Literature
Fighting the Forge
"If you want to something to be stronger, you must temper it,” my master told me once. “You heat it up, work it to where it needs to be, and let it cool long enough to accept what you've done before starting over again.”
He often talked like the things he created were alive, as if the horseshoe he made had wanted to be a hammer and needed to 'accept' that it would be something else. I may only have been an apprentice, and only of my fifteenth summer at that, but I knew that metal was metal and not really alive. To think otherwise was just to pretend, like games little children played.
Much like the games my little brothers