Hrae started that first lesson by making me learn the names of each and every one of the parts of the forge, including the anvil and the tools of a smith, slapping my naked head each time I forgot one or switched a pair. 

The slaps were not as severe as a Jotun could certainly manage, but they hurt nonetheless. When I attempted to duck and dance out of his way, he reached out a mighty fist and closed it around my neck, squeezing until I saw black dots dancing in front of my eyes.

"Try that once more, and I won't stop till you see the gates of Our Mother Hel's kingdom appear before you," he said, after releasing me and watching me choke and gasp as I leaned against my anvil rubbing my throat. "Again, what's this tool called?"  

Finally, when I'd answered well enough, he left me alone. Ordering me to repeat the terms until I could rattle off the name of everything around me without thinking.  I had little interest in doing so, however, and neglected it as I'd neglected nearly all of my studies Above Floor. As the days past, I became far more interested in observing my new environment and the other dwarves with a keen curiosity born out of a desire to figure out a way to escape. 

One soot-covered specimen with red-rimmed eyes and raised pinkish burn scars pockmarking his muscular arms like small mouths, stared at me so intensely that I felt compelled to stare back and call him to order.

"What are you looking at?" I barked. "Mind your own business!" 

Faster than I thought possible, he lunged towards me, raising his hammer over his head to strike a death blow. I grabbed up my own hammer, a chunk of metal attached to a length of horn, ready to meet a blow with a blow. But the dwarf suddenly jerked to a halt and fell, landing flat on his face. Lying prone, he pounded his hammer onto the rock of the floor as if he were beating me to death. .

The Overseer who had left me alone with Hrae came shuffling up. "Good thing he's fettered, eh? Otherwise, you'd be dead."

"I doubt that," I mumbled, watching as he repeatedly kicked the dwarf who had wanted to attack me in the sides until the miserable creature crawled backwards towards his anvil, dragging his hammer with him. 

The Overseer left, yelling into the gloom at another pair of dwarves who sounded like they were quarrelling.  

The dwarf who attempted to attack me must have been one of the criminals that I'd heard horror tales of Above Floor. I kept my eye on him in case he decided to hurl any of his tools in my direction. 

"That one's murdered more dwarves than you've seen winters, lad," a voice said from a few anvils over, as if reading my mind. I turned, but could only make out a shadowy outline. 

"His mind is shaken. He believes us to be rabbits," called another dwarf from a little farther off, and began to cackle in a way that sounded somewhere between a child and the demented. The sound echoed off the rock and rolled through the cavern, weaving its way through the clanging of hammering and the hiss of steam. 

Soon the entire cavern rang with screaming, maniacal laughter, as other dwarves were infected and joined in the din. 

I gripped my hammer so hard, my knuckles paled to the hue of fresh snow.

If the notion of living within sight, if perhaps not reach, of the murderously insane did not give me pause, the laughter did. It was the most terrifying sound I had ever heard and frightened me more than anything else I was to see or experience in that horrible place.  

It was only at that moment that I realised I had to get myself out of the Lowermost Forge at all costs. But the way to exit I'd been told about was below my dignity, and sounded as if it would take years. That was far too slow. I needed a faster route.  

Perhaps there was a way to cut through the leg iron? And then what? The more I thought it over, examined every possibility I could see or conceive of, the more I realised that there was no way to escape. And even if I did, I would have to pass by the open mouths of how many forges before finally arriving at the bronze door? I was sure to be seen.  

That didn't bother me. 

What did, was that, most likely, I would be beaten senseless and dragged back to the spot I was right then and made to go through it all again. Starting with a half-Jotun slapping my head and forcing me learn the names of insignificant things I cared little about. 

And so I sat, propped up against the mound of rock that was my anvil, and chewed on the dried herbs and wheat kernels from the food bowl that was brought around once a day by a sluggish, mentally-slow dwarf. 

I recalled what that arrogant old Overseer of the Uppermost Forge had said. If I were to rise, I  would have to learn the art of smithing. And that meant I would be required to bow my head and submit to whatever demeaning situations that entailed without complaint.  

But I had no desire to be a smith. I was a prince! The oldest of all of the sons of the Mountain King. One day I would rule the Mountain Palace and what need would I have of the intimate knowledge of an anvil and hammer?  How absurd! Whatever was my father thinking to send me here? What had I done that was so terrible? 

I felt like crying. 

The only ways out of the nightmare I found myself in appeared impossible and so it was no surprise I quickly came to believe there was no way out. I would be trapped here forever, just like Andrethi had said. 

I found so many things to provoke my anger in that sinister and hellish place that it wasn't long before I was howling and screaming my own dissatisfaction into the darkness like the half-insane dwarves that drooled and heaved blow after blow down onto their anvils.   

Sometimes I received an answer, other times, my howling was met with little more than cold disregard. I longed for the Royal Hall, and for the Upper World where the air was fresh and the wind from the sea rustled my bread and braids. When I dreamt, I was up with the rams and the goats again, or roaming through deep, green valleys and swimming in the clear pools under the waterfalls that tumbled hundreds of handspans down from the sides of the fjords. 

Waking up to find myself chained and abandoned among dangerous strangers was as painful of an experience as the blows I received from Hrae when I did not heed his instructions well enough to suit him. 

I came to learn that he had nothing but disdain for my uncalloused hands and clean face.  

"A clean smith is an inept smith," he would say, when he saw me washing in the stone water troughs, his nose wrinkled in disgust.

"That may be true, but at least I don't stink like a dead Jotun," I would reply, unable to stop myself.  

I soon learned that my cocky retorts only earned me more blows and harder lessons. Eventually, I became used to simply keeping my mouth shut and not responding to any of his insults or malicious teasing. That was a step in the right direction. 

I was given chunks of glowing-hot ore to work and taught the correct rhythm of bouncing the hammer from the end of the anvil onto the metal and back again. Hours and hours of hammering out flat sheets of iron, or making the simples of nails and door bolts, was as exhausting in its tediousness as it was physically draining. 

I had thought I was strong, but I didn't have a fraction of the strength of an experienced smith. As my arm muscles began to swell, and my chest expand, I began to think the forge might be hiding some benefits. 

Paltry as they were, they were the first thing that pleased me. Perhaps under the surface I harboured the notion of becoming strong enough to break the leg iron or to finally give Hrae a taste of his own cruelty. Whatever the motivation, I began to pay a little bit more attention my lessons, even if my anger still overtook me at times and the acidic aggression in my hands made me turn on my mixed race instructor and start a tussle, which always ended up with me curled up in a ball on the floor and screaming in pain. 

"Don't take it out on me, take it out on the metal," Hrae would shout, jerking me up by my leather apron and throwing me against the anvil. "Hammer it out. Learn to control and shape it like you'd shape iron." 

Laying a lump of glowing metal on my anvil with the tongs he kept on a looped belt around his waist, he would order me to start hammering. 

"Angry? Hate me? Beat it into the metal."

I'd pick up my hammer and start to strike, wildly and terribly inaccurately. Hrae would continue to scream at close range, forcing me to focus all of my aggression into the act of hammering. Sometimes tears would stream down my face, rising up from some unknown source within me. I would have been embarrassed, but I was hardly aware of them at times, the rage having taken such complete control of my senses that I no longer even knew where I was. 

Eventually, however, eventually I was able to aim more and more accurately even when I was feeling the most intense of emotions. I was able to keep up the bouncing rhythm even when I wanted to tear Hrae limb from limb, even when I was seething with despair, anger and hatred of my situation and those who kept me captive in it. 

I hammered, and felt the aggression drain out of my hands like the flowing of a stream. Miraculously, when I finally plucked up the tongs to inspect my work in the red light of the furnace, I was calm. Calmer than I had ever been. 

I felt at peace. 

I didn't realise it all at once. It was more of a gradual understanding, like the gentle dawning of the sun into the grey of early morning. 

When I became fully aware of what a relief it was to be rid of the seething goblin that lived inside me -- if even for a short time -- my mentality began to shift. I no longer saw the Lowermost Forge as a place of intolerable humiliation, but as somewhere that might have something valuable to teach me.   

And that was when I began to rise.