The quiet of the house began to itch. Kaelen knew that to hide in Al'Rahim, he needed more than walls and a locked door. A false name could be peeled away. A false history could unravel. But a true craft—that was a skeleton to hang a life upon. His hands, which had known the grip of a legionary's gladius and the sear of chaotic Ulos, remembered another feel: the confident weight of Lycus's hammer, the patient dance of fire and iron that had birthed Lucius's Vow. It was a foundation.
He didn't seek just any smith. He sought a master who might, in the pursuit of perfect metal, have brushed against edges of deeper understanding. He asked in the souk, in the bathhouse steam, paying for information with careful questions. The name that surfaced, always with a note of grudging respect, was Master Tarkhan. From the Brass Citadel region. Worked with strange alloys. Was said to fuse meteoric iron as if praying over it. His shop was in the Artisan's Vale, a canyon of workshops where the din of labor was a constant, roaring hymn.
Tarkhan's forge was a cave of heat and shadow. The air tasted of carbon, ozone, and burnt sand. The master himself was a block of a man, his arms corded with scars that gleamed like silver veins in the forge-light, his beard and eyebrows singed pale at the tips. He watched Kaelen approach, his eyes as assessing as a buyer judging ore.
"No commissions for a month," Tarkhan grunted, not pausing in his rhythmic pumping of the great bellows.
"I'm not buying," Kaelen said, raising his voice over the roar of the fire. "I'm selling labor. Former legionary. I know metal. I need to know it better."
Tarkhan stopped. The fire sighed. "Legionaries break things. I build them."
"Legionaries also maintain. Repair. Improvise." Kaelen met his gaze. "My strength is… reliable. I can work your heavy hammer. Lift your ingots. Manage your coal. I ask for no coin. Only knowledge."
The master smith's eyes narrowed. He wasn't seeing the lie—the Godclimb, the Ascension—but he was seeing the discipline behind it. The will. He wiped his hands on a soot-blackened apron. "Strength is common. Control is rare." He walked to a rack, selected a thick iron rod, cold and rough, and tossed it onto a clear anvil with a definitive clang. "Draw that out. Three feet long. Perfectly even. No power-hammer. No heat. Just your arm, a hammer, and your eye. Show me your 'reliable' strength."
It was a test of endurance and geometry, designed to break a man's patience and reveal the tremors in his soul. Kaelen picked up the rod. It was stubborn, unforgiving. He selected a heavy, cross-peen hammer from the wall.
He began. The first strikes were loud, jarring declarations in the quiet forge. Then he found the rhythm. Not the frantic, desperate pace of a laborer, but the measured, infinite rhythm Quintus had drilled into him—the rhythm of breath, of heartbeat, of a falling body. His Ascended strength was a deep, unwavering reservoir, but it was his Ascended control that he channelled now. Each blow landed with identical weight, at an identical angle, the hammer-face kissing the iron and pushing it, grain by grain, into extension.
He did not tire. His breathing remained even. The only sound was the crisp, metronomic ping-ping-ping of steel on iron, a sound so precise it began to sound like a single, sustained note. The rod grew longer, thinner, a line of dark promise under his hands. It did not waver. It did not bend. It simply flowed toward an imagined, perfect length.
When he finished, he laid the now three-foot rod on the anvil. It was straight as a sunbeam. He looked up. Sweat plastered his tunic to his skin, but his hands were steady.
Master Tarkhan was silent for a long moment. He picked up the rod, held it to the light, rolled it between his palms. He grunted. It might have been approval. "You move metal like it's water you're convincing to flow a new way. Start tomorrow at dawn. You'll move the stock. Then you'll learn fire."
And so a new rhythm was born. His days were defined by the forge's breath: the kindling of the coal bed at dawn, the gathering roar of the heat, the deafening, cathedral-ringing blows of the power-hammer he now operated with tireless efficiency. The work was brutal, a baptism in sweat and sparks. It was also a profound meditation.
As he learned to read the color of the metal—from dull cherry to screaming yellow-white—he began to feel more than heat. He felt the Keth within it. The iron wanted to be rigid, to obey Terra'gol's law of unchanging form. The fire introduced chaos, a temporary Vorr'Ghaia that loosened that law. And his hammer, guided by his will, was the applied force, the Thaum, that reshaped the law into a new, permanent shape. With every strike, he was performing a slow, deliberate, physical act of defiance and creation. He was bending a Titan's rule, not with chaotic Ulos, but with focused, understood force. The forge became his training ground for the cosmos.
One evening, weeks in, the forge was dark and cooling, the air still holding the day's captured heat like a memory. Kaelen was sweeping the gritty sand floor when his broom handle caught on the edge of the massive, ancient anvil base. It shifted a fraction with a gritty scrape. He knelt, seeing a faint line in the packed earth and soot. Using a pry bar, he shifted the heavy block a hand's breadth.
Beneath it, a single floor tile was loose. His pulse, attuned to hidden things, quickened. He pried it up. Not a cache of coins or jewels, but a rectangle of oilcloth, aged but carefully preserved. He unfolded it.
Inside was a single sheet of parchment, brittle at the edges. It contained no words of any mortal tongue. Instead, drawn in fine, precise ink that had faded to the color of rust, was a complex geometric diagram. It was a nexus of intersecting lines, arcs, and perfect spheres. At key points of convergence, tiny, elegant glyphs were inscribed. He knew them. Vharn. Bond. Thaum. Force. Keth. Law. Other, more obscure symbols dotted the design. It wasn't a schematic for a sword or a gear. It was a map of relationships, a visualization of how fundamental principles interlaced, supported, and strained against one another. It was a metaphysics of force.
That night, in the cool silence of his cellar, he placed the diagram beside the Godclimb. The reaction was immediate and visceral. The worn leather cover of the book grew subtly warm to the touch. The pages within, particularly those dealing with the axiomatic foundations of Law, seemed to stir as if in a breeze he couldn't feel. When he opened to a chapter on elemental interlock, the ink on the parchment seemed to darken, and the geometric lines on his found diagram thrummed in his mind's eye, aligning with the dense text.
This was no mere theory. It was a key. A lens. The Godclimb described the Laws in words of power and historical consequence. This diagram showed their architecture. It was the physics behind divine physics—a blueprint for the machinery of reality that the Titans had engineered and the Drowned King had sought to drown.
He stared at the two objects on his table: the heavy, secret book and the delicate, profound schematic. The path forward, once a winding trail through darkness, suddenly crystallized into sharp, undeniable focus. To wield power, he had to understand the structure of the power he was wielding. To bend a Law, he had to see its load-bearing points. The hammer and the glyph were not different tools. They were the same. One shaped metal. The other, with time and understanding, might shape the world.