Malm

• Build & height: 1.55 m and nearly as wide, a short, broad, soot-black old smith. Forearms like anvils, a barrel chest, bandy legs planted like an anvil's feet.
• Face: wide and heavy, with deep laugh-lines packed with soot, a nose flattened by a hammer's rebound, white stubble singed short. No eyebrows: they burned off decades ago.
• Hair: a horseshoe of white bristles round a bald, soot-streaked scalp.
• Eyes: the right is a small, sharp, pale blue. The left is a glowing coal: a live ember set in the socket after a spark took the eye. It sees heat, flaws in metal, and souls inside it.
• Skin & sin-mark: soot-black over ruddy skin, burn-scarred to the elbows. Lust, gold, reading souls. Under his apron his chest is scattered with hundreds of tiny gold sparks, each a splinter of a soul he has bound. The newest glow brightest.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a grey linen shirt with the sleeves torn off · a leather apron burned through in a hundred places, patched and re-patched · heavy wool trousers · iron-capped boots · thick leather gloves he takes off to talk to metal.
• Signature item: his hammer, a short, square-headed forge hammer with a handle polished black by sixty years of his grip.
• Movement: short, heavy and certain; he walks like he's already arrived. At the anvil he is a machine: rhythm, rhythm, rhythm.
• Voice: gravelly, bellows-warm and loud (forge-deaf). He hums constantly, and it's never his own song. His balloons have a hot orange rim, with musical notes drifting off the tail whenever he hums.
• Variant looks: At the anvil (lit from below by molten metal, sparks in the air, a soul's ghost bending over the blade). The Quench (steam exploding as a glowing weapon hits the water, and a voice crying yes). Without his song (rare: sitting silent, a hand pressed to his chest of sparks, listening).

Malm can bind a willing soul into metal, giving a weapon its own will, its own voice and its own loyalty.

• Willing only: he asks, and the soul must say yes. (The Melters' whole trade is the opposite: melting souls out.)
• Worthy metal: the soul goes into something it loved or something that loved it (a hunter's knife, a bell, a ring), reforged.
• A day and a night at the anvil for each binding.
• Soul-weapons choose their wielder. He doesn't. (Lilla Ulv chose Kompis.)
• Reforging: if a soul-weapon breaks and its soul flies home to the forge, he can make it again. (Ivar, Saga III.)
• The Smedjan rule (home field): metal can hold a soul. On Smedjan, every soul-weapon is twice as awake.
• What it can't do: bind an unwilling soul, the uncounted, or Mingus ("That one's no metal. That one's a heart."). He can't forge mirror-steel either; see Rougeina.

• Tempo: 150, at the anvil.
• Home tempo: Smedjan.
• Heartbeat technique: THE QUENCH. The binding happens inside one heartbeat: the beat in which the soul says yes. In that same beat the white-hot metal hits the water, and the soul and the steel become one thing. No one else's power waits on someone else's yes.
• Burn cost: a splinter of every soul he binds stays in his chest. Each one makes his own song a little quieter.

For every soul he binds, he keeps a splinter of it in his own chest. He carries hundreds of quiet voices, so he hums other people's songs because he can no longer hear his own. He forges weapons that go out into the world to kill and die, and he feels every one of them.

• The Melters: an Order-backed cartel that melts soul-weapons down and recasts the metal as obedient tools: no will, no voice. They come with furnace-carts and writs. Their foreman, Slagg (K-IV SHAPED · #902), is Malm's former apprentice, who quenched his own soul first (ch. 112); he has melted four hundred of Malm's works.
• Old age. He's past seventy and his hands shake away from the anvil (never at it).
• The splinters: hurt a soul-weapon he made and he feels it in his chest.
• Off Smedjan, he's a strong old man with a hammer, and nothing more.

• The hammer and the anvil of the First Mountain, the great anvil on Smedjan's highest peak, where every soul-weapon is quenched in a pool fed by snowmelt.
• The Apprentices: a dozen soot-faced youngsters from every island. The youngest, Glöd, fifteen, the only one who still whistles his own tune, falls holding the forge-door against the black-oil flood in Arc 5 (the arc's loss, ch. 114).
• Every soul-weapon that ever left his forge. They remember him, and they hum when he's near.
• Kompis's five guns are all his work: Ivar (rifle; a grumpy old hunter), Lilla Ulv (pistol; a wolf cub who never grew up), Fru Gnista (flintlock; a fireworks-maker who wanted to light the sky one last time), Tyst (long silent rifle; an assassin under a vow of silence), and Bror (shotgun; Saga IV).

A forge in a fight. He opens with Hammer-Song (enemy steel cracks in their hands) and calls every soul-weapon in earshot to wake. He finishes with the Anvil-Strike. Team combos: Malm + Kompis: the whole arsenal hums at once: Subtick with four awake guns. Malm + Smurjan: "You're a forge, son. Seventeen souls in one vessel." He understands Smurjan better than anyone, and teaches him to listen to the voices like a smith listens to steel.

• Wants: to hear his own song again.
• Fears: the Melters' furnaces: souls going into slag, screaming.
• Contradiction: he forges weapons and loves every soul in them, and he sends them out to war anyway, because they asked to go.
• Humour: loud, warm and blunt. "Stop sulking, rifle. You were dead for a saga, not a century."
• Habits: hums; talks to metal; tests every blade he meets with a flick of his nail.
• Alone: sits at the cooling anvil with his hand on his chest, listening to the hundreds inside him.

• Kompis: his student. Malm teaches him that a gun's soul is won, not owned, and that every gun remembers who it was. They are two Lust-readers who see souls in steel. In Saga IV: Bror.
• Mingus: lies by the forge for warmth. "That one's no metal. That one's a heart."
• Vigolas: offered any weapon he likes. "I'll keep my fists." Malm approves.
• Rougeina: "I didn't forge her blades." He looks at them a long time and won't say more.
• Trollmage: the crow keeps stealing his rivets.
• Ivar, Lilla Ulv, Fru Gnista, Tyst, Bror: his children, in a way.

• "Every good weapon remembers who it was."
• "Stop sulking, rifle."
• "I didn't forge her blades."
• "That one's no metal. That one's a heart."