoal and then lit a small fire underneath it in the hole at the bottom.

The fire crept up the charcoal, and Zoe noticed bits of flame poke out of the cracks. She pushed more clay in to fill the cracks, but more kept smashing through with each attempt. Zoe grimaced, and continued letting the bloomery burn while she flooded the bottom with Wind.

When it was roaring, Zoe summoned some hematite into the bloomery with Earth and covered it with more charcoal. Hours flew by as Zoe kept managing the flames that leaked out through cracks and topped up the bloomery with more hematite and charcoal.

After she was done, Zoe let the fire die down a bit and then pulled the white hot metal-like stone at the bottom out with her Earth and set it down on a slab of stone she summoned next to her. Zoe summoned her heavy hammer from her storage bracelet and pounded away at the iron bloom.

With her first hit, the white hot bloom split in half and she grimaced. She put half of it back into the fire and topped it up with a little more charcoal to keep it at a good temperature. The remaining half, she kept hammering away at.

The bloom cut into the stone below and Zoe had to keep building it back up with her Earth to keep it from destroying the slab. With each swing of her hammer, shards of slag shattered off and landed on the ground around her. The odd shard landed on her dress and burned through it to her skin below, but Zoe fixed up both herself and her dress with Restoration then carried on.

Even more hours passed as Zoe continued managing the fire and heating up the blooms as she hammered away at them. She’d put one back in the fire and pull the other out to keep working on it, then switch when they cooled down too much.

By the end, she was left with two tiny chunks of wrought iron about the size of her finger. Nowhere near the yield she would expect from the more established setups she’d used back in Flester, and hardly enough to make something useful.

Zoe continued heating the metal chunks and forged both of them into small handles she’d use on her dresser’s drawers and then tore down her bloomery.

She needed to do more research before she made her own forge, she’d realized. She had hoped that it would be simpler. Heat up the metal and hammer away at it to squish all the impurities out. But minimizing the impurities to begin with required a bloomery that wasn’t quite so shoddy, she supposed.

Or maybe enchantments. There were without a doubt enchantments she could use to make her bloomery run better, but she wasn’t sure which skills she had that would do it.

Either way, Zoe put her forge on the backburner. She tried her best and it didn’t work, and that was okay. She didn’t really need a forge in her cave anyway.

Zoe spent the next few months by the river trying to get a Water Manipulation skill, and just before the end of summer she finally succeeded, and then quickly upgraded it to a general Water skill.

*Ding* You have unlocked the Water Manipulation general skill.

*Ding* The Water Manipulation general skill has been upgraded to the Water general skill.

As soon as she got her new skill, Zoe packed up everything she cared about in her cave and left. She had her fun, but the failure of Moaning Point still stood over her and she wanted to rectify it.

The run to Gafoda was fun this time. Seeing how much quicker it was with her new levels and experience made her feel a sense of pride within herself. On her first run over it took her almost six days of running non stop. But this time, the distant mountain seemed to grow so quick as she rushed towards it.

People flew by on the road. Caravans from merchants, a few lone travellers who dragged magic and power behind them. Zoe even saw a group off in the distance through the trees but ignored them. If they weren’t going to bother her when she was lower level, they wouldn’t care about her when she was far faster and much more competent.

Maybe if they knew how much was in her storage bracelet they’d think about bothering her. But was it worth pestering some random nobody in the hopes that they happened to be carrying significant wealth on them? No, that was silly. You’d be a Problem with a capital ‘p’ and somebody would come deal with you. They didn’t have a history of bothering random people on the road, and thinking they’d start now just for Zoe was arrogant at best and paranoid at worst.

She arrived at Gafoda in the middle of the third day, the late summer sun high above and shining down on the town. Gafoda had changed a lot since she was last there. There were almost a dozen new wooden buildings built, and the beginnings of a wooden fence was stretched around the border.

Zoe walked in and wandered through Gafoda for a bit. Before she started climbing the mountain again, Zoe wanted to get some Restoration training in. She asked around a few of the shops and found a small building that an alchemist had set up at who was leaving in a few days. Zoe offered them ten gold for the building when they left, and they agreed.

She spent the days wandering around the lower area of Moaning Point and helping out people who were stuck out in the forest and telling them about her clinic that was opening soon. The inn that Zoe had stayed at last time was still open, but under new ownership it seemed and she stayed there.

On the alchemist’s final day, Zoe took the keys and checked out what she had to work with. The alchemist had taken everything with them from what Zoe saw. She was left with two empty rooms. A larger one at the front of the building, and a smaller one through a door near the back.

Zoe summoned the three chairs she had in her bracelet as well as the wooden table and placed them down in the front of the shop. Outside she hung a wooden sign she made with a carving of a cartoon-esque broken bone and the word ‘healing’ at the top. On the door she hung another sign she made.

Healing for injuries from the past day. Pay what you want.

Zoe wasn’t sure exactly how long ago her Restoration would restore things from, but in her experience a day was fine for injuries, though their clothes wouldn’t be repaired at that point. But Zoe wasn’t sure she wanted to restore people’s clothes anyway. They could go support the other local businesses for all she cared.

In the backroom, Zoe summoned her bed and a small dresser with some of the clothes that she decided to bring. Her green dress, one of the lighter jackets and a handful of shirts, pants and skirts.

She sat down at one of the chairs in the main room lit by the morning sun and waited for people to wander in. With all of the advertising she’d done on the previous few days she hoped there would be a steady stream of people to help.

Or maybe that was a little mean, since she was hoping for people to be injured. But the reality was people were being injured, she was just hoping they’d choose her to help them.

The morning passed and Zoe watched people walk past her open door as they rushed about town. Early in the afternoon an older man walked in with a limp. Blood dripped from his leg that dragged behind him. His face was covered in dirt and his brown hair was clumped together with dark splotches.

He looked up at Zoe. “Healing?”