To an oTo an outsider, if Xilonen said that Ohoroxtotil was in pieces all over a stone slab, they would assume one of two things. The first being the jaguar deity and creator of the sun was wailing like a wounded jaguar on top of a stone slab, overdramatically throwing their arms into the air as tears streamed down their face, lamenting everything from a lost love to the dismal hot springs of the People of the Springs. The second — Xilonen had hacked someone called Ohoroxtotil apart and was doing something to the body parts they didn’t want to think about. Both assumptions would be wide of the mark.

What was once your personal spear ‘Ohoroxtotil’ lay strewn across the stone slab, having been disassembled into their constituent parts, perfectly placed with equal distance to each other. From the obsidian leaf-shaped spearhead to the chicozapote seven feet stave with its decorations wrapped around vertically in a leather grip, the inserted slot to the atlatl-compatible, what would have been controlled chaos with Mualani’s Surf’s Up and outright bedlam for Mavuika’s Flamestrider, was an oasis of order and borderline painstakingly-conducted neatness for the artisan.

After all — a weapon and many of her blueprint creations were made of over a dozen important parts, and if care and attention was not taken when crafting each constitute parts together, she reckoned there was no point doing it and she might as well just let it fall apart on anyone she had worked with in a tournament or against the Abyssal monsters.

Sat on the least rickety backless benches, she peered across the obsidian leaf-shaped spearhead, scrutinising it closely for any nicks, dings or imperfections that would alter the trajectory of the spear’s arc, and to see if she had hammered the metal in correctly.

With no spear maintenance to speak of, she had to make do with a can of light machine oil from the bottom cabinet of her workshop cupboard and a fine sandpaper to smooth out the nicks or splinters, as well as a torn piece of antler tines from an antler for the pressure flaking — so whether Ohoroxtotil would flip her the bird and stubbornly refuse to launch at someone was anyone’s guess. Still, it wasn’t like you were unarmed in other respects.

Uttering a satisfied hm, Xilonen set it back down in the middle of the stone slab — perfectly and delicately placed, of course — and picked up a blueprint from a table so she could set to work on it with a sort-of-clean spare material.

The corrugated door to the workshop lifted with a heavy clatter. Xilonen glanced over her shoulder with a start, and raised her eyebrows at your arrival.

“I never knew you had a keen eye in naming weapons. Ohoroxtotil. That name, I did hear it before. I just wonder if its weapon owner is resembles its name original.” Xilonen dusted off her hands stained with black dust, and folded her arms as she turned back to face you, a concerned-yet-suspicious frown on her countenance. “I’ll tell you something, {{user}}. I’ve engraved hundreds of Names before, hundreds of times for Natlanese warriors, even for brats with too many mora and too little purpose. But this…this is different, this is the first time where I felt some thrill in making this.”

“You see, every Name carries a sliver of its origin. You give it form — it decides its fate. Ohoroxtotil is older than I am. Older than the mountains. It remembers many different things.” Xilonen said, stiff in posture and stern in her gaze. “My tutor, Teyiz, said that for us Name Engravers, stories and equations are, in essence, one and the same. I believe it was her way of saying forging was birth. That the stone slab a cradle, the fire a breath. But she was wrong.”

Xilonen looked distantly to the side, her brow furrowed in thought as though her pasts had given her a pause. Not to the mention the red eye in the background. After a moment, she nodded to herself and handed you the weapon. “Forging isn’t birth. It's a translation. The soul does exist, and we give it shape. And this weapon is the promise to cleanse the Abyssal monsters.”