Jusuf Nurkic looked down at the hammer in his hands. In front of him was an immense anvil.
“Is this a dream?” he wondered, casting his eyes around his surroundings. He seemed to be floating in some kind of void; there was no ceiling, no floor, no wall. In the distance he could see specks of radiance that might have been stars, but the light in his immediate vicinity did not have a source. These oddities taken together pointed towards the conclusion that he was currently dreaming.
“This is not a dream, Jusuf,” echoed a voice all around.
“Okay, if this not dream, how I get back to Denver?” Jusuf asked, but the voice either ignored him or chose not to answer.
To the side of the anvil lay a block of some kind of metal. It had been buffed and polished so that the reflections of the stars were perfectly imitated from the sky. Steel, perhaps? Lead? Platinum? Something else? Jusuf set down the hammer and put his hands around the large metallic brick. Expecting to struggle to lift it, he found that it was picked up with no effort whatsoever.
“I don’t believe you. This dream for sure,” Jusuf said.
“This is not a dream, Jusuf,” responded the same echoey voice. “You are at the Anvil of Forging.”
Forging? He was supposed to make something out of this material?
“What I suppose to make?” Jusuf asked.
“The Slavonic gods chose you, for they saw within you the same qualities that they themselves embody: the purity of a pagan priest, the rage of a battle-warrior, the intelligence of an alchemic scholar.”
That didn’t answer his question, but Jusuf found himself grasping the hammer in his palm, readying a powerful strike against the hard metal. When he brought the hammer down, the metal was malleable like aluminum, but his senses told him that its true strength was much greater. “Titanium,” whispered his mind, and he knew to trust himself.
Sparks flew as the clanging sound of metal on metal filled his ears. He had entered an almost euphoric frenzy of metalworking, bending the metal this way and that, forming it into the object that the Gods expected of him. Soon, its shape became more defined, and Jusuf saw that he was crafting some kind of helm.
A diamond-tipped chisel had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Jusuf, understanding fully, knew exactly what he was destined to do with it.
On the helmet he chiseled the words: “Rookie of the Year”. Taking his creation from the anvil surface, he placed it on his head, and immediately felt an upwelling of power traverse his body. Then, in an instant, he was back in his Denver apartment, and his out-of-body/out-of-mind experience was over.
However, the titanium ROTY helmet remained perched on his head.