#the sword that was broken

[marahsfandomloves]

Narsil in the Rings of Power

[hylorien]

Lmk if im looking too deep but is the Brokenshard Sword tattoo supposed to be Narsil?

[daeyumi]

decay 🌑🗡️⚫️

[2022]

[adobe-outdesign]

do you think there are certain Pokemon trainers that just aren't aware of regional gimmicks

like some guy from Jhoto when he goes to battle in Galar and his opponent's Pokemon turns into a giant cake

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

vaggie, miss "im not used to fighting with long hair" who's out of practice actually battling someone or really stabbing ppl...

...still had the arm and hand strength, the REFLEXES, to do a bare handed blade catch on a SWORD, who's user had been doing an aerial dive with it aimed at vaggie's FACE

then sling around and THROW her opponent with it

i know she wants a peaceful-ish life with charlie, but i really wouldn't mind seeing her getting into just a FEW more fights >:D

also also side note: carmilla was able to eff her up earlier so easily bc vaggie fought like an exorcist, no thought to getting hurt or personal defense, the headspace of 'i can't get killed! wheee! DIE DIE DIE' that got that other exorcist killed

and the main advice vaggie got from carmilla was take advantage of that sure, but first and more importantly, defend yourself better

which kinda plays into the whole "be out for love thing" too

aka the fight isn't important, it's what you're fighting to still have Afterwards that matters- the people you love, having a life with them

(the hotel, the hazbins, charlie)

carmilla doesn't send vaggie off with a 'you're ready to go kill angels'. she's only satisfied and ends their little lesson / sparring match when she can say "you might just survive this"

feels like she wasn't teaching vaggie to take out angels. she was reminding her and showing her how NOT to get KILLED

so it's just so nice seeing vaggie blocking, dodging, and grappling lute later. how good she is at focusing on avoiding or neutralizing those attacks aimed at her. how Seriously she takes them

binding lute's both lute's arms and wedging them into her own body so lute's sword CAN'T be angled towards her

the way this shot emphasis's the THREAT of the sword hanging over vaggie

and how her flash-fast recovery and block shows she's READY for it

dodging, not attacking

she's not in this for blood or vengeance, this lady is trying to stay the fuck alive. she's got things and people to live for

things like the idea of mercy. that thing both her and charlie show their enemies, people who came down to hell for murder and spent this fight trying to kill them and got damn close to doing it.

and sure there's a pretty big tone difference between charlie's "Whoa whoa dad. He's had enough" and vaggie's "No, live. Live knowing that you only do because I let you" but both end at the same place, with someone who hates them still getting a second chance

(UNLESS ITS NIFFTY WITH THE ANGELIC BLAAADE)

and vaggie wants that second chance too. she wants a life with charlie, and fights hard so she can stick around for it

epic fail, lute... have you considered getting a hobby...?

[luna-loveboop]

Yeah sky and time's relationship is a whole mess over the master sword

but can we talk about sky and wild's view of the sword

Because it's just a lot of contradictions

Sky loves the sword. Sky loves Fi. Sky openly admits she can hurt them. Sky knows she has best interests at heart. Sky is dying for someone to care about the sword. Sky is pissed that wild broke the sword. Sky still handed her back to him.

Wild loves the sword. The sword tried to kill Wild and he's a little bitter about that. Wild worked to earn the sword. Wild doesn't feel worthy of the sword. Wild breaks the sword. The sword always comes back.

.

Wild is the only one who openly invites Sky to talk about the sword- how he forged it, and the voice inside. There is a lot of negativity around Wild and the sword. And the sword is a major bonding point with Sky. He's dying for someone to care about her too, but at the end of the day Wild is the one who actually talks to him about her.

[sadmages]

Finally found a bit for my Durge

[ganondoodle]

man, totk has truly broken something in my love for the zelda franchise, saw the new title announcement and didnt feel anything :I

[budd-ie]

We as a fandom don’t do enough with how silly every single martial god is, so much so that they have “classic” behaviors like breaking stuff as their first solution to a lock, complimenting the opponent’s sick martial skills even if they’re in mortal danger, or the constant insatiable urge to prove their strength. Xie Lian is like, the worst offender of this too. I always think about that part during the black water arc when Pei Ming, iconic top martial god and Extremely Strong guy with a ton of spiritual power at his disposal, said the ship’s rudder won’t budge and Xie Lian’s first reaction was “oh, what?” and to go verify with his own strength that the rudder is, in fact, stuck. He had zero reason to distrust Pei Ming’s conclusion or strength but he just had to check himself.

Anyways kissing is cool or whatever but have you ever considered all the martial gods versus the pickle jar that’s cursed closed forever? Unstoppable force (martial god desire to conquer every test of strength) versus immovable object (jar that can’t be opened). What shatters first, their spirits or the jar? More shenanigans like this, please. Now go wild

[ubejamjar]

⚔︎ If you'll be my sword, I'll be your shield ⛉

[reloaderror]

trying to convince myself that art is a fun and enjoyable hobby and not at all frustrating 👍

[theoutcastrogue]

Cold Iron in folklore, fiction, and RPGs

'Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid! Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.' 'Good!' said the Baron, sitting in his hall, 'But Iron—Cold Iron—is master of them all!' — Rudyard Kipling, “Cold Iron”

Folklore

Drudenmesser, or "witch-knife", an apotropaic folding knife from Germany

The notion that iron (or steel) can ward against evil spirits, witches, fairies, etc is very widespread in folklore. You hang a horseshoe over your threshold to deny entry to evil spirits, you carry an iron tool with you to make sure devils won't assault you, you place a small knife under the baby's crib to ward it from witches, and so on. Iron is apotropaic in many many cultures.

In English, we often come across passages that refer to apotropaic cold iron (or cold steel). "All uncouth, unknown Wights are terrifyed by nothing earthly so much as by cold Iron", says Robert Kirk in 1691, which I believe is the earliest example. "Evil spirits cannot bear the touch of cold steel. Iron, or preferably steel, in any form is a protection", says John Gregorson Campbell in 1901.

Words

So what is cold iron? In this context, it’s just iron. The “cold” part is poetic, especially – but not only – if we’re talking about either blades (or swords, weapons, the force of arms) or manacles and the like. It just sounds more ominous. There are “cold yron chaines” in The Fairie Queene (1596), and a 1638 book of travels tells us that a Georgian general (in the Caucasus) vowed “to make the Turk to eat cold iron”.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines “cold iron” as a sword, and dates the term to 1698. From 1725 it appears in Cant dictionaries (could this sense be thieves’ cant, originally? why not, plenty of words and expressions started as underworld slang and then entered the mainstream), and from ~1750 its use becomes much more common.

NGram Viewer diagram for 1600-2019.

In other contexts, cold iron is (surprise!) iron that’s not hot. So let’s talk a bit about metallurgy.

Metals

In nature, we can find only one kind of iron that’s pure enough to work with: meteoritic iron. It has to literally fall from the sky. Barring that very rare occurrence, people have to mine the earth for iron ore, which is not workable as is. To separate the iron from the ore we have to smelt it, and for that we need heat, in the form of hot charcoals. Throwing the ore on the coals won’t do much of anything, it’s not hot enough. But if we enclose the coals in a little tower built of clay, leaving holes for air flow, the temperature rises enough to smelt the ore. That’s called a bloomery.

clay bloomery / medieval bloomery / beating the bloom to get rid of the slag

What comes out of the bloomery is a bloom: a porous, malleable mass of iron (that we need) and slag (byproducts that we don’t need). But now we can get rid of the slag and turn the porous mass to something solid, by hammering the hot bloom over and over. And once the slag is off, by the same process we can give it a desired shape in the forge, reheating it as needed. This is called “working” the iron, hence “wrought iron” objects, i.e. forged.

a blacksmith in his forge, with bellows, fire, and anvil (English woodcut, 1603)

This is the lowest-tech version, possibly going back to ~2000 BCE in Nigeria. If we add bellows, the improved air flow will raise the temperature. So smelting happens faster and more efficiently in the bloomery, and so does heating the iron in the forge, making it easier to work with. And that’s the standard process from the Iron Age all through the middle ages and beyond (although in China they may have skipped this stage and gone straight to the next one).

If we make the bloomery bigger and bigger, with stronger and stronger bellows, we end up with a blast furnace, a construction so efficient that the temperature outright melts the iron, and it’s liquified enough to be poured into a mould and acquire the desired shape when it cools off. This is “cast iron”.

a blast furnace

So in all of this, what’s cold iron? Well, it’s iron that went though the heat and cooled off. (No heat = no iron, all you got is ore.) If it came out of a bloomery, or if it wasn’t cast, it’s by definition worked, hammered, beaten, wrought, and that happened while it was still hot.

Is there such a thing as “cold-wrought” iron? No. In fact, “working cold iron” was a simile for something foolish or pointless. A smith who beats cold iron instead of putting it in the fire shows folly, says a 1694 book on religion, so you too should choose your best tools, piety and good decorum, to educate your children and servants, instead of beating them. When Don Quixote (1605) declares he’ll go knight-erranting again, Sancho Panza tries to dissuade him, but it’s like “preaching in the desert and hammering on cold iron” (a direct translation of martillar en hierro frío).

Minor work can be done on cold iron. A 1710 dictionary of technical terms tells us that a rivetting-hammer is “chiefly used for rivetting or setting straight cold iron, or for crooking of small work; but ’tis seldom used at the forge”. Fully fashioning an object out of cold iron is not a real process – though a 1659 History of the World would claim that in Arabia it’s so hot that “smiths work nails and horseshoes out of cold iron, softened only by the vigorous heat of the sun, and the hard hammering of hands on the anvil”. [I declare myself unqualified to judge the veracity of this statement, let's just say I have doubts.] And there is of course such a thing as “cold wrought-iron”, as in wrought iron after it’s cooled off.

Either way, in the context of pre-20th century English texts which refer to apotropaic “cold iron”, it’s definitely not “cold-wrought”, or meteoritic, or a special alloy of any kind. It’s just iron.

Fiction

The old superstition kept coming up in fantasy fiction. In 1910 Rudyard Kipling wrote the very influential short story “Cold Iron” (in the collection Rewards and Fairies), where he explains invents the details of the fairies’ aversion to iron. They can’t bewitch a child wearing boots, because the boots have nails in the soles. They can’t pass under a doorway guarded by a horseshoe, but they can slip through the backdoor that people neglected to guard. Mortals live “on the near side of Cold Iron”, because there’s iron in every house, while fairies live “on the far side of Cold Iron”, and want nothing to do with it. And changelings brought up by fairies will go back to the world of mortals as soon they touch cold iron for the first time.

In Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954), we read:

“Let me tell you, boy, that you humans, weak and short-lived and unwitting, are nonetheless more strong than elves and trolls, aye, than giants and gods. And that you can touch cold iron is only one reason.”

In Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) the unicorn is imprisoned in an iron cage:

“She turned and turned in her prison, her body shrinking from the touch of the iron bars all around her. No creature of man’s night loves cold iron, and while the unicorn could endure its presence, the murderous smell of it seemed to turn her bones to sand and her blood to rain.”

Poul Anderson would come back to that idea in Operation Chaos (1971), where the worldbuilding’s premise is that magic and magical creatures have been reintroduced into the modern world, because a scientist “discovered he could degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces”. And that until then, they had been steadily declining, ever since the Iron Age came along.

There are a million examples, I’m just focusing on those that would have had a more direct influence on roleplaying games. However, I should note that all these say “cold iron” but mean “iron”. Yes, the fey call it cold, but they are a poetic bunch. You can’t expect Robin Goodfellow’s words to be pedestrian, now can you?

RPGs

And from there, fantasy roleplaying systems got the idea that Cold Iron is a special material that fey are vulnerable to. The term had been floating around since the early D&D days, but inconsistently, scattered in random sourcebooks, and not necessarily meaning anything else than iron. In 1st Edition’s Monster Manual (1977) it’s ghasts and quasits who are vulnerable to it, not any fey creature. Devils and/or fiends might dislike iron, powdered cold iron is a component in Magic Circle Against Evil, and “cold-wrought iron” makes a couple of appearances. For example, in AD&D it can strike Fool’s Gold and turn it back to its natural state, revealing the illusion.

Then Changeling: The Dreaming came along and made it a big deal, a fundamental rule, and an anathema to all fae:

Cold iron is the ultimate sign of Banality to changelings. ... Its presence makes changelings ill at ease, and cold iron weapons cause horrible, smoking wounds that rob changelings of Glamour and threaten their very existence.... The best way to think about cold iron is not as a thing, but as a process, a very low-tech process. It must be produced from iron ore over a charcoal fire. The resulting lump of black-gray material can then be forged (hammered) into useful shapes. — Changeling: The Dreaming (2nd Edition, 1997)

So now that we know how iron works, does that description make sense? Well, if we assume that the iron ore is unceremoniously dumped on coals, it does not. You can’t smelt iron like that. If we assume that a bloomery is involved even though it’s not mentioned, then yes, this is broadly speaking how iron’s been made since the Iron Age, and until blast furnaces came into the picture. But the World of Darkness isn’t a pseudo-medieval setting, it’s modern urban fantasy. So the implication here is that “cold iron” is iron made the old way: you can’t buy it in the store, someone has to replicate ye olde process and do the whole thing by hand. Now, this is NOT how the term “cold iron” has been used in real life or fiction thus far, but hey, fantasy games are allowed to invent things.

Regardless, 3.5 borrowed the idea, and for the first time D&D made this a core rule. Now most fey creatures had damage reduction and took less damage from weapons and natural attacks, unless the weapon was made of Cold Iron:

“This iron, mined deep underground, known for its effectiveness against fey creatures, is forged at a lower temperature to preserve its delicate properties.” — Player’s Handbook (3.5 Edition, 2003)

Pathfinder kept the rule, though 5e did not. And unlike Changeling, this definition left it somewhat ambiguous if we’re talking about a material with special composition (i.e. not iron) or made with a special process (i.e. iron but). The community was divided, threads were locked over this!

So until someone points me to new evidence, I’ll assume that the invention of cold iron as a special material, distinct from plain iron, should be attributed to TTRPGs.

[wentian]

⚔️📜 BROKEN SWORD: SHADOW OF THE TEMPLARS — REFORGED (2024)

"Top of the morning to you!" "I beg your pardon?" "That's what you Irish say, isn't it?" "Do you want something or are you just flaunting your xenophobia?"

[hellosunnycore]

wano zoro my beloved

[maryxherie]

mare barrow fanart in 2024

love ur work @vaveyard

[cerezatodd]

SVSSS Au

Shen Yuan transmigrated as a baby before canon, either left in forest by someone o born from a magical plant.

He survives only because he was found by the previous Qian Cao Peak Lord, a few months before ascension.

The Peak Lord then put Mu QingFang in charge of taking care of Baby!Shen Yuan until he could put him for adoption. But MQF bonds with Baby!Shen Yuan and decides "this is MY CHILD" once he is Peak Lord.

The twist? Shen Yuan looks like the lovechild of YQY and SQQ, more noticible the older he gets. So he hides him in Qian Cao and swear his disciples and martial sibiling in silence.

Only Wei QingWei (because I ship it) knows - among the others Peak Lords- and is co-parenting Shen Yuan.

Then SQQ qi deviation happens and is taken to Qian Cao instead of being left in the Bamboo House.

The innevitable descovery happens.

Shang QingHua is freaking out in silence in a corner

EDIT: Picture this. Little Shen Yuan and MQF tending to the private medicinal garden, with WQW seting up their lunch in the background.