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You have been taught to serve your village as a shaper of steel, and yours is a noble art. You sift the waters of the tributary for clay and iron sand. You collect the fallen branches of old trees and make charcoal out of them. You shape a furnace from the clay that harbours the iron sand and the charcoal. You heat and turn over the mixture over the course of days until the process is complete and the furnace can be broken. You take the resultant steel and heat it once more, to mould it into the tool that you desire and quench it with water before you apply the finishing touches. Throughout every step of this process, you pray to each of the elements for their favour, so that the final product might be well and truly blessed.
It is a laborious process, but it is one that produces only the finest steel, a supple metal that keeps a keen edge for decades and flexes beneath great tension without breaking. Throughout Ionia, there are sites where terrible battles were waged, that are littered with swords forged using these techniques. One such site can be found not so far from your village, where the stony hand of a great titan reaches out from the earth, as big as a hill, impaled with a hundred glittering blades that refuse to rust, despite the millennia that have passed since that fateful battle. The story of the encounter has long been forgotten, but the people of Deva'le keep their distance from the titan's fingers, out of fear of awakening it.
Yet it is not swords and weapons of war that you craft, for your village has no need for such cruel implements. Instead, you forge sickles for the land-fishers, so that they might reap the river-grasses. You craft knives that are used to peel the fruit that falls from orchard trees, and to prepare the carcasses of animals that have surrendered their lives to feed the village. Violence is not the Ionian way, and so you make nothing that is meant to be used with violent intentions.
Your master and teacher, <span class="mu-s">Sanao</span>, is a hoary old man who has made many marvels. The metal that he works seems to never rust or break, no matter the passage of time or the strain that it is put under. He has gone to great effort to instil the importance of pacifism in you, yet his past does not align with his teachings. It is said that when Sanao was young, he abandoned the village and wandered the isles of Ionia, only to return when he was a grown man, with a number of scars and a sword by his side, a sword that he still wears to this day.
