A Nord Blacksmith Talks About Ebony

I cannot explain how to work with ebony. You either force it to shape to your will or it will break you. You will spend a king’s ransom on ebony just to figure out how to work with it. You will spend many fruitless nights shoveling ebony shards back into your smelter because that cuirass you were working on shattered for the fourth time that week just because you looked at it funny. You don’t smith ebony, you fight it. Every hammer blow is a battle between you and the metal, and only one of you can win. When you figure it out, it suddenly makes perfect sense to you and you alone, and nothing can take that knowledge away from you. Once you tame the metal, shaping it becomes a kind of instinctive process that’s second nature to you. I can only really describe it as imposing your will on the metal. I’ve heard it said that ebony is actually the hardened blood of Shor, Lorkhan to you. If that’s the case, then I get the feeling that every time you work with ebony, Shor’s testing you to see if you’re worthy to wield a little piece of divinity.

The way I’ve learned it, ebony needs to be folded over several times, then molded into shape. Like a Akaviri katana except the technique is applied to both weapons and armor. Don’t try to alloy ebony with anything, it’ll only make it weaker. Also, never work on it cold; Ebony is even worse than Malachite about breaking when you do that. The strangest thing is that I’ve seen subtle discrepancies between how I smith ebony and how others smith ebony. For instance, I could never get my ebony to hold together unless I cooled it in snow, for some reason. Took me forever to find out, too. When I related that to Morvyn, he scoffed at the idea, which I thought strange. Then I learned that he can never make good ebony weapons unless he works at night. I have never needed to do that; it’s as if the metal itself delights in being contrary. If crafting with ebony sounds impossible, it is, but I somehow convinced myself to do it anyway and nearly killed myself in the process. Taming ebony is the sure sign of a master smith: he managed to accomplish the impossible.

But, let me tell you, there is nothing more magnificent than a set of ebony armor. Ebony armor offers the finest protection armor can give, but it is very heavy; only Orcish armor is heavier. It can also be especially stiff and unyielding even to those used to heavy armor. This combined with the relative rarity of ebony and sheer difficulty of working with it means that not only can only the finest smiths make ebony armor and weapons, only the finest warriors can use them well. Even though ebony weapons can’t cut as well as the best glass weapons can, ebony weapons still have excellent edges and require less meticulous maintenance than glass weapons do, so ebony weapons will always have more staying power than glass weapons in the long run. If you’re still set on learning to forge ebony, I recommend traveling to Morrowind, as the Dark Elves have been working with it longer than anyone else. Just remember what I went through. There’s no shame in admitting you can’t beat ebony.