by Kevin L'dux

Created on: November 22, 2008

Once upon a time there was a guild of master-craftsmen who specialized in magic metal alloys. They were but young lads decades upon decades ago and were happy in the valley between the mountains that held the mystic ores that produced the alloys. They were known far and wide for the cookware they forged by hand in the deepest parts of the valley. The loud clanging of their hammers upon the crystalline metal and heat from the forge furnaces forced them from their village to where they practiced their craft at Clearmetal.

For years the small village of men and their families had been the foragers of prized phrogg mushrooms they sold a day's travel away in the city of Stone. It had been this way for as long as any had known from birth to grave. The baron of Stone had an affinity for phroggs and paid the village folk handsomely. As the rest of Stone came to know of phroggs they too paid handsomely. The citizens of Bottoms built a tall and wide earthen wall barrier around their village to keep the rest of the world from them.

While digging for the earth to construct the wall a strange black rock was found. It was light as a feather but could not be broken by pick nor hammer. The villagers tossed it into the stream that flowed in the bottoms and it burst into flames. "What could this be?", they all asked. Days later they found another like it as well as an orange colored stone that none had seen before. The two were tossed aside into a hole and when the two touched the black stone melted the orange stone into a pool of molten metal the depth of the hole. The metal stayed molten until dipped out and poured out onto the ground which then hardened into a solid bar of metal that was light and gleamed as gold. A blacksmith in the village wanted to test it at his forge and discovered it could be hammered into any shape he wanted. If cooled in the stream's water it held that shape forever. The villagers sought for the black and orange stones that were deep in the mountains and soon became known for the metal that withstood all. The finest of all was hammered thin and nearly clear giving it the name Clearmetal, from which the village soon took it's name.

After 10 years of making cookware a smith by the name of Patel thought to make a knife, none had done so before. "What a knife!", he thought to himself. It would hold it's razor sharp edge for a year before he went about making a sword. Not just any sword for Patel, he had been toying with the idea for some time. It was 3 feet

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