The Witch’s Dagger Saga

The night swallowed them whole as Drakkara glided low, her scales shimmering like oil on water, carrying Lirael over a valley no map dared name. Beneath her wings, the world blurred—fields of charred stubble, rivers glinting like spilled mercury, and a sky mottled with ash-gray clouds. It was the sort of night where even the stars felt watched.

They landed on a stony ledge, the mouth of a cavern yawning ahead, a breath of forge-warm air seeping out into the chill. The scent of coal and Celestial iron drifted to Lirael, triggering a pulse of longing and dread. She knew this place. It had been whispered of in underground rings—an outlaw forge, a sanctum for weapons no one should be making.

Drakkara lowered her head, pressing her muzzle close so Lirael could dismount. Even here, under the cover of night, they did not speak. Lirael’s chains of jewelry glittered faintly at her wrists and throat, the sigils her uncle had etched into them pulsing like cold embers. Her eyes flicked up to Drakkara’s; the dragon’s gaze, molten gold, softened. They did not need words—years of shared memory flowed between them like water through hidden channels.

Inside, the cavern opened into a sprawling forge. It was unlike any smithy Lirael had ever seen—no banners, no markings, just raw rock and shadow broken by the glow of dragonfire caught in a network of copper and glass channels. Hammer shapes hung like sleeping bats from the ceiling, and pools of quenchants swirled faintly in their odd shaped containers. Heat pressed against her skin. In the far corner, a tall figure stood over an anvil, hammer striking in slow, deliberate arcs. Sparks rose like fireflies, dancing toward the ceiling.

Nerean.

He didn’t turn immediately. He had felt their arrival in the shift of the air, the way an animal senses a predator or an old friend. When he did, his eyes caught Lirael’s—sharper now, suspicious. His hammer paused midair, then dropped gently to the anvil.

“You,” he said, his voice a blade sheathed in velvet. “Of course it’s you. Does your uncle know you’re here?”

Silence. A flicker in Lirael’s eyes. She opened her mouth, then shut it.“She can’t answer that,” Drakkara growled. “Why not?” 

Lirael smiled faintly. “Some questions are better left unanswered.” She reached out and steadied a stack of steel bars just as he nearly toppled them. “Careful,” she murmured.The touch startled them both — a brief electric moment, gone as soon as it arrived. Drakkara’s nostrils flared with a hint of amusement, the closest a dragon came to a chuckle. 

Lirael kept her face still, but her hands curled, her jewelry rattling softly. Drakkara shifted her weight, wings folding tight, a silent wall between them. Nerean noticed the bangles on Lireal’s wrist matched the one on her neck. He noticed the runes, and it was then he felt the power.

“I don’t care what you need,” Nerean muttered as he picked back up his hammer and landed a few light blows, as if Lirael wasn’t there. “I don’t forge for the Dark Mage.”

Drakkara’s tail flicked once, her eyes narrowing. She didn’t answer, but her slow exhale sent a curl of flame toward the forge’s heart. It was a warning and a plea all at once. Nerean stared at it, at her, then at Lirael again. He could see the truth flickering there, even if he couldn’t trust it yet. She looked like someone walking a knife’s edge—someone who had risked everything just to stand here.

Lirael straightened but said nothing. Drakkara’s rumble filled the silence, a sound between a growl and a sigh. “We’re not here to fight, and we are not your enemies.”

“What do you need?” he asked cautiously, each word drawn out like iron under a hammer.

Drakkara eased her wing between them, signaling a pause. “She has something she wants forged,” the dragon hesitated… Nerean tilted his head. “Does she? (sarcastically)” He wiped his hands on a rag. “And why not make it herself? Is she not  an alchemist?”“She can speak,” Drakkara interjected sharply when Lirael hesitated. “I am,” Lirael said, voice soft but steady. “I’ve tried, but it’s beyond my skill. This blade needs a certain touch. A rogue’s touch. Your touch.” They both blushed.Nerean arched an eyebrow. “My touch? Dangerous words.”Lirael drew from her satchel a roll of parchment and unfurled it on his bench. Lines of runes and symbols curled like vines around a dagger’s outline. Not a weapon for war, but something older, stranger — a Witching Dagger, the schematic alive with coded meaning, speculation and an order that lay just below the surface of chaos. 

Drakkara dipped her head, a small bow dragons made only in respect. “A blade,” she said. “Curved. It must cut without stealing. It must keep what it cuts.”

Lirael glanced up at Drakkara, the barest tilt of her head, and Drakkara dipped hers in return. In that wordless exchange, Nerean understood more than he wanted to: the jewelry, the silence, the desperation. He sighed, rubbing a hand over his jaw. She was being watched, and this was a big risk.

“Fine,” he muttered. “Did you at least bring the right steel?”

Lireal produced a satchel from beneath Drakkara’s wing, its clasp engraved with runes that pulsed faintly blue. When she opened it, the cavern filled with a pale glow: a sliver of Celestial iron, raw and unworked, its surface shifting like liquid starlight. Nerean’s breath caught. This wasn’t just a rare metal; this was power.

“This will make the blade,” he whispered, half to himself. “But the fire…” He looked at Drakkara. “Your fire.”

Drakkara’s eyes blazed. The sound she made was neither yes nor no but something older—a growl layered over a hymn.

Nerean reached for his tongs, a tremor running through his hands. He would forge the dagger. But he knew even before he began that this would not be a simple commission. It would be a test—for all three of them.

The forge roared to life with an intensity that rattled the anvil. Drakkara exhaled a thread of her inner fire accompanied with her ancient guttural hymn, and the coals blazed white-hot moving towards an unnatural purple glow. Nerean slid the billet of Celestial Iron into the heart of the forge, muttering runes under his breath. Lirael sprinkled a thin trail of powdered fey-silver across the metal, and it flared in pale blue.As the dagger began to take shape, the three of them formed an uneasy triangle around the anvil — blacksmith, alchemist, dragon. Drakkara’s magical flame fused layers of metal and alchemy; Lirael whispered old forgotten chants on top of Drakkara’s hymn while Nerean’s hammer rose and fell in rhythm with their tune. The Witch’s Dagger glowed purple and orange, its edges glimmering with hidden runes only visible when struck under the dragonfire.

They began with a bar of Celestial iron thin as a promise and twice as treacherous. Nerean heated it to a red under the heat of dwarven mined coal until the steel would glow orange  but go no farther; Drakkara fed air to the coal bed in a long, precise exhale that would have set a barn alight but only asked the forge to listen. Once again, the fire moved into an unnatural purple glow with dancing bands of blues and greens as if the Northern lights were trapped inside. Nerean slipped it into a stack of three iron bands with an edge band of high carbon content. Lirael stood at the bench, grinding dried moonleaf and featherwort into a pestle with the methodical fury of someone counting breaths, then poured the green powder into a salt brine that smelled of wet stone and clean thunder.

Outside, the night deepened, but inside the forge, time bent to their work. Sparks danced like captive stars, runes pulsed like heartbeats in the blade, and each strike of the hammer rang with the sound of a bond — fragile, dangerous, but undeniable — forming between them.

After the third heat, Nerean drew the iron long and let it curve itself the way a river curve  chooses a bank. He set the spine like a rule and thinned the belly until the edge began to think differently about the world. Lirael’s fingers hovered when they wanted to carve, and Drakkara rumbled low in her chest: Patience. They took turns each in their own discipline the way three people take turns finishing a sentence spoken without sound. 

Nearing completion, Nerean took the form and swiftly twisted the base of the billet around itself expertly producing three twists that would allow the blade to transfer the collected energy from the blade into the hand of the wielder.

When the shape was ready, Lirael took up a hooked scribe and etched along the outer curve a series of runes that did not command but asked: “Hold what you touch” She scored a second mark into the spine—a line no longer than a thumbnail, a hitch in the light—so that small bindings (knots laid on roots, whispers in sap) would let go. Nerean inlaid a thread of Celestial in the pommel, a vein that wandered like a thought. No jewels. No traps for the eye. Work wanted to be worked, not admired.

The quench hissed as if the blade had learned the language of water in an instant. The room filled with a smell like the first breath after a storm. Lirael lifted the dagger and her hand felt natural like the encircled hands of long time lovers.

“Shall we test,” it? Nerean asked. His voice tried to be business. It failed and became hope. “Ild Faux keeps a small garden stocked with powerful plants. I’m sure she has featherwort.”

Featherwort is one of a few plants that flower under the moon. In the right conditions, it can be harvested with a desirable outcome - get it wrong and the effects can be deadly. A five-flowered plant was required as the first cut. Each flower represents part of the beings of life - the top three flowers represent one each of the celestial beings and their creations: dragons, humans and dir (smaller creatures with unusual powers and features). The lower two flowers represent the beginning and the end of life.

At the garden’s heart, the herbs lay like sleeping dancers: Featherwort combed by no wind, moonleaf drinking a light that wasn’t there, mare’s ladder rungs invisible unless you stumbled. The earth around them was knotted with old protections—a basilisks weave of rope-spells coiled in the loam, whisper wards tucked beneath roots, a net for thieves and fools. In this group there were no fools.

Lirael knelt. The dagger’s edge did not shine. It waited.

She set the edge under a featherwort’s stem and lifted it. The leaf let itself be taken, and the virtue in it—its cool, its promise to take heat out of harm—did not run away into the air. She cut a length of featherwort and the garden breathed, offended but not enraged, like an old woman whose kitchen you have entered to sneak tastes of her delicious creations before a feast.

Then the garden played its trick.

It showed Lirael two young dragons made of memory—small bodies scaled like the inside of shells, bright eyes, the clumsy joy of new flight. They came laughing through the undergrowth, teeth white, bellies clean.

“Children,” Drakkara said, but the word was not in her throat. It was all through her bones.

The illusions ran to the edge of the clearing and became cages. Armor fell around them from a sky that was not a sky, plates locking plates, seams whispering shut. Their eyes stayed bright and then went dark—not dim, carried behind glass, looking out from the inside. A tear ran down each cheek, bright and fast; then rust where it touched the metal, eating a line through the plates like a last resort.

Drakkara shed her own tears then clenched her jawline.

Lirael’s chains tightened, happy to choke the scream she did not give. She put the dagger’s spine to the nearest binding in the ground and pressed. The little notches Nerean had forged filtered out the energy before the twist and forgot itself. The glade’s trick faltered. The illusions flickered.

“Hold,” Drakkara said, and the word bent the branches. She lowered her head until her horn tips touched the clearing’s lip and looked at the ghosts of her children as if looking were a kind of shelter.

Lirael made her last cut. The vision faded. The garden returned to its peaceful state with the moon gently kissing the leaves of the foliage through the darkness. The test was successful.

Lireal thanked Nerean. Drakkara uttered not a word. 

They turned for home.

In the garden a stone had recorded nothing ornate: three sigils, simple as a child’s drawing—wing, hammer, a leaf—and beneath them a fourth that looked like a tear.

In the forge, Nerean sat in a chair in the corner and pondered the events of the night. Something was shifting.

Outside, somewhere, a world waited for a cure it couldn’t afford to wait for. 

Inside, a small blade slept in its sheath, made to cut without stealing, ready to harvest the small mercies the war still allowed.

The first drop of mending had happened.