Kaustubh Dudhane’s Reviews > CLANG!: A Phoenix Forge Novel > Status Update

You’re going to mess up. You’re going to say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, lose your temper when you shouldn’t. That’s not failure. It’s parenting. But leaving is different.

Wood is a noble material. It was a tree once. Trees are sophisticated. Ore is just rock with ambition.

Ask what it wants to become, then help it get there. That was Cal. It had always been Cal. With the forge, with the metal, with everything he touched.

With her.

Hammers make things, Elric. They don’t only break them.

“How do you unlearn?” she asked.

Thort rubbed his chin. “You don’t,” he said. “You add. New ways on top of old. Eventually the new ones come faster than the old ones, and you stop fighting yourself.”

“How long does that take?”

“Depends on how stubborn you are.”

Three centuries of mornings, and the ones he remembered were all hers. The first time she’d laughed at his tea… The morning she’d told him she’d solved the shield problem in her sleep, reached for tongs, and fallen off the bed, and they’d both laughed until the tea had gone cold.

The forge had opinions. The forge was hungry or satisfied or temperamental. The forge was not a tool. It was a relationship.