As I began my reading of the Damascus text, a couple of bank guards, definitely from the brawler’s guild, arrived with a chest filled with racks of silver coins. They insisted that I sign a receipt, and I insisted that the coins get counted first. It took us half an hour to verify that the chest had 1000 silver coins. They grumbled as they departed, but I was forced to sign for the delivery, and I wanted to make sure I did not get stuck with a shortage. It was wasted time, but more than a few of the shop’s customers winked at me as they browsed the store’s jewelry and fine-crafted stone and glass figurines.

  I returned to the Damascus text and my notes as soon as the guards departed and carried the silver down to the basement with Biff’s help.

  “You going to stick your nose in that book all day, Gwyd?” He asked after I finished stacking the coin racks in a secure corner.

  “This is how enchanters prepare for journeyman trials,” I commented without looking up. I pulled a wool blanket over my legs out of habit. The cellar was a lot cooler than the first floor, and sitting on the stone floor chilled me unless we had a roaring fire going in the forge.

  Which we didn’t.

  “Yeah, I guess.” He said. “Brawlers just practicing staring in place and dodging glass bottles. For the test, I hear they set them on fire, so we need to watch out for both the broken fragments and burning splash.”

  I looked up. “Really?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what they say.”

  “I’m not sure who they are, but I’d be sure to wear your leather armor just in case.”

  He began walking back up the stairs. “Let me know if you have time to stop by the Double D later.”

  “Mmmhmm,” I replied, already back into the book.

  I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon hours poring over the first chapter of the Damascus text. I read it three times in as many hours and skimmed the second chapter before deciding to get started and put my new learning to the test.

  The first chapter was twice as long as any of the other chapters and covered several methods for separating metals, which led into the second chapter dealing with blessings and purifying a wide range of metals. Each metal had its own subtleties, and some real complexities arose when creating pure alloys—a new metal made from combining percentages of two or more pure base metals, such as bronze (made from copper and tin) or brass (made from copper and zinc).

  This metal separation and purification process is done for quality and to improve the value of the final works, of course, but also because magic won’t easily anchor to impure substances. In order for enchantments to hold true, the vessel must be pure. This is why much of the hostile and damaging magic cast by mages upon rivals was so effective. Magic became unstable around impurities, and that unique nature of magic allows for combat magic to be so effective and destructive because the mind of mages is both impure and fluid. The chaos that uncontrolled thoughts create is bad for permanent enchantments, but highly effective at times for damaging attack spells.

  However, for those of us dealing in rarified magics such as enchanters, thaumaturgists, conjurers, summoners, and alchemists, we need pure raw materials to work our best magic as well as plenty of time to prepare ingredients, crafting stations, and our minds.

  An unprepared enchanter is not one of the more dangerous mages compared to the more combat-ready wizards and elementalists. But a prepared and motivated enchanter could be highly dangerous when dealing with him on his own terms.

  Since I had a special affinity for copper, I decided to start with it because of its low relative cost compared with other precious pure metals such as silver, gold, and platinum or precious alloys such as augentium (made from copper and silver), electrum (made from silver and gold), and imperium (made from gold and platinum).

  According to the text, one of the easiest and surest methods to separate metals is to perform a simple, refined metal separation process. The trick was to repeat the process over and over again to obtain “surety in your purity,” as Damascus was fond of saying. While this is not exactly a secret among mages, performing the method seven different times, as Damascus insisted, was highly unusual. Banking and guild regulations insist on repeating the separation and purification three times. Most enchanters required this level of purity for their spell components and wyrds. It was how I was taught in my enchanter guild classes. Further refining was considered needless time wasted and unnecessary expenses paid out to the master metalsmith, with unlikely improvements in spell effects relative to the efforts. A rule of three was the mantra and had a special place across enchantments.

  The process of purifying metal was simple, even if it was not exactly easy when you have to do it seven times in a row. A special forge was used for fine metals that were much smaller than a typical smelting vat or ironwork. The large smelting vats removed a lot of impure debris from the process, which was often a crude, albeit effective method.

  Jewelers used forge workstations and tended to start with materials that had already undergone smelting. In my case, I chose to use copper coins as my raw material and then purify them from there. These coins had already undergone a smelting process to remove other ores and a partial purification to meet coin regulations for weight, size, and metal purity.

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  In addition to repeating the separation process seven times, Damascus was also unique in that he instructed that only half of the purifying metal would be chosen to advance to each subsequent stage of purification. This created a lot of waste, and most mages or metal workers would never consider it because of the cost and time involved.

  Each standard copper coin, by imperial standard, was required to weigh precisely one ounce. True, there were different coin shapes, but standard coins, regardless of racial origin, followed that rule. Coins also came in different weights, such as a half gold or double silver, but they were less common. Most of those coins ended in the hands of collectors because they were often decades old.

  Starting with a goal of one ounce of purified copper, I would need 128 of the standard one-ounce copper coins to begin the process. Copper coins were easy to come by, and there was no need for me to go to the bank for that many coins. We had plenty here, and I exchanged silver with Master Sundance for the copper.

  He never asked why I wanted the copper, but he had a knowing twinkle in his eyes when he gave me the sack of copper coins.

  I created my own recipe from Damascus’s writings to accomplish this first magical reduction. It looked like this:

  128 coins refined and purified into 128 molten ounces of copper;

  remove the excess top and bottom quarters and refine 64 ounces;

  remove the excess top and bottom quarters and refine 32 ounces;

  remove the excess top and bottom quarters and refine 16 ounces;

  remove the excess top half and refine 8 ounces;

  remove the excess top half and refine 4 ounces;

  remove the excess top half and refine 2 ounces;

  remove the excess top half and retain 1 ounce of 7x purified copper

  True, some products were always lost along the way, but this was measured through the forge scale, so I always removed the necessary ounces, even if they were always just a bit below half each time. The variance was very small, and I did not worry because the source of copper was previously refined copper coins and not raw ore. I figured that I was ahead of the game, starting with refined metal at the outset.

  In fact, using coins was probably why enchanters and other mages taught that three purification separations from a coin or bar were sufficient, since the hard work of removing significant impurities was done previously by the coin smiths. Very few would consider following Damascus’s steps this way.

  My workstation vat could hold 150 ounces, although the coins were bulky enough that I could not place them all in the vat simultaneously. I had to wait to add the last couple of dozen coins until much of the copper had already melted. This was not a problem since refining was not like cooking. The heat of my forge would not burn my material like overcooked food. But it did take a little longer because of that additional step. If I arranged for a larger forge vat, that might speed the process along for me in the future; however, that was not a priority for me right now.

  Getting the temperature hot enough to melt copper was hard and hot work. I was sweating within minutes and made sure to stop periodically to take a refreshing drink of cool water. The forge water bucket was on the floor, and I was thankful for the cool stone at times like this since it also cooled the water and bucket over time.

  Crafting workstations were minor magical constructs, allowing forging, crafting, carpentry, etc., to all work at a rate faster than would be possible in nonmagical facilities. For instance, my forging process moved along much quicker than it would if I had to build and stoke a fueled fire and clean or chip away the cooled molten metal remnants off my tools or the forge vat. The subtle magic of a crafting station made this unnecessary, and the ability to remove material from both top and bottom portions through their intentionally positioned nozzles made it ideally suited for metal purification.

  Still, it was a slow process, and all these extra steps added layers of work that would not ordinarily occur for typical human metal purification. So, at the end of an hour’s hot and sweaty work, I had one ounce of seven times refined and purified copper. For luck, I let the copper cool in a triangular mold I had created for fun some months back.

  My symbol consisted of an upside-down, elongated pentagon that resembled the outline of a gemstone. The five sides represented my five-socket prodigy ability, and the gem outline was for my prodigy with stones and gems. I added some additional details with triangles in the mold to represent both my triple patron status and the Rule of Three, which is important for enchanters and many practitioners of magic.

  I stamped the new Gwydion triangular coin with my largest signature stamp. The idea came from a book on historical coins that included many unusual shapes beyond the variety of round shapes used in modern coins.

  Every fine metalsmith had a metal stamping tool made in the shape of his or her unique symbol or mark. It was a professional signature that guaranteed quality and publicly announced the creator or artist of a work. The symbol was recorded in guild books and would join those going back several centuries. I used the largest stamp on one side of my triangular coin and carefully etched an inscription on the reverse side with some of my master’s tools.

  I chose for my inscription the last known quote and hint about Arturo Damascus and his lost knowledge, which, as legend stated, could be found on “An island of pearls and onyx gleaming out of a sea of emeralds.”

  I pocketed the triangular coin for luck after buffing and polishing it seven times for luck.

  The bank commission would not be due for a little less than a week from now, so I decided to browse ahead through the book and check out the next chapters. I am glad I did because partway through a careful reading of the second chapter, I discovered one of Damascus’s secrets. He had his work blessed by a priest before he began to add magical effects. I’m sure that, like many, I initially viewed the blessing as an affectation, but the text in the passage was underlined, and a note in ancient dwarvish runes was scribbled in the margin that stated, “blessing opens purified metals to the touch of new creation.”

  As soon as I read that handwritten notation, most likely by the Dwarven Archapprentice himself, I understood deep in my mind that such an opening alters the object and allows a deeper penetration or aligning of magics than would otherwise be possible. Damascus’s apprentices would be capable of works of magic beyond their typical range of power because the object had been opened to new possibilities. According to Damascus, magic did not have to be forced upon an object through an act of a dominant will, as I had been taught, but it could be melded and joined with the object in mutual creation.

  Along with the sevenfold refining technique, I discovered a second Damascus “trick” that involved a different kind of purification: a purification by faith. One of my oldest childhood friends could help me with this trick during my preparation month. Steven was a cleric who would also transition to journeyman status around the first week of spring at the beginning of the next month. It was the time all the guilds tested their senior apprentices in the journeyman trials.

  That would be as well.

  I knew that I had hundreds of hours of work ahead of me over the next thirty days with little time for sleeping, eating, or relaxing. I would be making repeated trips to the bank to retrieve coins, which I would then turn into rings. My goal was ambitious. I planned to create as many magical rings and constructs of power as possible before I was launched into the Shallowlands along with a thousand other ambitious, adventure-seeking heroes and the many tens of thousands of others that followed after that.

  My first of seven memories proved very useful, and no fantastic beasts launched themselves at me out of the darkness. I took that as a good sign of what was to come.

  Man, was I ever wrong about that…