Mól electrum weapon-craft

A Mól blade is not steel with a working laid over it. Electrum runs through the whole weapon, woven like a web over a spine or a full tang carried down its length, and the shape that web is laid in has purpose without being writing. Struck on a Mól anvil, the blade rings the pattern out, and a smith with the ear for it can feel where the metal goes.

Where a weapon carries a socket, the center point of that socket touches the electrum. That contact is the focal point: whatever is set into the socket does not sit in the pommel doing local work, it runs out along the web into every part of the blade. The sword Hinta forged for Koa copies the arrangement: a full tang of electrum she set into it herself at ruinous cost, and a socket whose center just touches the metal.

It is also why they die the way they do. The electrum is the pattern, and being the pattern makes it the weak point, so the weak point is not in one place. A Mól blade that fails does not crack in two. It shatters like glass.

She put all of this together in a week at Wraithblade Keep’s anvil, with the broadsword the party was carrying for Torgun Kurvroc as her reference piece, and she drew the obvious conclusion out loud: knowing how to recreate the pattern is knowing how to destroy it. That is the method the Wraithblade Khopesh was finally destroyed by.

The keep’s own forge is part of the craft. It makes electrum about as workable as steam-bent wood, which is how the metal can be woven through a blade rather than set into it as a core, and Hinta means to go back to it.