Thread: [D]emigod in the [D]warfworks [DarkRiffs & Confrazzled]

The clang of anvil rang out with each strike of the smith-dwarfess?? heavy hammer, forged of an arcane alloy known only to the dwarves, and even then, known only in small enclaves. Like this one, the master smithworks, the cross-roaded crux of their spiders?? web of tunnelry, lacing through the mountains of Midgard and burrowing all of the way to Nedavellir, the offshoot of its well-guarded tunnel guarded at the very capital of the Dwarven kingdom. And here, the palace nestled at its very heart, hewn from the massive mountain??s craggy stone and carved in its labyrinth of rooms and set with precious and semiprecious stones and metals hewn from the furthest corners of Midguard and Nedavellir alike. The masterforge, however, only a few kinks, twists, and hewn stairwells of tunnels removed from the lavish Dwarven palace was considerably less ornate in its design, though no less distinctive as a specimen of dwarven architecture. It never failed to impress visitors with its sheer magnitude and scope. The stoked flames controlled more immaculately than any human??s forge, in any shade and colour, tailored to an expert optimum for each variety of metal and alloy. With furnace upon furnace upon furnace, as well as opened rings of firepits for different manners of detail, all set into in variously sized and ventilated caverns filled up several tiers of scooped mountain caverns. The panorama of it was hardly encompassable in a single glance, and for the surface-dwelling visitors, rarely comprehensible when assembled in the mind??s eye piecemeal, like the links of a coat of mail. This day??s visitors??though perhaps it was not day, time always seemed to flow differently in the bowels of the Earth??certainly would be no exception. And Brynhildr Bodrunsdottir was not looking forward to this. She held little desire to lay aside the carefully-wrought mail-and-plate-backed gauntlets that she was forging, link by painstaking mythrill link, to meet Thor??s envoy. Mortal or not, half-mortal or not, like as not whomever it was would still not likely be capable of keeping that gaping mortal mouth from flopping open like a dead fish??s. He??d be lucky they were not in one of those disgusting surface swamps??what he??d have wound up with there was a mouthful of flies. And she was not looking forward to having to crane her apple-round face towards for those endless-seeming hours??it never failed to gift Brynhildr??s neck with brutal kinks and knotted gnarls, for she barely approached the nipple??s height of a human man. Spice to the mead, merely, to a duty that already shaped up to be dreary. Neither did she did not look forward to thrusting aside her leather smith??s jerkin and donning formal armed regalia, self-forged plate suit and all, and unpinning her jumble of burnished brass braids and tresses, currently roughly tossed up in a stable bun, as was required to keep from singing them. She grunted, taking the tiny tongs from the blue-hot flame, blazing like the concentrated light of a thousand pinprick stars, twisting together the final link at the thumb of the right gauntlet. A shadow fell across the forge but she had no attention to spare to its source just yet. The half-gauntlet Brynhildr hoisted with her tongs and thrust into a springwater??s bucket in a hissing cloud of steam before laying it aside, and raising her quick garnet eyes to assess just who had juxtaposed themselves between her torchlight and work.