"No need. I know you and I know that you'll go ask someone else if I don't tell you myself," he sighs and hooks thumbs into his belt, the breeze playing through his red hair, "You wanna know what Steel is?" He snorts, letting his head dangle from side to side as he takes a deep breath, "Steel is the antithesis of progress. Steel is stagnancy made manifest, the physical status quo of existence. It doesn't change, it doesn't grow, it simply is."
"Thats..." you frown, struggling to wrap your head around it, "I don't understand."
The sky darkens as the sun fails to rise. Shadows drape themselves off Sten's body as he looms like a specter in the night, suddenly towering over you like the mountains in the distance.
"You wanna know what the the Price of Steel is?" He whispers, time seeming to stutter to a halt as your heartrate picks up to an ear-splitting pitch. "It's you," he pokes you in the chest. "It's me," he drives a thumb into himself, his eyes never leaving yours for even a moment. "It's all of our children," he waves a hand across the ship, gesturing at each and every thing he speaks of, "It's the very ground beneath our feet. It's the air we breathe. It's every damn blade of grass growing in every damn field! The Price of Steel, the price to lock the present in place," he drives a finger towards the heavens as hundreds of headless fish bob in the churning waves, "is the future!"
Living and growing, accepting that one day you will die and helping the next generation grow beyond what you could ever achieve, and understanding that there are many different ways to be a Dreng you may not even know about yet.
That is the lifestyle following from
- Power Requires Sacrifice.
- All Men Die.
- Memory Is Forever.
that is the biggest and most enduring antithesis to Steel.
Personally, I think in an ideal world, we might have hoped was the secret of Steel's creation would contain some kind of riddle which could provide leads on destroying it. This isn't quite that, but it does tell us a lot. The antithesis of Steel is... creation, innovation and more broadly, change?
Honestly, my difficulty putting that into a plan of action is less finding an option, and more that there are quite a few. Halla has already done at least one project which qualifies here in terms of creating the book, and if we manage to create a Norse version of Knightly Armour, then we'll have created two genuine innovations. But how do we use those to destroy Steel? Do we somehow... think about them and use that to help us gain a burning will to resist stagnation that empowers us or something? That honestly might not be impossible, but I don't know what the best ways to experiment with it could be.
Alternately, you know what else is unambiguously a force for change and allowing new growth? Destruction. The fires of Ragnarök, for example, will usher in a new age and end the old. So it feels like the Blackhand answer to all problems of "Skill issue: Use hotter fire." would also apply here. Which seems diametrically opposed to using creation, but fundamentally destruction and creation are two faces of the same coin - whilst stagnation is more about not letting the coin be flipped at all.
I'm less stumped on an approach so much as trying to figure out how this narrows down the field.
The way to defeat Steel?
Hurt it, again and again.
How to hurt it?
By being change more strongly than it is stagnation.
Every secret of true cultivation liberated (think shapecrafting, berserkr, Seers) is a scratch on Steel, a wound on the Enemy.
The bigger the secret the longer the scratch. The more widely available the liberated secret the deeper the scratch (since it is less of a secret -> more of a change from being a secret).
Break the circle of 'growing strong and it all ending with death' and turn it into an upwards spiral by spreading the secrets so they can't be lost with the death of an organization like a warband, so that the grows of the next turn starts standing on you shoulder, rather than in your position.
(This is before getting into creative approaches to dealing with Steelfathers which don't involve directly destroying Steel, which is arguably a totally separate line of research.)
Iirc Steelfathers cut themselves off of the circle of Orth by becoming Steel, using their masked followers participating in the circle in their stead to be able to gain Orth again.
There we got a weakness.
Remove their masked followers (easier said than done, I bet they are still hard to kill, but not protected by Steelness like the Steelfather).
This is pure speculation, but it could be that a Steelfather without masked followers is cut off from regenerating Orth and weaving aspects to cultivate to regain Odr.
So kill all their masked and they are cut off from regeneration until they gain new masked. So If we manage to make them waste their Orth &Odr they'd be reduced to their passive effects.
