4: Elemental
To properly go into the history of elemental blades, one needs to go back to the first reported usage of one, shortly before the onset of the third secession war. A traveling merchant claimed to have seen a sword master of incredible skill using a blade that appeared to be created of the earth itself. The merchant was roundly mocked: stone blades were not considered to be antiques even then, and the first thing that sprang to the minds of the merchant’s audience was such a blade. The merchant was forced to clarify his description to the following:
A blade of earth itself – not rock, nor obsidian, but soil itself, arranged into a blade that seemed to cause the very flesh of its victims to react as if they had been hit by a rock slide or chewed up by the quaking earth. After giving my thanks to the sword master, I asked her where she had come by such a blade.
“I created this blade myself,” she said to me, “by asking the elements for a weapon powerful enough to bring ruin upon my enemies. They obliged, that’s all.”
Later the sword master’s identity would be confirmed as the Empress Elisa the First, who abdicated the thrown shortly after slaughtering her way to the top, accompanied by companions wielding the second, third, and fourth known elemental blades. The precise specifics of manufacturing such blades are a closely guarded secret even now – evidenced by the fact there are only five other such known blades in the world some three hundred years after their first appearance.
I should note here that nobody seeking to make these blades in the centuries since has thought to ask the elements. Mostly because nobody seems to think the elements can be asked for anything. I myself have tried asking them, of course, without success. Perhaps I am asking the wrong question.