He had to join his will to it and push through a faint resistance. Either the labyrinth’s suppression of spatial artifacts was increasing, or he was getting tired.
A moment later, a door opened in midair. It led onto a space that was much stranger than most void keys Lindon had seen.
A platform of stones hovered in the middle of an endless starry sky. Each of the stars were larger and clearer than usual, shining brightly from every direction. The stones themselves were large wedges that fit together into a circle about the size of a small room. Each wedge held a symbol that—
Lindon had to look away from the symbols because of a piercing pain in his head. They formed a script, he was sure, but they reminded him more of the runes in Suriel’s eyes. There was meaning there that he couldn’t pierce.
At the center of the platform of interlocking stones, there was a slab of dull metal. It resembled an altar more than an anvil, or perhaps half of a column. Inside that altar, a blue flame burned, visible through a small window. So perhaps it was more like a stove.
Lindon drew Suriel’s marble from his pocket and compared. As he’d suspected, the blue fire in his marble was eerily similar to the one blazing within the altar. Except the one here was many times bigger.
“Lindon, allow me to introduce you to the ultimate Soulsmithing tool: the Soulforge.”
Lindon reverently held his breath as he walked inside. He felt the world around him change as he stepped inside, in ways more than the physical. Echoes of creation filled the air. This was a place where wonders were born.
He paced around the anvil at the center, examining the stones, the flame, even the stars in the distance. “How does it work?” he asked.
Eithan beamed. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Lindon still couldn’t examine the huge paving-stones beneath his feet too closely, because the single rune carved on each of them was too overwhelming, but it was clear that the script-circle was focused on the anvil at the center.
And the anvil, if that’s what it was, was clearly the focus of all the creative energies in this space. In a mundane forge, you would heat up metal in the flame to make it malleable enough to shape, but that didn’t have much relevance to Soulsmithing.
He approached the center and felt the energy gathered above the altar-like anvil. There was little to see, but the air felt invisibly focused there, charged, as though waiting for something.
“I think anything you put there is…altered. Enhanced, maybe.” He knelt to look at the blue fire. “This fuels the effect somehow. I assume you have to burn something here? Soulfire?”
Eithan was about to answer, but Lindon cut him off as an idea occurred to him. “No…wait.” He pulled out the pearl necklace he had found earlier.
From Eithan’s proud smile, Lindon already knew he was right, but he tossed the necklace in anyway. The physical form of the necklace burned to ash in an instant, which dissolved to nothing with a hiss. But the flames strengthened.
Just to test it out, he tossed in some junk with no authority whatsoever. It burned up, but the flame didn’t change.
Lindon moved to his feet, full of confidence. “It takes objects with embedded authority and burns them, focusing it on whatever you’re making above the altar.”
Eithan applauded. “Very good! We say objects with invested authority or willpower are significant, but the terminology changes from place to place, so it’s not important. You’re so right it brings a tear to my eye.”
“But what does it do to the Soulsmithing?”
“In traditional Soulsmithing, Archlord artifacts are effectively the peak. There is no higher form of soulfire than that which Archlords produce, and spirits are usually raised past that stage artificially. Beings stronger than Archlords don’t often die and leave Remnants, you see.
“Even if you were fortunate enough to get a Herald or Monarch’s Remnant, or to raise a Remnant to be equivalent to a Herald, you would still be tempering it in Archlord soulfire. It would be only marginally better than an actual Archlord weapon.”
Eithan swept his arms around the Soulforge. “If you really want to perform Soulsmithing on a higher level, you need a way to imbue the authority and willpower of a greater existence into the item. That requires tools and locations on a superior tier of existence, which are few and far between. If you wanted to forge a Monarch a sword, for instance, you would want to do it on a battlefield in which Monarchs died, of which there are surpassingly few.
“This was a fairly ingenious solution, I will admit. A portable location that can increase the level of existence of projects worked here, allowing the manipulation of more advanced forces. It’s not quite as good as if you crafted a device in a significant location that suited the project, but it has the advantage of being universally compatible and mobile.”