"I'm definitely not from this world. Why can't you live on the surface?"

"Too hot. Maybe poison air too. Mm. Anything else you can remember about how you got here? Could be important."

"Something hit me in the head. I thought it was an illusion or a hallucination until it touched me, it looked like tangled light. I didn't speak this language until I found myself here and that's the weirdest part of this because I can't even guess how anyone could do that. It probably all sounds equally fantastical to you but funny light shows are normal and I can guess what kind of abilities you might have to have to make something suddenly appear in another place. Teaching someone a new language instantly is... even I thought it was impossible."

"...You're right. It all sounds equally fantastical. And I'm just a farmer on a rock. Not exactly the best guy to figure this stuff out."

"Well, now you're a farmer on a rock with some titanium and a funny story. Let me know if you need anything else changed into something else while I'm here."

"Could use metal tools. If you can do metal in particular shapes."

"Sort of but you'd be a lot better off getting a real smith to make things. I can try if you have solid chunks of wood big enough but they have to be a lot bigger than the tools you want to end up with..."

"I wear a lotta hats out here on my own, but 'smith' ain't one of 'em. If you can make a few nice blades that I can sharpen from some big timbers, I'll be happy. City folk are gonna love you for that, though. I think you're going to live like a king if you don't fuck it up somehow. Well, compared to the rest of us, dunno what kind of ancestral conveniences you're used to having."

"I can try! Do you have wood on hand that you want me to work on now?"

"I have timbers. Ship folk buy 'em. Before that, you still want to smash up these nasty bracelets, yeah? Let's go get my hammer."

He throws his - now empty - plate into a corner and puts the hunk of titanium away more carefully. He gets up holding the bracelets and heads outside.

Valanda follows.

And here's a big hammer, a sledge-hammer weighing at least fifteen pounds, and an open spot of ground with the hated bracelets sitting on it. "If it's too heavy for ya to get a good solid swing, maybe you can drop it?"

Valanda doesn't regret starving himself and refusing to do anything, it was the best choice he could make at the time.

But if he'd known smashing the slave bracelets was on the table he wouldn't've let himself get this weak.

He lifts the hammer as high as he can and drops it on them.

The hammer falls on one of the bracelets, misses the other one. The bracelet is dented. The already-beaten up hammer doesn't seem to have noticed the violent impact at all.

He shouts at the bracelets in Ilan, lifts the hammer again, drops it again.

He misses.

Kar doesn't stop him. He knows catharsis when he sees it.

Again. And again if that's not enough.

Eventually the bracelets are mangled, flattened metal that couldn't possibly be worn!

Valanda keeps going till then on sheer willpower but afterward he sinks to his knees panting. He stares at the metal that used to be bracelets, silent.

Kar picks up the mangled pieces and little flecks, investigating them curiously.

"Yep. Yer free, kid."

"If you and your island are representative I think I like Cloudbank a lot."

"Heh. Thanks. Well, some islands are good. Some bad. Same with ship captains. There's pirates and slavers around. Rare, but they exist. And we don't have fancy metal magic."

"You do now! Until whatever's keeping you from doing magic notices me."

"Something keeping us from doing magic doesn't sound any more wrong than all the other crazy ancestor stories, anyway..."

He pockets mangled former-bracelets and picks up the hammer, swinging it onto his shoulder with one arm.

"I'll fetch up some timbers for you to metallize. And after this, feel free to lounge about eatin' my food until a ship sees the flag I raised and comes to say hi. Worth it for metal."

Timbers are stacked up in a corner of that shed. Rough cut. He would be pleased at Valanda's best attempt at a few knives, curved blade like so for harvesting, trowel, rake, shovel head, and so on. He draws the shapes in the dirt.

"If you can't do it you can't do it, of course. Or if you don't wanna." He shrugs.

He tries. One is unreasonably small. One is stuck in the wood by the holes in the tang and might have other problems that aren't visible. One is crooked. One is too thick. He can't do much to control which phase the metal ends up in. ...The rake is probably a functional rake, but not a very good one.

But it's all titanium and even as scrap it's worth a lot.