TRANSFORMATION
When Apollo reached the forge, Sybil was already growing the fire.A warm summer breeze lifted the curls at her nape.She’d twisted her hair high on her head and secured it with a metal spike of some sort.
He slipped his gold out of his pocket where it had been since she’d shaped it into a rose that morning.He leaned a hip against the worktable and called up his inner heat, let the gold come alive in his hand until he could melt one end of the gold, twisting and tempering it.He pushed back his heat and let the gold cool.If he had some rubies, he’s place them in the gold, in the spiraling nest of tendrils he’d shaped at one end—drops of blood to wink out from her haphazard coil of hair.He didn’t, though, so when it cooled and his muscles ached, swollen from metal’s energy, it felt incomplete.Long and tapered on one end, elaborate curved tendrils on the other.An ornament not good enough.But all he could give her.
He joined her at the fireside and pulled the metal spike from her hair.Silver, plain, serviceable.He tossed it with a clunk to the worktable as her hair fell to her shoulders.
She blinked up at him with a little crease between her brows that he soothed with the pad of his thumb before circling one finger above her head.
“Turn around,” he said, and when she did, still frowning, he gathered the thick, soft mane of golden hair and twisted it up once more.Gently, he slipped his newly forged gold into the coil of her hair.“There.All done.You may continue.”
She reached up a hand to touch the new hairpin, the twisted coiffure.“I am not surprised you know how to do a woman’s hair.”
He shrugged and returned to the large table to watch her work.He needed to go outside to the lake.The gold’s energy had stretched him tall and wide; he felt like a restless beast.He needed to prowl.And it was not just the gold’s energy making him so.As much as he’d denied it, he had done something in the magnifying room.Feeling too little and worthless to give this woman everything she deserved, he’d taken up those vines as an extension of himself.Not quite consciously.More like he’d put a silent prayer out into the universe, and the plants had answered.
God, he didn’t want to think about that, about what it meant.His grandmother’s journal talked about plants as if they were her children, as if they could talk back, greet her, hug her, love her.It all felt fucking lonely.To be so dismissed you had to imagine a rosebush de-thorning itself to offer a safe caress.
Ridiculous.Pitiful.
But something had happened, and that knowledge made him restless and sharp, and the beast in him, born of soil and gold, would not leave Sybil.So he paced the forge like a lion caged and kept an eye on her.
“What are you doing?”he asked when she set the device protype into the blazing fire.
“I think it needs to be hot.We need to melt the lead down to discover its components.”She held the prototype with long tongs and flipped it over again and again above the glowing coals.When it was glowing, too, she set it on the nearby anvil.“Bring me lead, please.”
He did, and she dropped it into the open chamber where it sat, a lifeless lump.
“And now…?”
She bit her bottom lip and smoothed her palms down her hips.“I don’t know.It’s circular.The inventor must have meant for the entire shape to be used to advantage.Why else form it that way?”
“Don’t ask me, princess.”He busied himself tidying the shelves on the other side of the room, pretending not to watch her.
“What if…” She reached for the bellows and stuck the tip of it in the opening of the prototype.Then she squeezed air into it.
The lead quivered.
They shared a look, and excitement shivered up his spine.
More air from the bellows, more quivering lead, but as the protype cooled, the lead quit moving.
“Let me try,” Apollo said.“There are other ways to get it to go round.”
She flicked a wrist at him, stepping away from the prototype.
He didn’t bother with the tongs, stuck his hands right into the coals with the prototype, guarding himself against the heat but adding some of his own.His arms and hands glowed as orange as the coals when he removed them.
“Now what?”she asked.
He hung the prototype about his wrist, opening bubble at the top, then he dropped the lead into the opening.And then he began to swing his arm, using force to swing the ring round and round his wrist.He could hear the lead tumbling about inside, finding a smooth rhythm.
“Fascinating,” Sybil breathed, inching nearer.
And didn’t that make him feel like preening.Faster and faster, he swung the ring, the lead inside until the sound shifted, became less the scratch of hard metal against hard metal.It was… softer now.
He set the ring on the table, and they peered inside.It had changed.
Sybil stuck two fingers in the opening.He could almost hear her heart pounding.Or was that his own?She pulled out the lead.And it had changed.But it wasn’t gold.
