Lucian Kiln-Tender's Arc

Chapter 2 of 1

The harpoon was gone south with Velar, but the armor stayed with Lucian. He had forged it from thin silicon-carbon plates, light enough for low gravity, hardened in his silicate quench. On the bench it looked strong. That meant nothing. A hammer tap tells you one thing. A Gloomstalker's charge tells you the truth. Lucian could not fake that charge. He needed a real one, in a real place, against a real beast. So he found a hunter who worked where the beasts were. Neth Frostcave was a hunter with dark grey skin and black eyes. Lucian found him scraping blue toxin from fungus gills at the edge of a grove. His hands glowed faint green with the work. He did not look up when Lucian approached with the armor bundle. "A white one dens in the tundra cave," Neth said. "Big. Slow to spook." He sealed a toxin flask. "You want it to hit your armor. I want it dead. We both get the cave." They went together across the frozen grassland. The cave mouth wore ice teeth and a cold blue glow. Inside, moss lit the walls in pale green and cyan. Neth strapped the plates on. The armor hung well on their slender frame. It weighed almost nothing. Lucian felt a hope he did not trust. The white Gloomstalker came from the dark without a sound. It was pale as frost, long and low, with white eyes and broad silent wings. Neth raised a toxin spear. The beast charged. It struck Neth full in the chest. The armor held the first blow. Neth flew back and hit the stone floor hard. Lucian saw the plates flex and spring whole. For one breath he thought the quench had won. Then the Gloomstalker crawled forward and closed its jaws on Neth's arm. It shook him like a tundrahare. It slammed him into the cave wall, again, then again. Lucian heard the crack. Not bone. Metal. A plate split along the shoulder seam. Another buckled at the ribs. The armor came apart in pieces across the stone. Neth drove the spear into the beast's throat. The toxin did not work. The Gloomstalker shuddered and went into the dark evading death once again. Neth lay gasping among broken plates, bruised but alive. The armor had failed. Lucian knelt and gathered the shards. He turned a split plate in his hand. The crack did not run through the quench line. It ran through the metal itself. The silicate had held. The alloy had not. His quench was sound. His steel was too brittle for a charge like that. "Light enough," Neth said, sitting up slow. "Not strong enough." "No," Lucian said. He closed his fist on the broken plate. The quench was never the problem. The metal was. He needed a new alloy, one that could bend under a Gloomstalker's jaws and not shatter. He had his answer. He did not have his armor.