In the most technical sense, there had never been a king of Equestria.
The title -- there had been those who'd claimed it during the chaos of the Discordian Era, and those ponies generally hadn't done all that well in enforcing it: it was hard to claim absolute dominion over any amount of land when any given moment could see it turn into water. And during the Unification, when the sisters had been trying to stitch all the little pieces of the continent into the fabric of a single nation... well, that had been the time for every possible variety of egotistical idiot to turn their hooves towards conquest. When it came to recording the names of the thankfully-defeated, 'King' sounded just as stupid as 'Our Most High Exalt Above All (Especially Those Two Freaks)', although it did have the benefit of being considerably shorter.
There had also been a few concessions made to the original self-claimed 'noble houses' (which was usually just those families who had managed to stabilize their lands for the longest period) in exchange for their territory's inclusion within the new nation, and quite a bit of that had been the retention of titles: the nature of fully-independent selections was the lingering reason for the crazy-quilt offerings of the modern day. Some of those had dropped by the wayside along the trail of centuries: in particular, 'Prince' had quickly fallen out of favor. It was currently only being used by the most egotistical, stupid or with one relatively local example, both: everypony else had realized that their personal lack of both horn and wings took something away from the title's hoped-for impact. But when it came to kings... that had never really been in fashion. There were Princesses, and so for the nobles of Equestria, the use of anything which, at least in other nations, would have suggested a station above them... no.
So there had never been a king of Equestria, not when it came to the nation as a single, united entity (minus Prance). It just felt stupid.
Also, stallion blacksmiths existed and so when it came to the existence of petty dictators who treated the most minor offense committed in their terrority as a reason to call for multiple executions, kings were more or less redundant.
How to describe Barding? Most ponies wouldn't, because doing so required getting close enough for a long look at him and if you did that, you were probably in attack range. (Technically, the smith's domain stopped at the door to the smithy itself and like just about every other technicality, that one tended to escape him. The same could be said for most of the fleeing ponies.) The majority of the palace staff regarded him as being something like a moat monster, only with about two percent of the inherent geniality. There were arguments to be made that you didn't really need one, the ideal location for any you'd made the mistake of bringing in was much further away from the outer walls, and you still spent most of your time waiting for it to turn on you.
For the few who had seen him... it was just about impossible to determine whether he was bearing a near full-body coating of minor burns, or if his fur just naturally displayed the multiple hues of char. (There was a way to settle it, but hardly anypony had risked getting close enough for the determining sniff.) His grooming was perfectly even, at least in the sense that if nothing had been done to any portion of his form, then clearly an equal lack of effort applied everywhere. The eyes were the fierce red of a half-banked fire, his temper was always ready to surge towards the melting point, and you couldn't really watch for the lashing of his tail as a warning sign because he never gave anypony that much notice. Also, when it came to a visible tail, he really didn't have one. The smithing life had certain requirements, and chief among those was the protective garment draped over Barding's back. It stretched far enough along his spine to cover the tail -- or rather, the little bare extension of flesh and bone, because there was fire in a smithy and Barding really didn't feel like dragging around a fashionable fall of wicks. The tail had been deliberately shaved, the mane was gone, and nopony had ever felt comfortable enough to ask about the eyebrows.
He was well-muscled, which really said something when the statement was being applied to an earth pony. Even with the reinforcement provided by his mark's magic, his hooves still tended towards chips and minor cracks from all the hammering he had to do: something which didn't exactly put him in a good mood. Nopony had ever seen Barding in a good mood. The modern day had seen more eclipses than facial mood demonstrations from a visibly-happy Barding and given that an eclipse was an annual event which required the full magical attention of both sisters to arrange, nopony had any true concept of what it might take to make Barding happy. The most frequent guess was the death of every single living entity on the planet.
(Technically, this would leave him with nopony to make things for, but it also meant he wouldn't be dealing with the inherent stupidity of anypony's requests. It was generally agreed that having Barding as the sole survivor would leave a smith merrily humming at his forge for about two days, which was roughly the amount of time required for him to die from dehydration. Most ponies would have lasted longer, but it was exceptionally hot in that area and with everypony else dead, there would be none who could remind him to drink.)
Barding perceived the palace as a place which could host a forge: just about every other function was presumed to be incidental. He regarded the majority of ponies as loud things which didn't know how metal worked and so mostly got in the way. He was extremely, almost terminally single, because he had yet to find anything he loved so much as iron. (Equestria had the concept of 'clockwork automaton', mostly from Mazein: the majority of the local fantasy-based refinements had come from considering what Barding might find attractive in a partner.) And when it came to the Princesses...
The smithy was legally part of Equestria and, on that level which could only be recognized by the devotion of a soul which hadn't read the actual manual, still existed as a separate kingdom: one with a heavy emphasis on 'king'. Barding mostly recognized the rule of the Diarchy as something which regularly provided him with work while signing off on his pay vouchers. They regularly updated the smithy with the best of tools, always made sure he had access to the most current advancements and so as vassals went, they weren't all that bad. He was also utterly devoted to getting paid (especially for those few bits of work which could be seen as something other than stupid), because his kingdom didn't do much in the way of taxation.
And with Princess Celestia -- if Barding could have been said to truly love any mare, then when it came to the elder alicorn, you still wouldn't have been able to say it. But he did feel a certain degree of affection towards her, as he would with the most favored of tools. Because just about everypony on the palace staff knew that Celestia could generate heat -- not relocate or focus: create -- and when it came to the operation of a forge, having somepony around who could precisely set the temperature at will was a true blessing. Barding thought so fondly of the Solar Princess that on the best days, he actually let her stand in the doorway.
(Luna, whose flares of temper were known to spread ice, had been banned.)
He didn't let ponies into the smithy, because it was his. Barding understood how the tools worked, when the endless hunger of the forge needed to be fed and how to bank that fire in the name of necessity. Metal spoke to him through the half-hammered ingots of his mark, and that was most of what he needed: metal and a place to work it. Alone, because nopony else could truly understand unless they were a smith and if that was true, then they usually had their own forge. (Barding understood the concept of 'apprentice' and given what the learning process could do to his precious stores of metal, also understood it as something which needed to take place at a great distance.) He worked alone, he didn't entertain visitors so much as he punished intrusion and if you really wanted something done, you got a unicorn to float the written request towards the corkboard near the doorway while praying he didn't notice, because there was a chance that he would treat the corona's light as a distraction. In the Kingdom Of Smithy, distractions were punishable by death or, once Barding got out into the hallway, a very long chase.
Barding didn't allow ponies into his smithy. That wasn't just policy: it was law. The Princesses understood that or rather, unknown to Barding, they mostly put up with it because he was so good at his job as to be allowed some degree of leeway. Besides, all things considered, it was better to have him in the palace -- and there was an extra reason for that, one the blacksmith was no longer capable of understanding. The Solar and Lunar staffs (because the smith worked so many hours as to be considered part of both) understood that the death threats were just part of the routine: placing Barding into the city would eventually leave him explaining his rather interesting concept of territoriality to the police.
Ponies weren't allowed in the smithy. Everypony knew that.
And so after the latest provocation born of purest insanity had been explained to him, a split-second after he'd started to move on the intruder -- Princess Celestia had pointed out what, to any other pony, would have been the fully obvious. The moment after that had seen Barding's body seized within her field, levitated towards the doorway to Equestria as his desperately-clenching jaw had failed to clamp any level of anchor, and now...
He was in the hallway, in her domain. And in one sense, the Princess was being fair: from another, she was abusing linguistics to the point of sentencing terminal syllables to another form of death. For there was nopony in his smithy.
Technically, when it came to the status implied by 'nopony', the centaur didn't count.
It had been hours. He'd spent most of them with yellow blazing around his body while fire surged from his eyes, watching as a monster worked with his tools. Poorly worked and somehow, that had actually turned into the lesser offense. The truest insult came in what it was doing to the metal.
The Princess had attempted excuse: the claim was that the monster had brought knowledge with it from that unnamed distant land, a new way of working steel -- and because it was a non-smith talking about metal, he'd done his best to ignore all of it. But she was forcing him to watch...
Hours: the monster had the day off from its Guard training to do this. The Princess kept adjusting his neck to make sure he was observing the proceedings, and had already needed to pry his eyelids open twice because there was a basic means of defense and she wasn't letting him use it. At one point, while he'd still been able to talk, he'd irritably reminded the alicorn that it had been hours and there was a certain need for a restroom trench: this brilliant strategy had seen him released just long enough to get two hoofsteps into his furious charge and after that, she'd carried him to the facilities and used her body to block the door.
He was being forced to watch, as metal was abused. Tortured.
(Part of him wanted to watch. It was the same part which needed to. He'd never tried to ignore that bit of his soul before, block his inner hearing against something softer than a whisper...)
And the Princess wasn't the only one talking. The monster kept trying to explain.
It was a rather halting form of speech and just like what the monster was doing to the metal, it kept folding back on itself. It occasionally wound up trying to explain the same thing three times, which gave Barding some extra work in trying to ignore it. But he was being made to watch it work, or at least what the monster falsely thought work was. And when he had to watch...
It was supposed to be a trained blacksmith: that was what the Princess had claimed. The best possible way to see that was as insult, because there was trained, and then there was marked. It had no mark for the work: it had no mark at all and when he'd pointed that out, the Princess had gently explained that the thing would never have one. And that might be fine (or rather, exist as a barely-recognized nightmare) for those in the other nations, but this was his forge. There was a markless monster tending his fire. Working with his tools, as best it could -- and that was with no skill at all.
Well... strictly speaking, nopony would have reasonably expected it to work with those tools. When it came to the items which were made to be worn over the hooves, nothing had been custom-fitted for the monster's ridiculous dimensions. For hoof diameter, it was just about as large as the Princess. Other items had been designed for jaw grips, and what kind of jaw did that thing have, anyway? The face was just about purely vertical! You needed the bulge of a snout to have a proper jaw, and the monster's bulges were lower, plural, and stuck out so far as to get in the way of just about everything.
The bulges also took up extra room in his forge, and so they were just as offensive as the rest of the monster.
In an attempt to compensate for the monster's anatomical weaknesses, a number of foreign tools had been brought into the forge: an act which had made Barding wonder if there was something worse than the death penalty. But there weren't that many of those unwelcome items, because the availability hadn't been there. Some hoof work was being done, using whatever degree of shielding which could be achieved -- but most of the blasphemous attempt at 'smithing' required the monster's arms. That meant tools made for bipeds, and there was no smithy like that in the city. The monster was, in terms of what it was able to use in abusing the metal, improvising.
The process itself, however... that was exacting.
It was also insane.
There had been a sturdy box, something which could withstand the heat of the forge. The monster had packed the interior of the box with charcoal, something which clearly made no sense whatsoever because fuel went on the outside. And to further demonstrate its state as something which should not exist, it had followed that up with the open working of necromancy.
It had to be necromancy. There was no other possible reason for the monster to be using bone.
There were bones in his smithy. Or rather, once the monster had finished with it, there was bone dust. The Princess had told him that the remains had come from the butcher shop in the Heart: the griffon had been rather surprised by such a specific request, but the butcher was close friends with Sizzler and was always happy to accommodate the operator of the meat station. (That was another little kingdom within the palace, one where the borders were maintained by the fact that most ponies were too sickened by the concept for casual approach.) So the bones were supposedly those of the monsters which griffons used for meat: samples too large to be used as pet treats. Barding, who tended to view skeletons as armor's most basic support structure and was now completely sure that the monster was controlling Princess Celestia's mind because an alicorn who would let a monster into his smith clearly wasn't thinking straight, was prepared to treat all of it as a lie. There was a chance that the bones weren't from a pony. It was about the same as his chance of pushing through the field and getting away to sound the alarm.
The Princess had let a monster into his smithy. She was just watching it. Forcing him to do the same.
He'd been part of the team which had evacuated the armory while Tirek had been on the approach, voluntarily working with others for the first time in his life because there was enchanted metal in there and while the enchantments could presumably be recast, he hadn't been able to bear the thought of something happening to the metal. They'd just barely gotten all of it into the tunnels, and the success had only been possible because of a distraction. A distraction named Barding, who'd voluntarily gone out to serve as appetizer while the true meal was brought to safety. And now there was a monster working with metal, in his smithy, a process which could only be torture and necromancy and abuse, something it was already inflicting upon the dead because the bones had been shattered. It had broken them with what seemed to be a casual effort from those hideous hands, and then it had taken a mortar and ground them down. The remnants had been packed into the box with the charcoal, the metal had been added while the monster had half-stammered something nonsensical, which the hissing translator had eventually falsely rendered as carbon microtubes...
That had been after the smelting. It had smelted its own ingot, disrupting the process from the moment of the metal's corrupt birth. It had brought in leaves at one point, saying something about carburizing additives. But the ingot had gone into a box filled with the death of the world, the monster had heated the whole thing for a while at a temperature too low to do anything real, and then the metal had come out of the box.
It was easy to see where the metal had been corrupted (and whatever the penalty was beyond a death sentence, he now needed something past that). The steel had darkened, gone blue and black with hints of purple, with all the unwelcome hues in mottled non-patterns which could only exist when the natural order had been perverted. The only reason why a monster existed at all.
The Princess couldn't hold him forever. Eventually, her concentration would slip, and then he could -- all right, it wasn't as if he had any friends in the palace because metal sufficed, but there were other blacksmiths in the city. His lessers would understand, at least after he'd explained it for the fifth time. Enough blacksmiths spreading the word and everypony would understand --
-- but it had already been hours. And for so much of that time following the necromancy, the monster had been doing the same thing.
It heated the metal, to the point where the corrupted ingot glowed with a fire to match the rage in Barding's heart. Once the steel was ready, the monster hammered it: something which might almost look natural, if you didn't know about the evil which had already been inflicted.
But then the monster folded the metal.
It was a careful process: heat, hammer to about half-thickness, then turn the steel back on itself until there was something approximating the size and shape of the original ingot. The corrupted metal was then returned to the forge, reheated, and once it was malleable, the whole thing began again.
It did this over and over and over.
And it sickened Barding to watch. It made his head hurt while it produced a feeling of ever-deepening nausea, something which was accompanied by an inexplicable twinging from his flanks. The combination of sensations was something he had never experienced before, because he was a pony who lived by his mark. He often did so to the point of obsession, had nothing approaching a life outside the forge, and so Barding could be described as one of the fallen: a pony whose personality had collapsed into his talent, addicted to the joy produced through exercising his deepest magic. Not the worst of them, not to the point where he was no longer capable of considering the consequences of following his desires at all times -- but on the level where a smithy had to become its own kingdom, because the world outside simply felt too strange.
It was possible to rescue the fallen, bringing their minds and lives back into some form of balance. But that was something which required connection, and the acknowledgement of existence beyond the mark. (Barding had never recognized how many ponies had been sent to the forge in the name of trying to get him outside it for a simple drink: he only knew that he'd been chasing away more intruders than usual.) Until he could be saved, he had to be kept where he could be watched, and so the sisters had decided the palace was the safest place for him.
He was deeply connected to his mark. Too deeply, and that was something which had a price. But there was also a benefit, one he experienced more than most. It was a sensation which generations of pony scholars had tried to describe, and all had failed because it was both universal and unique. But to use the most base terms...
In the most base terms, it could be said that within the deepest level of his soul, a talent watched closely. It did so when its possessor would not. It did its best to recognize what was happening: even if metal was being corrupted, the process had to be learned just to prevent it from ever happening again. But the more it observed, the more the talent wanted to understand. And as the steel's hues changed, as it was folded over and over, when acids were applied for no reason the pony cared to think about... the talent did its best to convey what it was seeing to its bearer, and found communication which existed at a level both above and below words bouncing back. Something which triggered an ever-increasing internal imbalance.
There was a monster pretending to be at work in his forge. It had its hair tied back and bundled into an oversized bun: similar precautions had been taken with the blonde tail. It was wearing protective garments, clumsily-stitched ones rendered from the leftovers of a hundred smithing pieces: the seams overlapped everywhere, and the monster was having visible trouble getting a full range of motion with its elbows. The flexibility of poorly-made gloves was even worse.
It had its flanks similarly protected, sometimes jumped back as flying embers came down too close to its hooves, and the weight of that impact made the entire smithy shake. It had to wipe the sweat away from its forehead far too often, for it had no fur to absorb the first portion of flow.
The monster was sweating, and so its natural scent increased. An odor which was nothing like that which had arisen from Tirek, a blast of stench which had lingered in Barding's nostrils long after his drained body had collapsed -- but this was a female, and so the scent had a reason to be different. It was still the scent of a monster, something which had to be one of the reasons he felt so ill...
It wasn't.
Barding was a stallion who had spent his life listening to his mark, and so had no familiarity with the disruption which arose when a pony first tried to ignore it.
The monster had finished.
There was a single flattened rectangle of thin-hammered cooled metal strongly braced against the wall. If it had been reflective, the panel would have been just about large enough to serve as a mirror. But there were too many distortions for that, not all of which had been produced by the necromancy's corruptive hues.
The surface of the tainted work was... odd. There was a pattern woven into it, something which felt far too random to have been deliberate. It was like looking at the surface of a contour map which measured elevation changes in tail strands, or watching the flow of a million miniature rivers. Other portions of the mottling had rendered a visual effect which bore more resemblance to teardrops, and Barding understood the metal to be weeping for its fate.
"I'm sorry," the monster lied, sighing a little as it wiped the back of its poorly-gloved hand against its forehead again. "It's... not as good as it should be." The bare skin was now being underlit by rising red. "I haven't done this before by myself, not from first step to last. And I could have folded it a few more times, and the tools..." The blush was flowing faster than the sweat. "...I know that's not anyone's -- anypony's fault, but -- I should have done more with what I had. I couldn't figure out how to adjust for everything, and --"
"-- we'll get better tools," the Princess gently broke in. "Perhaps Barding can make them for you, after you sketch out your requirements."
He had just been asked to make things for a monster. It was something which forced the screams against the back of his teeth, and there they stayed because the Princess had kept his jaw clamped shut for a very long time.
"...maybe," the monster eventually said. "If he wants to. But..." It swallowed. "...I'm going to be working in his forge. So I wanted him to see what I'll be doing. How the process operates. Because I know you don't have it, and it probably looks strange, seeing it for the first time. I thought..."
Blue eyes glanced down at him. The eyes of a predator.
"...if he just understood..."
It looked away, refocused on the well-braced metal panel. The expression on the monster's face was unreadable. The posture of legs, barrel, and tail came across as something very much like embarrassment.
"Barding," the Princess steadily stated, "I'm going to let you go. I am not going to allow you to gallop down the hallway. I'm asking you, as your first action, to step into your smithy and look at what she's created. And then, as a blacksmith -- the blacksmith trusted by the palace to create and maintain Guard armor, along with so much else -- to tell me what you think of it."
Her field winked out.
The stallion blinked a few times. Worked his jaw back and forth. Considered every last punishment he'd come up with during his bondage and how they could be applied to the monster, then decided it was best to wait until he didn't have a witness.
A charred foreleg gestured across the border.
"Get out." It was all editing for Princess presence had left him with. "Get out. There's no room. I want space."
The monster slowly turned, left facilities which had been too cramped for it to begin with. And once it was in the hallway, just about peering around the edge of the doorway, Barding reclaimed his kingdom.
"It's rubbish," the blacksmith declared as his forehooves landed on his territory. (It was something which should have made him feel instantly better, and it just made the nausea that much worse. Monster scent was clearly that harsh.) "It doesn't make any sense! Not unless you're looking at it as magic --"
"-- I can't --" the monster tried, with desperate tones plummeting towards whisper. "-- I don't have any --"
The spike of his own decibels balanced it out. "-- forbidden magic! Something no one should ever work with, something nopony ever will --"
"-- Barding," the Princess cut in, "she can't cast. Whatever the process is, it's a natural one. I didn't understand how it worked, and that was after she tried explaining it to me. Most of what I got was translator overlap: endless amounts of it. She almost ran down the charge just from attempting to teach me, and that was with the platinum in operation. But you're a blacksmith. I thought you would understand more than I do, because your mind would be capable of grasping new concepts within the range of your talent --"
"-- bone!" It was all too close to a scream. "Charcoal and bone! The death of wood, the death of us! Is that how it treats steel, as a graveyard you can wear?"
The alicorn's eyes went hard, and did so at the same moment the monster pulled back. It would have been something Barding had never seen before from the Princess, if he'd cared to look at all.
"She," the Princess said.
"A monster," Barding hissed, because the fallen generally had trouble with social conventions to begin with and a stallion who'd been ignoring his mark for hours, who was dealing with an ensorcelled leader, had already reached the point of having nothing left to lose. "One who twists the world. Tirek would have stripped magic from metal, and you said this one is different? It is, because it corrupts the metal itself! Weakens," and his flanks were burning, "corrupts, twists, fouls! And all it takes to show you is -- !"
There was too much anger, too much sickness, and the weight of it combined to send his head down, bent his forelegs into the posture of a pony who was ready to charge. A stallion who needed something he could hurt.
But the Princess would have defended the monster. The mind-clouding combination of incandescent rage and thwarted talent still hadn't been enough to make him feel as if he could beat an alicorn. And so he took it all out on the other thing which shouldn't exist. The one which could not be allowed to remain in his kingdom.
He charged, spun, and earth pony strength magnified by years of exercise in the forge kicked into the endless river of steel's frozen, agonized tears.
There was a sound. It was considerably like that of a bell, a little like a wall collapsing, and very much like a lot of kinetic energy being rebounded the other way.
This was followed by another sound.
"AAAUUOGH!"
The full-body thump served as something of an anticlimax.
"Don't move!" the Princess ordered, and did so when she had no right because she'd just moved across the line into his realm. "Don't try to get up! I'll have the Doctors Bears here in a minute: if they get to the hoof crack quickly enough, they can seal it! Even when it's that deep --"
"DON'T."
The alicorn stopped moving.
Slowly, all too slowly, Barding forced himself to his hooves. It hurt, and it took too long, but... the metal wasn't going anywhere.
"Not yet," the blacksmith whispered, the voice of his desperate talent dropping back into his soul until it was needed again. "Not yet..."
He limped towards the panel. Facing it throughout the approach, instead of letting his hind legs attempt another final regard.
"There's some light scuffing here," the stallion forced out. "At the left impact point."
"I didn't do it properly," the girl began. "There's a little ritual I usually do with the water, but it's your smithy. I thought you would have your own rituals. And I couldn't adjust for the tools, and I should have folded --"
"-- light scuffing," the blacksmith finished. "There's no enchantments on this yet? No magic at all?"
"No..." the other blacksmith timidly tried.
"You swear."
"Yes."
"So anypony could do this. If they knew how."
"Yes..."
"I kicked this," Barding whispered. "Kicked it with everything I had. And there's some. light. scuffing."
She said something then, and he missed it. The words had been lost within the rising bars of an inner song.
"What was that?"
"Your hoof," the girl repeated. "The doctors need to --"
"-- it'll be even better with the right tools?" he cut her off. "Better than this? Then you need tools. You can sketch. Sketch your tools. I'll start making them tonight." The existence of the injury briefly registered, mostly as a source of potential future tool imperfection. "Tomorrow. And write out the process. All of it."
He looked at her. All of her, every last hideous hoofwidth and hoofheight, from the distorted features to the slow-shifting mounds and finally stopping with legs which were, for his tastes, simply too long. (He hadn't been aware of his own tastes in years.) And yet, in the face of all that ugliness, there was a moment when he thought about dropping to his barrel and proposing marriage on the spot.
(It was nothing romantic, and it never could have been. He just had the vague impression that in the event of someone acquiring a patent, the spouse had the long-term chance to inherit the rights.)
The Princess smiled.
"She needs to make certain portions of the armor herself," the alicorn said. "As none of us have ever tried to accommodate that kind of form, and asking anypony else to do it will reveal who it's for. But in the name of expediency, once the process is recorded and translated, we can consider distributing some of the more ambiguous pieces to the rest of the city. Just to avoid overworking you --"
"NO!"
The first time had been speaking from his mark. The second wasn't quite as pure.
"No..." the blacksmith considered. "No, Princess, this stays with us. It has to, until somepony else reverse-engineers it. If this stuff can be enchanted properly, the usual protections on top of this... then it puts us ahead. You know the rule, don't you, girl?" This without looking at the centaur. "That in the race of weapons versus protection, the weapons are always ahead? Because you can't respond to a weapon until it exists." And in a whisper of near-reverence, as centaur and Princess both stared at him, "Today, armor is ahead. Fit her first. See how the enchantments take. If that works, we can start reequipping the Guard."
The pacing began on instinct. The limp was forced by an ignored injury.
"They'll see we've got something new, anypony who looks closely enough," Barding declared. "Especially the smiths, even in the other nations. They'll know it's something special. But it could take decades before they catch up, and until they do, we're ahead." The existence of blacksmiths made kings somewhat redundant. But when it came to maintaining the actual kingdom... having a unique resource could only help. "And it needs a name. A name for something new, something forged from death itself..."
He was one of the fallen. His life, his mind, his soul was in the forge.
He didn't really think about social mores. There were ways in which he no longer could.
He thought he was paying her the greatest compliment imaginable.
"Centaur steel," he stated with open satisfaction. "So they'll know where it came from, all the monstrosity it took to make. And so they'll never want to recreate it."
He looked at her face again, incapable of recognizing the horror which had suffused those strange features. And after a moment, because he was in a good mood, he remembered how to smile.