by Jarissa Venters
This is a stone building in about the boxy shape of a shed or barn. It can fit two horses inside without putting them too close to the forge or workbench. Two pole-style hitching rings are built into the western end of the interior, near the wide open entrance. A third hitching ring on a post is available just outside the entrance, and additional animals could be parked on the west side of the exterior where they will have access to hay and a water trough from their hitching post.
The top half or so of the building is the A-frame black roof. On the narrow ends, most of the space between the roof and the wall is taken up by a giant triangular window, made of frosted or smoked glass put together with metal seams in a spiderweb pattern. The eastern wall also has a square window in its lower area, made of more brightly colored stained glass in a kaleidoscopic pattern.
That's an unsettling window, actually, to those who are not accustomed to it. Look away for too long, and the kaleidoscope pattern changes.
A chimney comes through the roof on its southern slope. Smoke is usually pouring out of it.
Contents & Furnishings
by Jarissa Venters
Inside the smithy, finished products hang from pegs on the south wall. A visitor might find
human-sized shovels and rakes, similar things sized for folks of the
dwarven or
halfling persuasion, plus one-off or commissioned products on the wall such as an iron floor lamp with an art-deco stained glass bowl at the top for Ghost Harrell at
Larchblossom Ranch or a wrought iron fire brazier for Dorna Gritgobbler's birthday at
Chiamina Farm.
The forge itself is usually lit. It is made of light-colored stone and is rounded, bricks on the lower section and a smooth single piece forming the shell-like hood. It has a black chimney rising up out of sight, going through the dull black roof. A closed grate curves along the front of the lower section, allowing air to feed into the base of the forge. On the wide stone lip of the forge's hearth, things that need a quick hammering before they go back into the heat can be worked instead of taking them over to the anvil. Between the hearth and the east wall, split firewood is neatly stacked for quick fuel additions.
Brick steps form a riser at the end of the worktable closest to the forge.
The east wall from the viewer has two windows. The square lower window gives the impression that the kaleidoscope could turn, moving the pieces and changing the colors, at any given second.
by Jarissa Venters
In the northeast building corner left of the square window, an anvil rests atop a round wood stump cut only a few inches above the red earth. The stump and the anvil might be glowing very slightly -- not the red glow of heat, but the white light of something unworldly or supernatural. A doorway-sized ornate stone carving in the wall might be ventilation (except that it was not visible from the outside) or a sound baffle. Or it might simply be art for art's sake. It is extremely clean, peach-colored stone, with no dust or cobwebs or anything on any of the many carved surfaces.
Closer to the entrance along the north wall is a simple workbench with a rack of tools hanging on the wall above it. Most of the tools are completely made of the same unpolished metal. The tools quickly identifiable include pliers, pincers, chisels, wrenches, a ball-peen hammer, tongs, and the two blacksmith hammers more often to be found on the forge's hearth. Some spaces are usually open where tools have been removed from their assigned hooks. The workbench is where things get worked once they have mostly cooled, although char marks on the workbench surface prove that this is more of a guideline than a strict rule. Stones or maybe gray bricks have been assembled into a set of stairs under the far end of the workbench so that a much shorter person does not have to dig out a stepstool in order to work comfortably.
Finished horseshoes, ready for application when a customer arrives, hang on the wall nearby. Sometimes
two oatman hats hang there as well, when the proprietors are hard at work. Sometimes a pair of leather aprons hang there instead, when the forge is dark and the proprietors are away.
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