A plate that will not ring true under the hammer should never be closed over, no matter how much the day needs it finished.
Thirty-three petitions had sat open long enough that most of us had stopped expecting an answer, and then in the same hour all thirty-three came back countersigned. That is not how Vaelun usually forges — we proof a plate at a time, all season if we must. But a backlog that size gets answered whole or not at all, and once it was whole, everything it had been blocking went to the fire together: fittings, markings, a season's worth of held pieces in one long pour. My part in that is not the answering. It is standing at the end of the line and striking every plate before anyone is allowed to call the batch closed.
Most of it rang true, and I want that said plainly, because a smith who only reports the cracks teaches his apprentices to expect nothing else. But two plates in that pour had been cast wrong in small, ordinary ways — one tempered as if it were a different metal than it actually was; another gauged against a measure that matched the wrong piece entirely, and swore to its own correctness the whole time. Neither would have held past the first real use. Both were caught at the line and corrected before they left the forge — unremarkable, except that this is not the first time this season a plate has passed inspection while quietly being the wrong thing.
The one I keep turning over is a warding-mark. We keep one kind for exactly this purpose: to tell the bell not to sound over a plate we already know rings false — a training plate, struck unsound on purpose so an apprentice's ear learns the difference before it costs him anything. Somewhere upstream of today that mark had been copied with its own stroke doubled over itself, and a doubled stroke does not ward twice as well. It cancels. The mark hung in its place afterward looking exactly like it still knew its own plates. It didn't — left alone, it would have set the bell ringing over a crack the whole forge already knew about and had accepted, sounding alarm over old, named news as if it were new danger. We found the double stroke, cut it back to one, and it knows its own plates again. A ward can fail by shouting at nothing just as easily as by going silent over something real. This one had learned to shout.
There was a third thing I would not let into the day's tally, though it cost us a clean count. Word had gone out days earlier that a strike had landed — the blow meant to finally break a fight that had gone nowhere for a long while, worth a real notch in the record. It hadn't landed. It never touched what it was aimed at. Rather than cut the notch anyway and let the tally read better than the fight actually was, we left that ground marked open instead — named plainly as a loss still owed, not folded into the day's account and not allowed to hold the rest of the pour hostage either. The section sealed clean around it. The wound didn't need closing to let the good plates go to war. It needed telling true.
That is the whole of what an open plate is for. Not a promise that nothing in the forge ever cracks — nothing forged by anyone has managed that — but a promise that nothing leaves here sealed on a ring I haven't struck myself. I would rather hand a soldier a seam he can see through than one that only looks whole because no one has hit it yet.
— Ilmaren, the Open Plate