Armament

“Oh what can I do for thee, my husband?” said Aesma. “Mend my clothing!” commanded the Red Eyed King, “I had one time a hauberk made from the scales of the Ur-serpent that coils beneath the ash of the world. The feathers of the screaming Roc I took for my mantle, my shield was of the tail-hide of the Leviathan that haunts the deep, and my sword was carved from the bone that is found in the heart of a World Tree.” This was all a fantastic lie, of course, for the King had never had such fine or rare clothing. And if he had been girded in such armament, so empowered by the plum he had eaten, the Gods of justice would never have had any hope at all of defeating him in battle. He would have laid such waste to the universe had never been seen before, and burnt it to a cinder, so that his red eyes could lay their baleful gaze on only smoldering ashes.

...

First she dug until she found and tugged upon the tail of the mighty Ur-Serpent, whose body was thicker around than a city. Yanking it from the earth, she wrestled with it for three days, during which she bashed enough scales from its body for her purpose. Then she dove into the black and limitless ocean, and swam until she found the leathery and ancient Leviathan of the deep. Aesma was very bad at fighting underwater, and couldn’t hold her breath for very long, so the battle went very poorly for her at first. But very shortly, she became so fed up that she summoned a score of transcendental fist arts and rained such horrific blows upon the water around her that she beat it back for a full day, turning the bottom of the ocean into dry land for a short while. The Leviathan was very slow on land, so Aesma bludgeoned it into unconsciousness and stole it’s tail while it slept.

Next Aesma tracked the Roc, and clung to its back for a full week while it pecked her viciously, but she was able to pluck enough feathers to make a fine mantle. Then she rode her chariot to the edge of the universe, and fought through the howling winds, the scouring cold, and the limitless demons that poured in from the edge of existence there. And after a harrowing journey, she was able to hack out a heart-slice of the fourth World Tree that held up creation using a vorpal shard of void-ice. The tree was mighty enough to withstand its mutilation, and it recovered in time. But until that time it was injured enough to bow, just a little, so for a while an entire corner of the universe sagged quite terribly. This caused great consternation in YISUN’s speaking house and among the multitudes of star-gazers, astronomers, sorcerers, and techno-saints that measured such things, but Aesma was scarcely aware of this. In a fervor, she fled to Koss’s workshop and stole his lesser chisel when he wasn’t looking. Then she crouched over a public hearth for a full week and banged her husband’s armaments into shape.