It was the middle of the night, and the boy tinkered still.
Alone, nested in the heartwood of a great World Tree, far removed from any semblance of civilisation – the boy tinkered.
A sharp bark of metal – then a curse. The umpteenth incident of the day. For an eternity the boy stared at the ruined chisel, its blade crumpled like paper and its handle split in two.
He closed his eyes. Perhaps if he screamed, the great tree above him would heed his call. Perhaps the spirits within it would descend upon the accursed object of his frustration and rend it in two.
He would not, for doing so was tantamount to admitting defeat. With a soft breath the boy opened his eyes. He carefully placed the intact chisel to the side and cast his gaze upon the array of tools still laid out before him.
It was vast, stretching out as far as the eye could see. Endless, perhaps. Roughly-hewn hammers of stone waited next to masterwork saws encrusted in ruby and sapphire. Exotic machines with displays of a million different languages took their place next to inscribed circles of magic and poultices of alchemical reagents.
The boy snatched at one at random and found a jackhammer in his grip. Tall, bulky – the sheer weight of the tool caught the boy off-guard, almost pulling him to the ground before he caught himself with a wince.
With that, he returned his attention to the infuriating item before him, the simple loop of bronze which had been the architect of so many sleepless nights.
By all means it should have been a piece of junk, barely worth the simple material from which it was made, the imperfections on it a mark of his shame. The imprecise alloying of the metal made his eyelid twitch, the slightly-melted clasp the object of his nightmares.
Yet for all of the bracelet's deficiencies, its largest sin of all was its refusal to be unmade.
There was no ceremony to the process; it had long since been exhausted. With a swift kick the power plug of the jackhammer went sailing out of the way. With a whir and a shudder the boy set upon his work.
Sparks leapt out with each clash of the jackhammer and the bracelet, each strike a hammer's blow. With precision and fury the boy directed his tool, repeatedly pummeling away at a single point in the bracelet's structure.
It did not work.
By the time the boy finished, the head of the jackhammer was a molten mess and its plastic housing a puddle on the ground. He looked at the pristine, unvarnished bronze of the bracelet and fought the urge to scream.
Instead, a laugh emitted from his mouth. A lone laugh, then two, then a string of dozens, shame and sorrow and rage mixing until they could no longer be distinguished from one another.
A tool leapt to his hands. Then a hundred more. With his hysterical laughter the boy fell upon the bracelet, smashing, slicing, rending.
For three days and three nights, the bracelet had vexed him.
Thus, for three days and three nights more, the boy waged war.
Instruments of precision turned to blunt tools in his hands, carefully-packaged reagents rupturing and exploding in a shimmering, ever-cascading rainbow. The World Tree shook with his fury, the spirits within fleeing as the putrid remnants of a hundred thousand spells leached into the outside world.
At the end of it all, nothing remained. Nothing but a boy and a bracelet, alone in the yawning cavity of a great tree.
And oh, how they remained. The boy was panting, coated in ash and grime, choking on the pulverized dust his destruction had wrought. Yet the bracelet... shone. Brighter than it ever had.
For it had been forged with every single tool of a master craftsman. Tempered by roiling waves of raw hate and quenched in a bottomless pit of shame.
A masterwork, the pinnacle of creation, never to be surpassed before or since. The boy beheld it in its fullness for but a moment.
Then, he fell to his knees and wept.