It is the perfect place to work—No. No it isn’t. It’s strange, like all the rest, foreign, unknown, untested. It hurts, somehow, to know that the ways he can describe the unfamiliar land are also so easily applied to himself. He is foreign; a castaway from another land, taken by one set of gods and abandoned by another. He is unknown; a sense of self is alone such a new concept for the former god-vessel that he has yet to adequately build up his own. He is untested; for all the days he had struggled to find and to know and to be, what had he really accomplished? Not a damn thing.

Work. The word calls out to him, beckons him like some sweet oasis in the desert of doubt he wanders. If he can work, if he can produce, then there before that stallion will some tangible thing by which to measure his worth. In the Rift he had worked with the metals of the earth, had molded and shaped them with the magic his mad gods had given him, but more than that, he had known them. Each ingot, each fleck, of each different metal had its own look, it’s own feel, it’s own weight. He kew the ring of steel, the clang of brass, the tinkle of silver; each was a symphony in his mind and memory and so to them he goes for solace.

The indigo priest stands at the the precipice, the heat radiating up toward him from the angry pseudo-volcanic pit. Sweat beads, drips, the orange light from the fire casting a strange sheen on the deep blues and subtle greens painted over his body. The heat is relentless but he remains, face to the fire and staring down and waiting… waiting for exactly the right moment. Now!

Without warning he moves, hunkering down to leans his bulk over the edge. In his mouth is a crudely woven pad of dried grass and, more nimbly that one might have expected, uses his teeth to place it over the lip of the cratered stone he had placed on a ledge just above the moving flames. It’s a poor crucible if truth be told, shallow and uneven, but inside the iron ore was glowing, separated from its impurities by the heat. (He had dug up the raw metal nearby, not much but enough to do something with.) Up he pulls, with a grunt of effort at the awkward angle, but he does not stop the movement once it is begun. 

Protected by the woven pad, he brings up the stone repository and pours the molten metal in the the carefully dug mold, no more really than an unclosed ring in the dirt. Because his mane was kept cropped, it remained out of his way, but in the profanity to heat, the ends of the pad catches fire and so as soon as the metal is poured, Iscah drops the crucible and the now-fiery makeshift barrier to the ground with a dull thud and gives his head a mighty shake. The sweat-drenched crown dips, almost franticly and he rubs his muzzles in the loose dirt at his feet. There is a faint smell of singed whiskers and when her raised himself again the dust clings to him. The metal does not take long to cool and in moments he begins to unearth his poor excuse for a prize: a ring of iron, several inches in diameter and open on one side like a chain link waiting to be joined. It’s jagged, unrefined, and still clinging to pebbles around its circumference, a imprint of its earthy mold. With his old magic, even with some proper tools, Iscah might have made it beautiful, but he gazes down at the ugly product with something close to satisfaction. Perhaps it’s a start.

"."
@Cera 

Please give me time to decipher the signs

Please forgive me for time that I've wasted