Chapter 419: What I Want

Dorrik did not answer for a while, and I thought I might have presented an impossible challenge to him, but he reached back to the bench beside the forge and picked up the blade I had handed back to him, and he set it down in front of me.

"Look at it," he said. "Properly. With whatever senses you have."

I glanced at Dorrik and picked up the blade. I had felt the Law in it the first time I held it, although I had not known what the Law was because I had not looked at it closely... that had been a mistake, and it was time to fix it.

Most of my senses were sealed, but I was a Proto-Sovereign, and with Path Perception from the Law of Stillness, I was able to glimpse beyond the surface of things, and it did not take long for me to determine that whatever Law was inside here was not one that I recognized.

What I could tell was that it carried the presence of supreme sharpness, as if it could cut through anything, material or even immaterial. This was certainly very impressive, and I wondered how it would fare against my flesh.

The moment the thought entered my mind, I decided to apply it. Holding the blade in my right hand, I pointed the tip at my left palm and began to apply pressure slowly.

At first, the tip of the blade could not pierce my skin, so I applied more pressure; my palm began to cave inward, but there was no tear. So I stopped holding back and pushed the blade into my palm, and an unexpected humming sound arose from the blade; before I could hold back my strength, the blade pierced through my flesh but was stopped by the bone, causing a harsh metallic sound to ring out.

My eyes widened, and I pulled out the blade, looking at my palm that was not bleeding, and in a few seconds, I began to feel the wound itch as the Law of Flesh began mending the injury.

I heard the sound of Dorrik drawing in a deep breath, but I did not look at him; I had deliberately displayed this experiment in front of him. However, I did not forget the purpose for which I first received this blade.

When the blade had hummed and stabbed through my palm, I had been able to accurately sense the power of the Law inside it. I could have fought against that Law and prevented the blade from digging deep, but I did not, since it would go against my purpose.

In this manner, I was able to tell that the Law this blade carried was not inside of it.

I had assumed the blade was a vessel holding this Law, but that was not what I had just felt. The metal and the Law ran through one another like two threads twisted into a cord, and neither held the other. There was no boundary between them anywhere I could find, and no place where one stopped and the other began.

It was as if I was not holding a blade, but the Law itself.

"The Law is woven into the blade," I whispered with not a small amount of awe in my voice.

"No, what I did was to marry the Law to the blade." Dorrik took the blade and set it down by the bench. "This flame had served many forgemasters besides me, and they had all left the traces of the Laws they understood inside of it. I left that steel in the flame a long time, and waited for the right Law and the right steel to agree... and now they are one. A forgemaster makes this union possible... and if you broke this blade, you’d not release a Law; you’d kill one." He tapped the flat of it. "That’s the reason I do not want to create weapons, as every Law broken in this state can never be brought back."

I glanced at the blade again. "So, how is this different from what I want?"

Dorrik sighed. "This blade cannot be told anything; from the moment it chose to merge with the Law, it became a piece of a Law that happens to have an edge. I had no say in what form it would take; I only directed the merger."

"Then is there no way to hold a Law without waiting for a... marriage?"

Dorrik went very still. "No."

I frowned. "You haven’t heard the..."

"I heard all you have to tell me." He put both hands flat on the forge. "You want a place that takes hold of a Law and makes it obey you; that’s what you said. Bend them to your will."

I paused, then nodded. "Yes."

Dorrik chuckled. "That’s the Pivot, boy. You are describing what the fallen gods crave."

∞

I didn’t understand him for a moment, then I did, and I didn’t like it.

"That’s what it does," he said, and there was heat in his voice now, the first I had heard from him about anything. "That’s what the Dragon brought down out of the void and what’s been eating this world for three hundred years. It names something, and it ranks it, and it takes hold of it, and after that there is only the inevitable climb for more."

"I’m not..."

"You’ve a god of stone who can’t be in his own stone any more because it has been decided where he’s allowed to stand by forces he cannot understand. You’ve got a whole ladder of the biggest bastards that ever lived, all of them fitted into their allotted place, all of them doing as they’re told and calling it order." He jabbed a finger at the blade. "And you sit in my hall and ask me to build a box that does that to a Law, on purpose... for you?!"

"That’s not what I..."

"It stinks of it," Dorrik said. "That’s not an insult, and I’m not calling you a liar. I’m telling you what my hands would be doing. I do not know how long you have had that thing in your soul, but the way you see the world has changed."

I sat with that, and I knew that he was right. The System was a tool of binding, and I had just described something that sounded very much like it.

But he was also wrong. I was not trying to build a cage for Laws. I was trying to build a workshop where I could learn to wield them.

"Dorrik," I said slowly, "I am not trying to bind a Law as you think. I am trying to understand it... I am trying to become it. The System binds from the outside. It reaches in, takes hold of something that is already there, and forces it into a shape it can control. That is not what I want."

He was quiet, and I felt the weight of his attention settle on me. I had to get this right.

"What I want is to reach inside myself and find the shape of the Law that is already there. I want to become it, the way a river takes the shape of the canyon it carves. The System is a cage, and for me, a Grimoire is a forge. One traps the Law, the other shapes the soul that wields it. That’s the difference."