WARNING: This is my first time publishing and I am mostly experimenting with my style of writing, I will not have a set schedule for releasing chapters and there may be big gaps between releases due to work and school. Keeping all of this in mind I am open to criticism as I am working how to improve my writing. With that out of the way please enjoy my first rendition of Fireborn.
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Chapter 1
I can feel the calling even now, the constant call, the constant tug at the back of my mind. I want so much to just give into it and it would be so easy to give in, but I’m too smart to do something so reckless and stupid. I’m no god, no unstoppable being, I am simply another person in the crowd who is a little different from everyone else. My name is Jason DuCart, and I am just another person who is fresh out of high school and doesn’t know what to do. In the beginning, I wanted to go to college but I just feel like I don’t know what I would want to do, and whatever I would do would feel like a waste of my potential. So here I am sitting in a shack on my property drinking a cold beer and watching the flames of my forge. I am currently living in a very small home I made myself on a small piece of land in the middle of nowhere, literally I’m in the middle of Minnesota and my property is at least 20 miles from the nearest city. I would live even farther away but every man has his needs and I need to at least be able to get mail and food.
Ever since I was 5 I have been different then everyone else. I have been able to do things that shouldn’t be possible, things that scared me for many years. When I was 5 I had gotten lost in the woods during the winter. You see I had followed a random trail deep into the woods and before I knew it I was lost among a plethora of trails in the forest. As it had dawned on me as a child that I was lost, I had taken to trying to find my way home but I only continued to get more and more lost. Before I knew it, it was already dark and only getting colder by the minute. Being the scared little child I had been at the time I cried my head off for a few hours before snuggling up under a tree. As it got late into the night I could feel the cold seeping into my bones, listening to the sounds of the night, of wolves and birds as my eyes closed wanting nothing but sleep. As I became cold and sleepy all I could think of was being warm at home, of wanting nothing more than to be warm, surrounded by the warmth, by fire. Before I knew it I was yearning only for the fire, not the warmth, but a primal instinct to create fire and have it. I yearned for fire and nothing else and with this want I suddenly found myself getting warmer and warmer.
As I opened my eyes I looked to my hands and saw my gloves coated in flames. I was on fire and my first reaction was to put out the fire, but as soon as I thought of getting rid of the fames the fire was gone, like it was never there. I thought I was seeing things as I looked to my hands and my now burnt gloves. I thought I was going crazy until I began to get cold again and wanted the warmth and the fire back. Before I knew it my hands suddenly sparked to life and the flames appeared dancing over my hands and between my fingers. This time though I wasn’t as afraid, as far as I was concerned the fire was a life all its own and it was my friend. It didn’t wish me harm or want to take from me, it just wanted to be, to exist. During that long chilly night, I played with the fire for hours on end, absorbed in what I could do before falling asleep from exhaustion. The next morning, I awoke to a team of fire fighters and police that were combing through the woods. They were walking in an extensive line spaced out and yelling my name repeatedly. As I got up and walked over to them they seemed more surprised than happy.
A child who was lost all night and should by all reason not be fine was just walking over to them like nothing happened. Long story short I was taken home to my crying parents and would have been given quite the scolding except they were so happy to see me that they completely forgot to, it was quite the exhausting day for everyone involved. After that life went on without a hitch around my house, although my parents did become a little overbearing for quite a while watching my every move. Though as time went on everyone began to forget the whole incident, everyone except for me. As I got older the want to do what I did in that forest only grew stronger, but I was never able to do it again no matter how much I tried. It was only when I was 14 that I finally had a breakthrough. It happened when I had gotten extremely angry after getting bullied at school. I had come home and went on hike telling my parents I would be out for a bit. I was so angry that I just had to vent it out. I took a few tools such as an axe, a knife, and machete out with me in a backpack. When I got far away enough from any trail I let loose chopping trees, slashing branches, and just generally venting it all out. As I got angry my axe got stuck in a tree and I switched to my machete which also got stuck in the tree, and even my knife eventually got stuck.
With nothing else I just punched the tree until my hands went numb and my knuckles became bloody. As I continued to vent I thought about school and how I hated it so much. I wanted the whole school to burn down, to go away. I wanted to burn it all down, for it all to burn! As I thought this and punched the tree a huge boom occurred. Flames had blasted out of the end of my fist and directly hit the tree. As I moved my hand away from the tree the end of my fist had fire floating over my knuckles and the tree had a large chunk ripped out of it with burn marks all around it. As I stared at my fist and the fire I was overcome with a calming feeling. It was soothing to look at the fire, feeling that all I needed was the fire. What followed though was not the calm feeling I first felt, but an indescribable hunger for more, for the fire to consume and grow. I wanted to burn everything, for the fire to burn everything and grow.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
I was luckily able to quickly stop myself and the flames disappeared like they were never there. I would have felt upset with what happened normally but I felt like I had actually gained something from this. I felt closer to the flames, like I could understand them and what they wanted. As I focused on the idea of controlling the fire I realized I was thinking of the fire as an object and not a living being. That was the key difference, fire needed to breath, it wanted to grow and cover everything, not be contained. It had desires and needs which I had been ignoring, and for some reason it felt close to me enough that it would not ever harm me, only protect me. That is why I could never control it, I never truly understood it in the first place. Leaving the forest that day I had found myself in a way that I never thought I could.
After that day, I continued learning to control and guide the fire every day after school. I even went as far as building a makeshift forge behind my parent’s house. It took a lot of convincing to get them to allow me to make it, so I ended up making a deal to apprentice with another blacksmith for 2 years before I could make my own forge. During all this time, I learned to make blades, nails, jewelry, and all sorts of things. Honestly the apprenticeship was the best idea I ever could have had, without which I would have had to learn everything by myself. As time went on I began to make my own knives and other items working on request through online forums, and even set up my own forge at home. I had turned out to be very good at making blades and made quite the reputation for myself online sending my blades to people. As time went on I even began having regular orders from some people.
Soon I made enough to buy my own little piece of land in the middle of nowhere, 20 miles from the city of Grand Rapids. I even bought enough supplies to make a small house, closer to the size of a one car garage than a house. Then I built myself a workshop where I could make all my blades and other things. As I graduated high school I moved everything into the house and set up my own shop where people could order blades and any other type of thing they wanted from me online. I even let people requisition unique designs or go with a premade design for my knives. Of course, I also made many other things such as jewelry to keep myself practiced in most techniques and forms of forging, but more than anything I was now able to experiment with metals on my own.
The thing that I wanted to do the most though was to forge the much harder to work with materials. Currently my goal was to be able to get some tungsten and forge a knife with it. Unfortunately, I need to find a supplier to get some as well as figure out how to forge such a metal as my forge can only get roughly half as hot as it needs to be. Usually tungsten being used for a blade or being forged in general is considered as impossible, or as a waste as usually people either ruin their equipment, as well as how hard it is to weld such a material. But with my talents I think it may be possible to make good reliable tools entirely from tungsten.
In today’s market tungsten is much more expensive than it used to be as it is a good material to mix with carbon and steel. It is usually used to make armor piercing shells, armor, and other military ordinance. Of course, it is also used for some of the most high-end tools around the world, with simple drill bits made costing upwards of $750 because of the tools durability and precision. Thanks to all of this it is both hard to acquire and to work with the material. In the end it will be a long time before I can make the material into something usable once I do get some, so for now I am making blades and testing some ideas.
Today I made a stainless steel long sword that is roughly 3’6” long. The blade itself makes up exactly 3’ of the sword and the handle is 6” long. The reason I am making this sword is that I am using a specific type of stainless steel that is highly heat resistant and generally keeps its hardness and shape even at high temperatures. This is basically a practice for the type of blade I want to make with tungsten, with the exception being tungsten is much heavier and needs higher temperatures to forge. This sword itself was not too hard as I have handled roughly similar materials many times before. Because of this I fear I won’t be prepared for when I need to forge the tungsten as it will be much harder. The leap in skill between this and tungsten is just too large. So instead I need to work on my unique techniques that I have been wanting to refine and use for years.
Since I started to learn to forge, the first thing I wanted to do was to experiment with how to manipulate fire and how I could not be hurt by it to find unique ways to create things. Of course, this was not going to happen as I needed to be supervised a lot when I was first learning, and when I did get my own forge I wasn’t able to stay up late or have much privacy with where it was set up. In the end I gave up on the idea until I could get some real privacy to try and learn these things. But now that I had time and privacy I could experiment all I wanted.