#cold iron

So this is for @merthurmicrofic Prompt: Bound + @merlinbingo Adopted Prompt: Abuse

(This will be a longer au but I'm considering this still a 'microfic' as it can be read as an open ambigious ending lol) Warning now it's dark. The link to the ao3 will be in the title btw I just haven’t linked it yet.

Arthur hadn't been able to believe what he saw. How could Merlin, his Merlin have magic? Merlin was good, and kind. He was brave, and protective and the most loyal man he'd ever met, but maybe that was the problem.

But watching him get dragged out of that room by confused and worried guards had broken something within him.

So here he stood in the court room awaiting Merlin to be brought for trial. It was technically his first magic trial since becoming king officially about a month ago after his father passed away.

It was a trial he never thought he'd proceed over and hated that this was where he'd ended up.

He reminded himself to breathe deeply, everything was going to be fine, he had a plan, he would get Merlin out of this.

They're going to love you, Merlin had told him.

The crowd outside the cage certainly loves him, would love him both victorious and with his guts spilled — depending on which side they have bet on. The cheers and the boos wash his skin with grime and blood, but they welcome him and love him, nonetheless.

Lancelot tries not to wonder what Merlin would think of him now. Merlin is far away in Camelot, and Lancelot would be long dead before Merlin would think of him, would learn of his fate. The knights didn't love him in the end, so Lancelot settled for someone who would, someone who could use his sword, and that, unfortunately, was only ever someone like Hengist.

Part 2

Pt2/5

Pt.1 - Pt.3 Pt.4 Pt.5

Your bare feet touched something soft, something velvety, carpet. The walls made of black marble, chiseled with what seemed to be the hands of beauty and patience. You looked to the man next to you, this made sense, a beautiful home for a beautiful man.

Tags/warnings: nudity, suggestive themes, touchy Alucard (nothing crazy)

You woke when the light shone through your glassless windows, your body filled with joy and excitement. You’d get to see him today, the pretty man. Alucard. You stood up from your small linen-lined cubby, the warm summer air whisking past your naked body. A small clank is heard in your kitchen area, *Probably just an animal,* you assume. Squirrels and rodents treat themselves to your forages all the time, it wasn’t odd to hear scurrying and clanking in your house. You turn the corner from your little private bedchamber area and head to your small hidden closet. You had so much time on your hands, so you often spent months and months creating beautiful dresses lined with beautiful jewels that seemed to appear out of thin air. Most of the time when you forage you'd find small clumps of rocks that split to reveal beautiful crystals inside. Gold dust was plentiful in the silt by the riverbanks, making it ridiculously easy to line the string you had with gold once cleaning and grinding it down properly. Your dresses were woven of the finest horse hair and wool the wild stallions and sheep had lent you. Your mother was a dressmaker, she taught you at a young age how to sew and bead the dresses she sold. You had quite the knack for design, making the most beautiful patterns with the little material you had at your parents' house. But now you lived in the woods, where the freshwater clams willingly opened their shells to offer you their pearls, and the rubies and sapphires seemingly found you while you walked along the inside of the rocky caves. You never wore the dresses, only really wearing them around aimlessly in your house to the music in your head. It was just a mere project to pass the time in the woods alone, but now it seemed like it had paid off. You now had a few options to choose from to flatter the man you'd met, not that you minded being naked in front of him, but still you figured that was a little barbaric.

You opened a small hand-carved wooden chest you’d crafted a while back, the gold jewelry and body pieces shining even with the little light provided in your narrow bedroom. Pieces of the finest jewelry washed up in a specific part of the lake by your house, you were clueless about how it ended up there or who it originally belonged to, but you were grateful. You’d felt guilty at first about taking the gold lace and jewel-clad rings and bengal you’d often found in the lake, but it was clear it was arriving there on purpose, heavy jewelry doesn’t just find its way to the bank of a river, much less the spot closest to your house. You never wore it, except to try it on for the first time when you found the bejeweled pieces, yet you couldn’t help but collect it and keep it. You knew the water loved you, as did the rest of the forest, so you just justified it as gifts, you did like shiny things of course.

You slip on a few simple gold bracelets that were laced with beautiful colored gemstones, similar necklaces adorning your neck, and small rings stacked on your fingers. The jewelry was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, and now was your chance to wear it for once.

Before you reach your corner where your dresses stood, you're met with a tall blonde figure marveling at your creations. He didn't touch them but he looked at them as they hung effortlessly off the wooden tailor dummies you’d carved out of wood. The dresses were adorned with gemstones and pearls, fabric dyed beautiful colors provided to you by the exotic flowers that grew on the very walls of your house. Gold laced cord and twine were woven into the small seams of the dresses, and carefully woven lace adorned the sleeves and skirt slits in the dresses. He stared at one in particular, one of your favorite dresses you’d ever made. “Would you like to pick one for me?” You break the silence with a question, making him acknowledge you. You’d figured you’d looked quite stupid actually, standing there in just some jewelry while your body stood bare still. His eyes seemed to soften as his gaze locked on yours. “Did you make these?” You nod, taking notice of how he looked back at the dresses dreamily. “They’re beautiful,” he says as he lightly touches the end of the sleeve of the dress he was looking at beforehand. “You should wear this one,” he says in a soft tone. You approach the stand and gently slip off the dress from the mannequin. You slip your hips through the top of the dress and gently pull it up over your breasts, slipping the sleeves on and adjusting it where ever was needed. The stitching wasn’t perfect and it fit awkwardly in some places, but still it looked as beautiful as ever on you. Or so Alucard thought. He approached you carefully and snaked a hand around your waist, bringing his other hand to meet with your jaw to force your busy eyes to meet his. “Care to take a walk with me, darling?”

You walked with him in the woods, holding your dress up to keep the thorns and dirt from catching on your dress. This is why you never wore clothes, too much to worry about. Alucard glanced down at you, watching you awkwardly walk in your dress. “You were being serious about not wearing anything all the time, weren’t you?” He asked in a lofty tone, it was clear by the way that you walked that this wasn’t really normal for you. “Is it that obvious?” You say with a small laugh. “Don’t worry, it’s quite charming, I’m accustomed to elegance so it’s nice to have so change for once,” he says with as the corners of his mouth upturning as he watches you avoid a small thorny bush, the bush seemingly shying away from you as if a servant bowing to their lord as he walked through his very own hallways. *Interesting,* Alucard thought.

You walked with him over the hill that he had pointed to yesterday when he had met you at the lake. Your bare feet slipped a bit as you trekked up the steep mud. “Are you hiding? Did you have something you were running from? Is that why you built your house in such an inconvenient place?” You asked, your breath more shallow and quick as you scaled the hill. He laughed a bit, seemingly not breaking a sweat. “Well it wasn’t my choice, this is where I just ended up at,” he says as you both begin to reach the top of the hill. “What?” You say in a confused tone, you somewhat understand what he meant, he’ll, that’s how you were here, you didn’t even build your house, much less decide where it was made, was he more like you than you thought? Then there it was. Surrounded by the walls of the secluded valley, seemingly a crater full of beautiful lush life, and in the middle, a large, gothic, complex castle. One that looked like it didn’t belong, but fit in just fine. “Oh my,” you say in awe.

You seemed preoccupied with staring at the massive structure nestled in the valley that you failed to notice the small rock in your path. Your foot stubbed the rock and you let out a small yelp as you began to tumble forward, but the impact of the hit never came. Alucard acted to catch you but he was interrupted by the swift shuffling of the tall grass. The vines of the few nearby trees shot out and caught your body before you hit the ground, breaking your fall and gently picking you back up and placing you on your feet. “Ah, thank you,” you say to no one in particular as the vines retreat without further action, as if they were just doing their jobs. Alucard's brows furrowed in curiosity as he watched you straighten out your dress and adjust your jewelry. Your thoughts were interrupted by the clearing of his throat, and you turned your head to look at him. “I’ve told you what I am, no I believe it’s your turn to tell me what you are,” he says in a sly tone. “I wish I could give you a clear answer but I don’t know myself, I was referred to as a ‘which’ and a ‘monster’ by my old town folk,” you say with a deepened tone, not a sad one but a reminiscing one. “but I think better of myself, I don’t think I’m either of those things,” your tone perks up as you look at him, a smile forming on your face. “Well you’re something, I don’t know what but you’re something,” he says as he looks deep in thought. He then takes a few steps forward to meet you, offering you his arm before you both continue walking. You gently take it, as if feeling like this was something cheeky or sly. Your heart beat a bit faster and all you were doing was holding onto his strong, toned, firm arm…not that big of a deal.

You entered the enormous castle doors as they opened by themselves, your feet brushing the soft velvety carpet beneath you. It was just as beautiful inside as it was outside, the interior lined with beautiful dark wood walls and floors, and beautifully intricate tile patterns and designs. A large portrait hung flesh with the wall below the double staircase, a picture of a beautiful blonde woman with an equally beautiful baby in their arms her and what you assumed was her husband, a large brooding man with dark hair and pale skin, yet his eyes held the love of a thousand lifetimes, his eyes not trained forward but instead on the woman and child, his expression nothing short of amazement and worship. Alucard’s hand on your shoulder pulled you out of your trance, he stood there silently, staring at the picture with you before nudging his head in the direction of a large intricate stairwell. “Come, I have something to show you,” he says before leading the way.

You arrive in a beautiful room that looks freshly cleaned. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were packed to the brim with thick pieces of literature, display cases showing off beautifully crafted weapons and artifacts. “Where did you get all of this from,” you ask in a breathy tone as you're in shock at how beautiful the room is. Alucard chuckled a bit, a reminiscent tone in his laugh, “I…inherited them from an old friend,” he says vaguely and you decide not to push. You walk over to a large shrine-like structure, where a beautiful silky blue robe that was a bit dirtied and burnt around the edges, hung on a padded silk hanger behind a thick protective layer of glass, alongside a large leather whip that was coiled up on a stand beside a cut piece of fabric that showed a gold embroidered cross surrounded by various other swirls and curves. These artifacts meant much more than the other items on display, some lay out on the tables in the open air, some behind a small panel of glass grouped with other things alike. But these were in their very own cases, standing over a large red carpet and surrounded by countless burnt candles and preserved under a large archway, separating them from everything else in the room. You turn to look at Alucard but his eyes don't meet yours, they stay trained on the cases, a longing look in his eyes. This was a sensitive topic, it was most likely best to leave it alone. So you do. You keep wandering, reading the titles above the large sections in the library, ‘weaponry, masonry work, carpentry, gardening-’

“*Name*,” Alucard calls out, beckoning you with the sway of his hand towards himself. You had wandered quite far so you speed walked back to meet up with him. He gestures with an open palm to two large books lying on one of the small wooden tables surrounded by a few stray pieces of paper with writing on them and a few artifacts. “Do you want to find out what you are?” he asks casually. Your head shoots up to him, your eyes widening, “You really think we can figure it out?” you ask in disbelief. He just chuckles and caresses one of the books that held the same crest you'd seen earlier behind the thick glass besides the whip and robe. “Oh yes, this is my most trusted source, it may take some time but I guarantee we could figure it out,” he says confidently.

You're both now sitting at the wooden table, both deeply caught up in reading the manuals, the ‘beastiarys’ or at least that's what Alucard called them. Alucard has shed his coat a long while ago, his white tunic's sleeves now rolled up to his elbows and his long blonde hair put in a half-up up half-down style, the top half pinned up by a small hairpin so his hair didn't distract from his reading. You were now naked, you hated sitting down in the dress, it made you feel suffocated since you never really wore clothes. Your jewelry came off too, The clanking of the gold pieces distracted you far too much to focus, and this was a task you needed to be highly focused on. Plus Alucard didn't seem to mind when you were naked, You asked him if he was okay before you stripped, and he merely responded with a wave of his hand while his cheeks tinted with the faint blush of pink. Both of you are completely sucked into the books, only looking away from the books to test something out or confirm something with the other before returning right back to the words. “Are half of these things even real?” you ask skeptically, looking at a four-legged monster with purple skin and large bat-like wings that was told to be able to breathe fire. Alucard looks over at what page you're on and smiles. You were reading the ‘first volume’ while Alucard had the more recently made one, how recent that was you had no idea. “Trust me love they're real, and you have the old one, just look at what I've got,” he says showing you the page he was on, revealing a picture of a humanoid lizard figure with a small baby depicted in its mouth. It was holding a large spear and looking forward with red beady eyes. It looks much worse than your book, the image sends a shiver down your spine. Alucard smiles with an ‘I told you so’ cockiness him. He then flipped the page and read for a few seconds before standing up to grab something. He opened a small glass case and fished something out of it while you glanced over at the page he was on. In big bold letters, it read ‘Nymphs & their types’.

Before you could read further he stood directly beside you holding a small piece of metal in his hand. “I won't let anything bad happen to you but just know that if I'm correct this will hurt,” he says wearily, letting you nod before he does anything. After you agree he brings your hand up toward him, caressing your skin in the back of your palm gently before bringing the piece close to your palm. Cold, the metal felt cold at first, then a searing white hot pain engulfed your hand as small welts began to form. “Alucard!” You yelp out and he quickly takes the metal away, blowing cool short breaths on your hand to ease the pain. A few tears streamed down your face and he quickly set down the iron and used his other hand to wipe them away. “Sorry, sorry love, I know it hurts, I know,” he reassured you for a few seconds before speaking again. “But this is good news, we finally know what you are,” he says in a happy tone as he tries to ease your pain.

“You’re a Nymph, not entirely sure what this means, can’t say that I’ve ever met one, but now we know the extent of what you can do,” he says in a resulting tone as he continues to blow on your hand and wipe your tears. After you calm down he grabs the book with one hand and turns it to face both of you, pointing to a specific section while he lets your hand rest in his so he can continue to soothe you. The section reads ‘Forest Nymphs:,’ and he begins to mutter out some words to himself before speaking. “I believe being a forest Nymph makes the most sense, the land has some sort of enamored relationship with you,” he says in a teasing tone, making you laugh a bit. He begins to read from the abilities and powers list. It wasn’t very big since Nymphs typically weren’t meant for power, but rather a strong relationship with their environment, or at least that’s what the book read. “Healing huh?” he says as he glances at you and then at your hand, “Want to give it a go?” he suggests. You look up at him, feeling a bit embarrassed as you had absolutely no clue how to do that. “I uh, I don’t know if I have that, is there ah, sort of like a step by step how to or…” You ask sheepishly. Alucard laughs, the hardest you’ve heard him laugh yet. “Oh sweetheart I wish, these are books on how to kill creatures like me and you, they’re not exactly going to tell us how to be one,” he says teasingly, making you flustered. “Do you at least know of anything you are positive isn’t normal? Besides controlling the plants?” He asks you curiously. “I’ll have you know that I do not control them, they act on their own,” you say matter of factly, trying not to seem as flustered as you were, and then it clicked. “Oh!,” you exclaim and then begin to frantically look around for a small object. You spot a small folded piece of paper and begin to think about it, just when the thought enters your mind on how you needed the paper to float, it does, it begins to levitate and shimmy toward you quickly, landing right in the palm of your good hand. “I can do that,” you say, and look up at Alucard. He had a surprised look on his face as he looked at the paper now in your palm.

“Well that’s definitely a start.”

'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!

It is always fascinating to see how time completely sanitizes ancient survival mechanics into cute, modern superstitions.

Take the horseshoe above the door. Ask anyone today, and they will tell you it's a lucky charm. Hang it like a 'U' to catch the luck, or hang it upside down to pour the luck onto whoever walks through the door.

But Castle's history lesson in the tavern gets straight to the gritty, original intent: it wasn't originally about luck. It was a weapon of deterrence.

In Celtic and broader European folklore, the Fae (fairies, sprites, the Good Folk) were repelled by "cold iron." The symbolic reasoning behind this interpretation is brilliant. The Fae are the embodiment of the wild, untamed, chaotic natural world. They are the deep woods and the unpredictable storms.

Iron is the exact opposite. It is the pinnacle of human industry. It cannot be found in a usable state in nature; it must be mined, smelted in extreme heat, and beaten into shape on an anvil. It is human will forced upon the earth.

When humanity mastered the forge, the stories say the old magic was driven back. So, nailing a heavy, rusted piece of iron above your threshold wasn't just a plea for good fortune. It was a ward. It was a physical declaration to the creatures of the forest that this house belonged to the builders, the smiths, and the tamers of the world.