Work Text:
Once long ago there were two smiths who were the two best in the land. They admired each other, but they were rivals, too. How could they not be? They were the best.
In competition they made each other many fine gifts, and in friendship they compared their techniques, and in something besides friendship or competition they spent long nights together. And though the fairer of the two was the more skilled at decoration, though people said the other could work metal with his bare hands—neither ever exceeded the other for long. But neither did they ever stop trying.
And one day a daemon said to the fair smith, “I could teach you my secrets, and then you would be the best without question.”
And the fair smith agreed, even when the daemon named the price: his soul. What was a soul, after all? His father had always said that such things did not even exist.
So the daemon taught him: how to weld anything into anything else; how to put will and desire into metal; how to make one thing act like another. And the fair smith took this knowledge and, unlike before, hoarded it from the other.
The fair smith made many wonderful things: swords that could not be sheathed without tasting life’s blood; cloaks of metal that moved like cloth but served as fine armor; buckets that purified deadly poison into water; a mirror that showed his own lovely face even when someone else looked upon it.
But while he made these things he neglected all things but his work, and the other smith worried about him. So he came to visit, and as usual he suggested a competition.
This time the fair smith won easily, as he never had before, and of course the other was curious. But the fair smith did not wish to admit to him where he had learned these skills. So first he evaded, and then he accused the other of jealousy, and finally they fought.
They had quarreled many times before, and always made up in the end—aye, and kissed away each other’s insults, too. But this time the fair smith had no soul, and so in his rage he took up a sword that thirsted and cut the other smith’s head from his shoulders, and his hands fell against the hot anvil as he fell.
And though without his soul the fair smith could not feel regret, grief was still his, and he fell to his knees, weeping.
“Hah!” the daemon said, “I need not have bought your soul, for this deed makes it mine without question!”
But the fair smith was enraged by his laughter. He swung his hammer at the daemon, and though he was in a frenzy of rage and grief his aim was true. And behind the daemon was the marvelous mirror.
So the fair smith hammered the daemon into the mirror he had made, cursing his bargain all the while, and once he had done that it was an easy enough thing to hammer his soul out, leaving the daemon behind. And once he had done that he was seized with the most terrible remorse for what he had done.
So he went to where the other smith lay, and he used what the daemon had taught him to put his head on his shoulders again. But his hands he could not salvage, for they had been burnt; and so he had to make him new hands of iron. Then he wept, and the iron-handed smith embraced him, and they went back to the town together, hand in iron hand.
The mirror caused a lot of trouble after that, of course. But as for the two smiths, they lived very happily; and if they have not died in a way the fair smith could repair, why, they may be living still.