The Unmaker

“... Your lever isn’t nailed in properly inside the locket. The quick-release mechanism will jam when the user tries to draw the sword.”

Little Dahlia whirls in her chair, startled. Her father is standing by the Bug-Hunting School’s second-year classroom’s doorway. He doesn’t usually show up here unless he’s making something for one of the fifth-year students at Instructor Biem’s request; he anticipates her question and nods, limping towards her seat next to the windows.

“A fifth-year broke his remipede gauntlets, so Biem called me in to fix it,” he says, sighing a heavy breath of relief as he plopped down in the chair in front of her, turning around. She tries to scoop in all the parts scattered across her desk, but he picks up the unfinished scabbard before she can hide anything, scrutinizing it with half-sunken eyes. “Do they teach you how to make Swarmsteel when you’re only a second-year? I hope they’re not grading you on the quality. Great Makers know there are only five people in Alshifa qualified to grade Swarmsteel, so if Biem gives you a hard time, I’ll tell him off.”

She looks away sheepishly, shaking her head. “It’s not… graded.”

“No? Then you’re making this just for fun?”

She nods.

“For who?”

“... Issam,” she mutters. “He said, most likely, that the Instructors are going to give him and Raya early picks for their personal Swarmsteel, so he wants to try out lots of different Swarmsteel before he has to choose. I… want to make something he could find useful.”

Her father hums, turning the scabbard around to inspect the other side. “So you copied the design of the cricket leg scabbard you saw being sold in the Bazaar two weeks ago. You should know that design only works for a chained staffblade. Issam likes straight swords and stuff, doesn’t he?”

“Uh… huh.”

“So, conceptually, this scabbard won’t be the right Swarmsteel for him,” he says, placing the scabbard down and reaching into his doctor’s coat for his gloves. “You want something tough. Robust. The quick-release mechanism you have here will make it so a chained staffblade will whip out the moment it’s unsheathed, but you don’t ‘whip’ a sword out like a flail, do you? You ‘draw’ it, and you cut a straight line from the chape to the locket of the scabbard—the moment the blade comes out, it has to carry momentum and bleed sharpness from the edge.”

He looks up briefly and winks at her.

“Like this.”

She pulls out her pocket watch and turns the dial. He pulls out his own and thumbs the button. Two watches tick down in sync, but she knows his watches count down from two minutes instead of one. After all, her father was getting paler and paler by the day, and her mother, too—their hands were no longer as nimble as they once were, and there were times when she'd have to holler right in her father's ears just to wake him up for dinner. What he could once make in a single minute, he now needed two.

Even still, his two minutes aren't the same as her two minutes.

His right hand splits her scabbard in half while his left hand lays out all the parts she'd used to cobble it together: leather-wrapped brass for the foundation of the scabbard, heated quivertail wings for the straps to make it meld with human skin, bouncy scorpionfly chitin for the chape so the blade wouldn't be dulled at the tip, and normal steel for the locket where the blade's handle would be resting against at all times. The shape of the scabbard itself didn't need any changes, and her father hums in agreement. It's a good enough foundation to work off of; the real difficulty lies in figuring out how to make the unique mechanism work.

Originally, her plan was to line the insides of the scabbard with a bunch of springs and cricket leg levers, and it'd be spring-locked so that the unsheathing motion would send the blade whipping out with the force of a flail. Her father had guessed that part correctly. The problem she couldn't solve, then, was making sure all twelve levers would push the blade out at the moment of unsheathing without jamming somewhere along the way. If even one of the levers jammed, the blade wouldn't unsheathe, and the scabbard would fail in its duty as a Swarmsteel.

Her father has another plan, another vision; she sees it, eyes glimmering, as he breaks the complicated cricket leg levers she'd spent twelve hours making. Strangely, she feels no spur of anger seeing her hard work destroyed in a single moment. Her father glances at her and smirks tiredly, rolling his shoulders to dispel his tension before getting back to work reconstructing the cricket legs into something else entirely: a vertical, zigzagging saw blade the length of the entire scabbard.

Tentatively, he places the saw blade on the inside edge of the split scabbard, snapping his fingers at her for the nails. She fumbles for a second before handing him her hammer as well, and he starts nailing the saw blade in place, making sure it's perfectly aligned along the length of the scabbard. Then he places both halves of the scabbard over each other and nails them back together. Then he sharpens the chape and the locket with his scalpel. Then he polishes the straps with his gloved fingers, rubbing coarse grains off that'd interfere with its melding onto human skin—and then he drops the scabbard the instant his pocket watch rings, leaning slowly back in his chair.

“... Get me a sword from the mountains of scrap over there ”

She obliges, bouncing off her chair and retrieving a spare steel sword her classmates had been using in training recently. The sword is dull, rusty, and reeks of sweat in her hands; her father laughs as she tosses it to him with a scrunched nose, shivering from head to toe.

“Watch,” he mutters, as he sheathes the dull blade into the scabbard, “and realise the strength of a Swarmsteel has nothing to do with how complicated it is.”

Then he looks around at the chalkboard and draws, pulling the blade out in a straight line—and the blade sparks aflame, a line of fire cutting through the board and into the next classroom over.

She blinks.

He blinks.

It appears neither of them expected this outcome.

“... Simple is best, after all,” he says, coughing into his fist as he tosses the gleaming blade away, slapping the scabbard back on her desk. “I put a saw inside the scabbard so that when the blade is drawn, it's automatically sharpened. The way the cricket legs are arranged in that loose zigzag shape as well, the friction of unsheathing is neither increased nor decreased. This means the blade is just going to be permanently sharper henceforth… which is all a Swarmsteel scabbard for a kid really needs to do.”

Excited, little Dahlia picks up the scabbard and marvels at the tiny saw inside; her father pats her on the head with a wistful smile, sighing softly.

“I told you, didn't I?” he said. “Don't follow a template. Don't copy something that has already been made. Every Swarmsteel you make must be uniquely ‘yours’ and ‘theirs’, and nobody can come in between them.”

“...”

Sensing little Dahlia is going to be completely preoccupied with playing with her new scabbard for the rest of the day, he sighs and stands, turning to leave her be in the classroom.

She’ll be back home for dinner soon enough.

“... Don’t make generic Swarmsteel, Dahlia,” he whispers. “Your ones must carve your own destiny.”

- Scene from Alshifa Bug-Hunting School past