Church of the Anvil

Forged, not made¶

Onigma is the Unbroken, and his church makes a claim no other faith in Valdrin dares to make: that it can be checked.

Flesh is clay. Weak, fleeting, and shaped by whatever leans on it hardest. Only iron and fire temper a soul, the body is a vessel to be reforged rather than a gift to be preserved, and every hammer strike is a prayer in the plainest sense, which is that it is the actual liturgy. An Ironite congregation at worship is a working forge. There is no other kind of service.

And then there is the evidence. Corruption gets no purchase on dwarven flesh. Not slowly, not rarely, never, and the Church has an explanation ready: dwarves were forged, and forged well, and the other peoples were merely made. Rot cannot widen a crack in good work because good work has no crack to widen. Every dwarf who walks out of a foul place carrying nothing home in the blood is another line in the argument, and the argument has been running for three thousand years without losing one.

What the doctrine costs everyone else¶

The trouble arrives the moment a non-dwarf takes the faith seriously, which happens more often than the holds like to admit.

If forging is what makes a soul unbreakable, and a human can be turned by a bad season in a bad valley, then the human is not badly forged. He is unforged, and the Church has no gentle word for that. The doctrine is not written to exclude anyone. It simply arrives at exclusion on its own, in front of everybody, every time it is stated carefully.

Ironite chaplains outside the holds spend most of their working lives on this one problem, and the answer they have settled on is the hardest thing the faith asks: a man who was not forged may still be forged, by his own hand, over a life, at the anvil, and nothing about that will be quick or comfortable or finished.

The measure of a thing¶

The crafts carry the same conviction, and this is where the Church touches every market in Valdrin whether or not anyone in it believes.

The highest compliment an Ironite can pay a piece of work is not that it is beautiful. It is that the maker is four generations dead and the thing is still in daily use. Beauty is an opinion. Service is a fact, and a fact tested by time is the closest thing to a sacrament the Church recognises.

Emberday and the Great Forging are the holy days. On the first no fire is lit anywhere for any purpose, so that everyone remembers what the forge is worth. On the second every forge in the hold burns for a day and a night, and the work made in those hours is never sold.

Living beside it¶

Ironites are the finest smiths, masons and engineers you can employ, and the most exhausting to manage, because they will not do a thing quickly if doing it quickly means doing it once.

Order a wall in a season and an Ironite will tell you what the wall will cost in five years, and he will be right, and he will still be there in five years to point at it. This is not obstruction. It is the entire theology, expressed as a delivery date, and no bonus you offer will move it.