Smiths of the Deep
Deep in the Forge Deep, the pocket of slowed time inside a volcano where heat never leaves and metals fuse that will not join anywhere else, the Smiths of the Deep keep their forges. They are master artisans who hold the Deep to be a temple and give centuries to a single work. Apprentices and artefact-makers descend to learn from them, and the first thing they are taught is that nothing there can be hurried.
Appearance
A Smith is broad and heavy, a little taller than a Dwarf and much broader than a Human, with the thick forearms of its craft. Its skin is like cooled lava: black and grey, rough, cracked in plates, and glowing orange-red in the cracks with the heat inside. The glow brightens when it works and dims when it rests. Its eyes are molten gold. It wears a leather apron, if anything, and its hands are its tongs.
It never hurries. Every movement is slow and complete, and a single hammer stroke from a Smith rings for minutes in the Deep’s thick air. It speaks rarely, in a low voice, each word weighed. It smells of sulphur and hot iron.
Habitat and Range
They live at their forges, some the size of halls, among the slow magma rivers and obsidian anvils of the cavern. A Deep holds a few Smiths, each with a forge and a work.
Behaviour and Temperament
Smiths are quiet and contemplative. They believe haste the enemy of perfection, and value patience, precision, and the sanctity of the craft above all. They think outsiders hasty and shallow, and say so without malice. They accept apprentices, slowly, and teach slowly; an apprentice who stays a week below may climb out to find decades or centuries gone above.
They are not hostile, but a Smith interrupted mid-work at a moment of joining is not forgiving, because a fault made then lasts forever.
Abilities
They do not age in the ordinary sense: they cool, over centuries, and draw sustenance from heat gradients and the energy released in forging. A Smith lives as long as it keeps forging. They can handle metal hot enough to melt a Human hand, and they know how to put will into a work: under the Deep’s law, the longer a smith labours at a thing, the more of their will and Pattern goes into it, and a blade worked for a decade remembers its maker.
Life Cycle
How Smiths begin is not known; some say they were mortal smiths who came down and never went up. A Smith that stops forging cools at last into stone, and the Deep is said to hold such statues, bent over unfinished work.
Uses and Dangers
What the Smiths make, and teach others to make, is what the Deep is known for: alloys that never rust, weapons that never dull, objects heavy with long intent. Their price is time, and every buyer or apprentice pays it in the world above.
Lore and Belief
Smiths in the world above tell of the Smiths of the Deep as the masters of their craft, and some smithies keep a seat empty for one at their feasts. Many believe a blade from the Deep has a will of its own; what it has is its maker’s long intent in it, which can feel the same in the hand.
A Deep-forged sword is the greatest prize a hero of the songs can carry, and the tales of such blades are tales of the wars they were carried into and the hands that stole them; some are said to have refused a thief’s grip.