splinteredstar | tiny original thing

You know, that “fairy tales are full of magical bullshit” post makes me think. Fairy tales and fantasy stories have Artifacts of Power tumbling out of the cupboards and clogging the drains. Millions of the fucking things just everywhere.

Which means someone has to make them. Swords that glow in the presence of evil and vials of liquid that change color when someone dies don’t just /happen/, you know.

A blacksmith pulls a sword out of the forge with runes carved into the brick - one of the runes flickers like a failing lightbulb until the blacksmith whacks it with a hammer. She sighs as she realizes that the spellwork fizzled at just thewrong time, and this sword probably will only glow in the presence of telemarketers. She holds it up against the nearest Evil Artifact (Gauntlet of Arkzami, made of dragon’s teeth and hide, sealed with the blood of a virgin, produced in batches of 20) just to be sure, but there’s not even the slightest glimmer.

Well, hells if she’s getting blamed for failed merch when the boss /said/ they’d fixed the fucking forge. She tosses the sword onto the reject bin and weaves around everyone else’s work, almost tripping over a messy stack of True Love detectors. (The things sell out fast as they can make ‘em, even with the mile-long legal notice they’ve got attached these days.) She resists the urge to kick one of them at the wizard carving them out of rose hips and silk, because he probably wouldn’t even notice. She’ll complain at him after she talks to the boss.

She can hear the boss shouting even before she reaches the wards that tell her they’re on the phone, and she inches closer to listen.

“Well, if her Glorious Mistress of the Darkness wants another charmed necklace,” the boss growls at whatever unfortunate soul is on the other side of the phone line, “Then she needs to pay her invoice for the last one! What, she says - no, it was /not/ faulty, it says /in the instructions/ that it glows when someone in the room wants to kill her. If it starts glowing whenever she enters a room, maybe she should stop pissing people off so fucking much!” A pause, and then an eloquent snort. “Oh, she’s threatening to make my skin boil with her Witchblood Amulet? Go ahead and try. Been a while since I’ve taken the spells apart on one of those. Nope, we’re done here. Pay up or I’m sending legal after you.” Another pause. Legal, the blacksmith knows, is mostly comprised of numerologists and demons, though she’s heard rumors that there’s a repo-dragon. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Pleasure doing business with you~”

The phone slams down and the wards around the office drop a moment later. The blacksmith pokes her head in, much less interested in shouting at the boss when they just had one of those kinds of calls. The boss looks up from glaring at an innocent piece of paper work, one paw over their face, and sighs through their claws. Their ear tufts look tangled, but she’s not gonna be the one to mention it.

“Is it the fucking forge again?” She nods. The boss buries their face in both of their front paws for a moment, and then crosses their arms. “It’s just the dectection rune, right?” She nods again. “All right, work on whatever you can, I’ll send Joly over once he’s done on the security wards.”

“Thanks, boss.” The boss waves her away with a forepaw. She ducks out into the shop again, glaring at the wizard who’s /still/ way too in the zone to notice he’s dropping charms everywhere. See if she covers his shift again.

Oh well. There’s an order of ever-sharp daggers she can work on until the ward-craft gets over here. She hits the forge again, almost affectionately, and grabs some blessed silver to start work up again.