The testing room was spare. Blank sandstone walls. A workbench, with a small box of assorted screws and hammers. Blocks of raw material. A furnace. A bookshelf stacked with reference materials. An anvil. A clock. All made of a dark-gray metal. That was it.

Dorian waited, legs crossed, as the clock ticked slowly by. There was no sign of a proctor for the past quarter-hour. He was starting to think one might not materialize. Outside of one prominent exception, Guild didn’t seem very fond of him.

Ah, bigotry. It was an all-too-common roadblock on his runs. It was also very silly. These Oasis-folk considered Tribesmen savages. The Ugoc thought the Oasis-folk were savages. The Tribes called each other savages. Dummies, the lot of them! To Dorian they were all savages, him included. Why make such a fuss about it?

Speaking of—there seemed to be a commotion outside. Lots of high voices. A silence.

Then the door opened and a huge, very hairy man squeezed his way through. He was big, heaped with fat, but underneath were cords of thick muscle too. At a glance Dorian could tell he was at the Peak of the Profound Realm; it was in the thickness of the repressed qi leaking out from him, but it also showed in his bearing. His face was hard as weather-worn stone.

“So you’re the savage-boy.” he said. His voice sounded like two great boulders scraping against each other. He folded his arms as he took Dorian in. “You want to be an official artificer, do you?”

“I do,” nodded Dorian. “Shall we start?”

For a long, awkward moment, they stared at each other. It was mostly this fellow doing the staring. Lots of staring at Dorian’s chest, for some reason. Is he a proctor, or is he here to throw me out?

At last the big man let out a snort. “Hmph!” He stomped across the room and threw himself across a metal bench. It was metal, and it still groaned under his weight.

“My name is Martial Elder Kal,” said the man. “I’m here to make sure the Guild keeps up its high standards.”

Then he leaned in, his mustache bristling. “This is the Artificer’s Guild! This isn’t some hunky-dinky crafts-hut in whatever Outsider hole you crawled out of. The Azcan Oasis is the Armory of the Desert. Every artificer is first-rate, no matter the Tier. Here’s a friendly word for you: don’t look down on this test. Slapping two blocks of steel together won’t cut it. It must meet my standards. You must be fucking perfect—“ he banged his meaty fist on the workbench for emphasis—“and even then, it likely won’t be enough. I don’t care who you’ve sweet-talked. You pass if I say you pass. Got it?”

Why is everyone in this guild so intent on scaring me?

Dorian nodded, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “I understand, sir! I won’t take this lightly, I swear it.” He bowed. “It’s an honor to test for the Artificer’s Guild. I won’t let you down.”

Kal narrowed his eyes at him. “‘Least you picked up some manners. That’s good.” He groaned, settling back in his seat. “Hey. Where’re you pulling this confidence from? You know how many savages this Guild’s let in? Zero. There’s always a savage every few years who thinks he’s special. None are. Day ends, we kick ‘em out, never hear of ‘em again. They go back to eating out of their hands and bathing in Vordor-piss.”

Dorian was a little speechless. Is this guy meant to be a proctor or a heckler? He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I haven’t even started the test yet! He’d expected some push-back, but from some sneering, judgey official who played his prejudices close to his vest. Pleasing this off would be a much thornier kind of challenge indeed. I’ll need to get creative with this fellow, it seems.

It obviously won’t do to match his anger. Step one—deflect with nonsense.

“Well…worrying doesn’t help, does it?” said Dorian with a wan smile. “Whether I’ve got what it takes or not, I’ll always believe in myself. I can’t control the result—only how hard I try. So I’ll try my best.”

Step two—Get to work.

***

By the end of his first rant, Kal had expected the boy to piss himself. He’d expected the boy to shit himself after the second. But he’d finished spraying spittle and the boy’s pants were still disappointingly clean.

He’s got nerve. Kal could respect that. A disappointingly flat chest, too, but he was easy on the eyes—that much Kal could give him. Otherwise, the savage-boy was nothing special. Nothing at all. What did his niece see in him?

“The task for the first Tier is to craft a Tier 1 Artifact. Simple.” He gestured to the bookcase. “Use any manual you need.”

“What about for Tier 2 and 3?”

A vein in Kal’s head bulged. “Worry about finishing this fucking test first, eh? You have the hour. Go.” Usually test-takers were given five, but the thought of being stuck in a room with this fool that long made him want to dunk his head in a vat of molten steel.

He plopped down on a bench, yanked out Forbidden Romance #78, and started to read.

“Won’t you supervise me?” asked the boy.

Kal waved him off with a grunt. “I’ll inspect it when you’re done,” he snapped. “I’m here to make sure you don’t blow anything up too bad.”

Supervise? What for? All I need to do is wait out the hour, slap a fail on him, and go home. Or is the boy under the impression that what he does matters? Kal snorted. The boy could make a textbook-perfect artifact and Kal would still send him scrambling.

Kal was the Martial Elder: the Elder in charge of enforcing the guild’s laws and protecting its members with fairness. In theory. In practice Kal made no pretense to being impartial, whatever the hells that meant. ‘Fairness,’ he’d long held, was the romantic concoction of airheaded writers—the kind he’d seen tanning on feather-beds in their Sinkhole-side villas, the kind who’d never made a hard choice in their lives. A good judge was about being right, which was very distinct from being ‘fair.’ And Kal was almost always right.

The only thing any writer was good for was erotica, Kal thought as he flipped a page of Forbidden Romance. The minutes trickled by with aggravating slowness. The more he read, the more he found he couldn’t lose himself in the pages like before. This was steamy shit. Top-grade. Lots of moaning and thrusting going on. It did nothing for him. As he read about Young Master Li’s mighty dragon and Huntress Yasha’s moist sinkhole, he couldn’t help superimposing that savage’s smirking face over Li, and his poor niece’s on Yasha…

He thrust the tome aside with a growl and looked up. Nearly a quarter of an hour had passed. There was no clanging of metal. The boy was still reading a Tome.

Li did a double-take. It’s the wrong fucking tome! He was reading from the tome for Tier 2 Artificers, and flipping so fast the pages were almost a blur in his hands. Is this meant to impress me?

Or can the savage not read? Either way, Kal was ticked off.

“That’s the wrong tome,” he snarled.

The boy looked up, blinking. “Oh. Oops.” He set down the tome and picked up another tome off the shelf.

It was read Compendium of Artificing - Tier 3. Kal had to restrain himself from leaping up and strangling the boy. Did they not have fucking numbers out in those wastelands? He took several deep breaths, counting them one by one, just as his wife always told him to do. By the end of it he was only trembling. Why am I mad? Let the idiot fail.

The boy read and read and read. The way time was passing now reminded Kal of that time he took a particularly painful shit after a week of eating only raw Endspider meat—he only got a little drop of shit out at a time, screaming and grunting with effort, his asshole begging for relief. Every second felt like one of those little drops: passing through him and leaving him in agony. But this was even worse 'cause it was mental. Even looking at the boy made him want to smack him up the face Finally—finally—the boy set aside the tome.

Then he moved a shelf lower and picked out another. This one read The Complete History & Genealogy of Azcan Artificing. Vol 1. A fucking HISTORY book!

Kal imagined murdering him in graphic detail. It’d be easy. He’d hit him on the ear so hard his brain-matter would splatter out the other ear. The room was locked and soundproofed. After he was done he could turn on the furnace and chuck what was left of the boy in. He’d enjoy watching that stupid face burn.

After five minutes of reading, the boy put the tome down. Finally. Finally! …and pulled out The Complete History & Genealogy of Azcan Artificing. Vol 2.

The boy must be an Ugoc agent, Kal thought, sent here to assassinate him via induced aneurysm. Watching him flip through that tome was death by slow poison. The worst part was he seemed to be enjoying himself. He stopped on a page, nodding and smiling. Kal couldn’t take it anymore. Three-quarters of his time is up!

“Aren’t you going to fucking forge?!” He screeched.

Io looked up, startled. “Oh! Yes. But first, I thought to do my artifact justice, it’s only proper that I educate myself on the history of artificing…”

It was the most wyrmshit thing Kal had heard in his entire life. “What.”

“How can I use artificing techniques without understanding their histories?” The boy had the nerve to look up innocently at him.

Kal sprang up, dashed over, ripped the book from his hands, and tore it apart at the spine in one swift motion. “BY MAKING THE FUCKING ARTIFACT, YOU SCUM-HEAD NIMROD! IT’S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD! IT’S PUTTING HAMMER ON FUCKING METAL, NOT A FUCKING NINTH-TIER ALCHEMY DISSERTATION! FUCK!”

A smile flickered across the boy’s face. For a second he looked weirdly enigmatic. “Trust me,” he said. “It is useful to my forging process. I promise.”

Kal picked him up and chucked him at the anvil. He made a nimble arc in the air, landing feet first and looking chagrined. “Alright, sir! It’s as you wish. I’ll begin forging now.”

Kal couldn’t take it anymore. The urge to strangle the boy was nearly overpowering. He turned away and dragged out another kelp-book, trying to distract himself.

Fifteen minutes, he told himself. Fifteen minutes and I’ll never need to see that blasted face again.

***

As it turned out, it was sooner than that. Ten minutes. That was all it took. “Done,” said the boy cheerfully.

Kal whirled around to rest his eyes on the product. And his brain caved in a little. It wasn’t any Tier 1 Artifact he recognized. It was a stick.

A stick.

It was a stick.

That smiling imbecile made a stick.

As he spoke, his voice was strangely soft. “What is this?”

“It’s a stick,” said the boy proudly.

Kal charged the boy and closed two meaty hands around his neck.

***

In truth Dorian hadn’t meant to piss off the Martial Elder—though admittedly that was a nice bonus. Alright—perhaps that was a lie. Maybe he meant to piss the man off just a little. But everything he said was true. He did need the history books, for more reasons than one. He did need to consult the higher-order Tier compendiums. He had a plan in mind.

Black spots filled his vision. This was a bit troublesome. All his plans wouldn’t amount to much if he died here on the spot. A man didn’t reach Martial Elder without some restraint… right?

Then the hands let go and he collapsed, panting and sucking in air.

“You have one sentence,” snarled Martial Elder Kal. His craggy face reminded Dorian of a volcano on the verge of eruption. It even bubbled a little. “Explain yourself.”

It took a few seconds for Dorian to regain his breath. Then he coughed, smiled, and spoke. “It’s not just any stick.”