Welcome to Gaia! ::

Foenix nodded in understanding. This was the first time she had heard any details of Rahujo's gift, and it was rather fascinating, even if she was a bit disappointed that the Aerandir would probably not be able to fix everything easily.

"Well, I should be free tomorrow afternoon. I wanted to get some work done in my office, so I wasn't planning on going anywhere. Why don't you come over then? I'll fix you lunch. And I'll head over to the Centre now and arrange for some new burners."

Nehanda looked from human to Aerandir. Whee! Rahujo was coming to her house. Maybe she'd like Nehanda's garden.

With a smile, Foenix placed a hand upon nehanda in support, and followed Rahujo to the gate. inside, she couldn't help but laugh at ehrself. this was the most interaction she'd had with the adult Aerandir since she came to the island, and it had taken Nahda and a major accident to achieve it!

"Thanks, that's terrific. It'll be nice to have some company over again."

Nehanda burbles and merped in pleasure. Acia! She was going to see Acia again! The little gryphon still possessed all of her hero-worship for the Spellweaver. After all, Rahujo was really, really nice and soothing and so strong, but Acia had created Nehanda's gardens!

Late morning. Rahujo had been up for a few hours, and now she sat on a stump outside her forge, whittling away with a knife at a lump of wood. At her feet was a small pile of wood shavings and splinters. Earlier, she'd used hand tools to cut the sizeable chunk that she'd started with into a rough contour, and now she was smoothing it into a comfortable, if rather small, handle.

The forge behind her was dormant, the hearth all but extinguished save a few embers banked below a heap of sand. She'd finished working with the fire and the anvil last night, work-hardening the pieces she'd created over the last couple of days by repeatedly hammering their entire surface at a low temperature. They'd been filed and ground on a series of increasingly fine grindstones until the metal shone. Now she was fashioning handles for both tools - one of dense blackwood, one of tawny shedua.

Rahujo flicked her knife upwards, sending a thin shaving of wood spiralling into the air, and hummed under her breath.

Backdated ... somewhere on Ar'Idil

The cave was humid, warm and damp - even more so than the usual atmosphere of Cetalu and its surrounding islands. Sweat matting her fur and trickling down her face, Rahujo stood braced in the narrow space, one hand gently touching the rock wall opposite her.

Her eyes were closed, all her awareness concentrated on the rock. A faint sense of warmth permeated her skin, a low hum, a dull cherry red, with small spikes of cold/high/blue. In between the spikes wound beautiful growths of emerald green, lukewarm, a clear bell-like tone... It was hard to describe to one who did not possess the extra senses from which the Aerandir benefited.

The warmth, she knew, was metal within the rock - usually low concentrations, part of the rock's natural makeup. The sharp points corresponding to weaknesses and fault lines. The plant-like branching green forms were natural copper deposits, raw metal laid down by lava flows in the fissures and cracks within the rock. Different metals gave different feelings, different notes and colors...

She'd tried to explain the feeling to Mhairi once, when she was smaller and it was less refined, and the woman had compared it to music. Different note pitches and combinations could generate different associations, different moods. It was a little like that, she guessed ... just ... different.

Moving her hand over the rock, the feelingscape subtly changed, giving her a very rough three-dimensional view of the rock's structure.

After a few seconds, she stopped moving. Under her hand was a particularly warm patch with a complex greenish structure running throughout and two large green nodes in the centre - large masses of copper. Rahujo felt about until she located fault lines surrounding the area, then tapped the wall sharply with a bronze pick held in her other hand.

Tink...tink...tink...

As the pickaxe struck the rock, she felt the sharp blue lines vibrate and shift slightly. She moved the impact point of the pickaxe a little.

Tink...tink...

One section of blue line flared and almost vanished, replaced by a line of black silence with blue tendrils lining it. The rock had cracked along the faultline.

Rahujo grinned, and gave a couple more blows to the crack. It was tiny, invisible to the naked eye, but she knew that if she coaxed it in the right direction it could be persuaded to split off a sizeable chunk of the rock face with very little effort on her part.

Several minutes and many more minute cracks later, she had an almost continuous line running around a large slab of rock. Rahujo replaced the small pick in her toolbelt, and pulled out several metal wedges. She inserted one into every visible crack in the rock, rocking them to wedge them securely into each crevice.

Then she lifted her sledgehammer from its rest against one rock wall.

There was scarcely enough room in the small, deep cave to swing the massive stone-headed hammer, but with Rahujo's muscles even a small swing had an immense amount of power behind it.

She raised it to waist height and swung, the head tracing a low, flat, fast arc.

Crack!

Shards of rock and rubble flew, and a cloud of rock dust surrounded Rahujo. She drew the sledge back and swung again, and again, and again. The cracks and thumps of the sledge's impacts were nearly deafening in the narrow space, but Rahujo was used to noise - her hearing, once acute as a result of her herd-animal heritage, had dulled after years of working with hammer and anvil.

After she had hammered in half the wedges, Rahujo lowered her sledgehammer and wiped the dust from her face with a coarse-haired forearm.

Once the dust had settled, she inspected the rock in front of her. A neat line of deep channels ran around a foot-square block of wall. Half of the wedges had fallen out with the rubble, and the other half were pounded flush with the wall. She retrieved as many as she could find, dropping them into a pouch attached to her belt, then inspected the rock carefully. Trailing two fingers around the edge of the rock, she verified that it was ready to split off - blue-white stress lines radiated all around the perimeter of the rock mass.

If she did this wrong, she would end up with a rather heavy lump of rock crashing down onto her foot.

She pulled a larger wedge from another bag and inserted it into the centre of the crack at the top of the rock, stood well back, and raised her hammer again.

Crack! ... THUMP!

Accompanied by a small explosion of pulverised rock, the slab gave way and toppled out from its perch, smashing down onto the rock floor and splitting into several smaller pieces.

Rahujo grinned happily, bent down and tossed each piece into a wooden trough by her side, handling the heavy lumps of rock as if they weighed almost nothing. More metal for the forge!

As she picked up the last piece, it felt slightly ... odd. She frowned at it. It felt like there was an egg-shaped deposit of ... something. Sort of metallic, but sort of not. Not much use looking at it in this cave, anyway. Rahujo shrugged and tossed it into the trough with the others.

There was a croak as Rahujo approached her water butt, having finally finished putting away most of her supplies. A small, bright green frog sat in the middle of the heavy wooden lid. She watched it, mouth quirked into an amused smile. It croaked again, its throat swelling up into a bubble almost as large as the frog, the sound remarkably loud for such a tiny animal.

As she walked closer to the water tank, the frog stopped croaking, and looked at her with bulging yellow eyes. After a couple of seconds of Rahujo staring at the frog and the frog staring back at Rahujo, it flexed its legs then launched itself from the top of the water butt, travelling in a high arc before disappearing into her woodpile.

Grinning, Rahujo lifted the wooden lid and set it aside. There was nothing in the water this time - she'd plugged the small hole between the lid and the barrel which she'd found after the last froggy water incident.

She dipped a few scoop-fuls of water from the barrel, filling her kettle with the fresh rainwater, then headed back inside. Time for tea.

---

A small fire burned in the hearth of the forge, heating the blackened kettle suspended above it. Rahujo sat at one of her workbenches, her chin propped up with one hand, idly playing with some of her latest finds with the other.

Her mission to Ar'Idil had been surprisingly fruitful - she'd hit upon a cave which led deep into the volcanic rocks of the island, intersecting rich seams of native copper and other metals, as well as nodules and threads of crystals and minerals.

The object she had in front of her was a greenish, egg-shaped lump of crystal - malachite, to be exact. It was roughly fist-sized (well, Acia-fist-sized, Rahujo thought with amusement, comparing it to her own massive hands) and currently covered in a thin skin of rock.

It rumbled around the tabletop in a small eccentric orbit as she toyed with it. Perhaps she'd make it into jewellery - or, more likely, keep it until an Aerandir was born who had more intrinsic talents in the field of jewellery. Rahujo's talents extended mostly to relatively simple items with little decoration beyond minor engraving.

She gave the malachite a little prod with her finger. It wobbled, spun, and rolled against a small bar of silver with a soft 'tink'. The crystal egg rolled onwards, pushing the silver before it, and managed to gather a couple more bars of assorted metals before it fetched up against the wall and stopped with a bump.

The kettle had started whistling by now. Rahujo stood up and wandered over to the hearth, pulling down her little tin of tea leaves and a large and slightly chipped mug. Tea!

The night was comfortably warm, and after the rainstorm of earlier, the air was fresh and clean. Rahujo dipped a ladleful of water from her rainwater butt, now brimming from the torrential tropical rain, and dumped it over her head.

The cold water was pleasantly refreshing as it trickled through her thick black hair. She raised one furred arm and wiped the water down her face, cleansing it of the soot and dust that she'd accumulated during the afternoon.

Her afternoon's work had been quite productive - she'd finished off a blade that had been lying around for a few weeks, abandoned from lack of inspiration. The trip to Ar'Idil seemed to have rejuvenated her smithing talent as well as given her a much-needed break.

She looked around the rain-sodden front yard of the forge, then headed back inside to the comfortable smoky fug, smiling thoughtfully as she thought of the new Aerandir she'd seen. In her kitchen, no less - what a strange place to be introduced to a new young one. She wondered who its guardian was - perhaps one of the newer humans she'd seen wandering around the island but to whom she hadn't been introduced.

Either way, more Aerandir for the tribe, Rahujo thought as she put her kettle on to boil. They were all young now, but soon they would grow, and at some point in the future the tribe would be able to stand on its own collective feet for the first time, without needing any external support - everyone working for the good of the whole.

She smiled at that thought. Being surrounded by those of her own kind would be ... nice. True, she had grown up around humans, but she had always had an acute sense of her own difference. A pair of massive black wings attached to your back (not to mention the horns and fur) will do that...

Her mind wandered off on a tangent as her hands picked and sorted random pieces of leather and cloth in the dim lamp- and fire-light. She wondered how Mhairi was getting on. It had been quite a while since she'd seen her former guardian.

As her thoughts drifted, she found herself folding a strip of thick, tanned leather into a little concertina shape about an inch thick. Absent-mindedly, she pressed it between her fingers until it was a solid cube of leather, twisted it, turned it.

In the sooty light of an oil lamp burning on her desk, her unfinished knife glinted on the workbench - just a blade, without a handle or any fittings. She picked it up and tapped the leather on it thoughtfully. She had hardly even thought of a handle for this one - had vaguely assumed that she'd use one of the bone handles she had carved a while back. Thinking of the recipient she had in mind, though, bone didn't quite feel ... right...

Rahujo turned the leather over in her hands, thought for a moment, discarded it, rummaged in her supply boxes for several minutes, then resurfaced with a loosely folded bundle. She unfolded the bundle into a large sheet of unusually mottled thick leather, which she laid on her workbench.

The leather was the same thickness as the scrap she'd had before, but tanned a rich, dark blood-red. Well, mostly - there were lighter areas, and patches which were darkened to a brown that was almost black.

She grinned. The leather had been an experiment by Osero a while back, tanned using earth pigments and vegetable dyes. It hadn't come out quite right, but he'd given it to her anyway for future use.

She thought for a second, then picked up her leather cube-shape from before, measured it against the knife's tang, unfolded it, measured a few lengths on the leather sheet, then cut out a long strip of the red-tanned hide using a pair of sturdy shears.

The rest of Osero's experiment was bundled back up and stored away, before she laid the reddish strip on her workbench, picked up a knife, and started cutting the tough leather into regular rectangular pieces.

She'd never done this before, but it should turn out interesting, at least...

Rahujo sat outside in the bright sunlight, listening to the omnipresent sounds of the jungle in the distance and munching on a rice ball. She'd finished off the knife with the stacked leather handle the night before, trimming the crude block of pressed leather into a smooth, curving grip. A silver cap and bolster had finished off the weapon, and on a whim she'd added a thong of loosely knotted hide.

Now, she was vaguely casting around for a new project. I should really go up to the Centre and actually meet some of the new Aerandir and their guardians ... I'd probably have more of an idea of what the tribe would need.

In the meantime, she would probably occupy herself making random tools, both for herself and for the roles in the tribe she knew would eventually be filled.

Finishing the rice ball with relish, she licked her fingers clean and looked up as she heard footsteps coming towards the forge.

"Ah, Fae." Rahujo waved to the girl. "And ..." she blinked, and held a hand up to shield her eyes from the bright mid-day sun. What had been just a slightly oddly-coloured shape floating several feet above the ground resolved into an ethereal child-shaped wisp. "Pueblo? Hm, you've certainly grown." She grinned.

"So ... what brings you here?"