The first thing to return was pain, a white-hot spike driving through his skull where it had met the rock. The second was silence. A deep, profound, and unnatural silence where the constant, low hum of the Anvil's forges should have been. The earthquake was over.
He pushed himself up, his body a map of new aches and old wounds. He wasn't in the ruined, debris-strewn corridor. He was on the hard cot of his own sleeping quarters. Someone had moved him.
He rose, his movements cautious. The obsidian mask was still affixed to his face. He pushed open his door and stepped into a scene of absolute horror.
The great halls of the Anvil were a charnel house. Dead Glaives lay everywhere, their featureless masks making the slaughter anonymous and all the more grotesque. Some were slain by blade, others torn apart by the raw power of an awakened Essence. The air was thick with the coppery smell of blood and the dust of shattered stone. He moved through the carnage, a ghost in his own home, his mind a storm of shock and confusion, his training forcing a detached wariness over the rising panic.
He turned a corner into a wider chamber and froze. Lying half-buried under a chunk of fallen ceiling was a severed arm. His eyes were immediately drawn to the Mark on the wrist, a perfect, single circle circumscribing a scythe. Varien's. The hand was clenched into a fist, a final, defiant gesture. Of the Terminus himself, there was no sign. The sight was a punch to the gut, a feeling so sharp and personal it momentarily overrode his conditioning.
He pressed on, his knife in hand, until he reached the Master's receiving hall. The great basalt throne was intact. And upon it, as if watching a play that had just concluded, sat the Forge Master. The old man was untouched, his long robes pristine, his posture one of firm, graceful detachment.
Bedlam stopped before him, the sole living weapon in a hall of the dead. He assumed the Master had saved him, that this titan had risen and quelled the chaos.
"The Anvil… is broken," Bedlam stated, his voice a dry rasp.
"Fractured, not broken," the Forge Master corrected, his voice like the slow grinding of ancient stones. His face, partly obscured in the gloom, turned to him. "You fought well. You survived."
"You saved me." It was a statement, not a question.
A dry, almost inaudible chuckle. "No. I did not. You were saved by one very much like yourself. The one who killed nearly every other Glaive and Senior Glaive in this fortress. He brought you to your quarters. A strange mercy."
Bedlam's mind raced. The white-robed man? "Who?"
"He calls himself Corvene Shade."
The name was alien, yet it landed in Bedlam's mind with a faint, inexplicable resonance, like a forgotten word from a dream. It made the hairs on his arm stand on end. Why?
The Forge Master rose, his movements fluid as he descended the dais. He stopped before Bedlam and gestured to the Mark on his neck. "In the chaos, you added to your tally. You are but a sliver away from a full Halo." He paused, his unseen eyes boring into Bedlam. "Effective immediately, you are elevated. You are a Senior Glaive."
A promotion amidst a massacre. The absurdity was staggering.
"You will be given a mission. Your Terminus Candidacy. You will have two tasks, and they are one and the same. First, you will seek out this Corvene Shade. Second, you will find Terminus Varien. what is left of him, and assist him with his task."
The questions burned in Bedlam's mind, a heretical fire. Why? Why seek the architect of this destruction? Why had the Master of the Forge, a being of unimaginable power, sat and watched as his entire army devoured itself? The silent rebellion was so loud in his head that he was sure the Master could hear it.
"The question is in your eyes, tool," the old man said softly, proving him right. Bedlam was surprised that the Master knew him so well, that he had even been aware of his existence before this day. The Master picked up on this, too. "What craftsman is unaware of his finest pieces?"
The words were a chilling compliment, a reassertion of ownership.
"Corvene Shade is an anomaly," the Forge Master continued, his voice dropping. "Go to the armory and pick up the journey man's pack. I expect you gone before the next dawn"
As Bedlam turned to leave, the Forge Master spoke one last time.
"And Senior Glaive….The nature of your mission is covert and should you eventually realize your objectives, you will learn the answers to the questions you should know better than to ask"
He walked away from the throne, his mind reeling. Corvene Shade. His mind buzzing with questions he should rightfully not ask.
--------------------------------
The corridors of the Anvil were quiet but not empty. As Bedlam moved through the ruins, he passed the Tenders, thin, stooped figures in pale garb, their masks less martial than ceremonial. They worked without words, dragging bodies of Glaives onto crude sledges, stacking them in rows to be burned or buried. There were not many of them. The fortress had bled out nearly all its lifeblood, and the Tenders seemed too few to stem the tide of death.
They did not look at him as he passed. To them, he was another tool of the Forge, another masked figure with purpose. He wondered if they saw the difference, if they knew how thin the line was between the dead they carried and the man who now walked among them.
The armory doors groaned as he pushed them open. The cavernous chamber smelled of oil, leather, and cold iron. Once it had been a place of noise: smiths hammering, quartermasters barking, recruits jostling. Now it was as silent as a tomb.
The journeyman's pack lay prepared on a low table along with others, as if waiting for him.
He examined each item with a soldier's eye. Three intonements.
A length of dark rope, faintly humming with the whisper of its enchantment. Binding. It reminded him of Simon's trap, of the night he had been caught like prey. And with that memory came the absurd thought: the promise of apple pie. A triviality, a strange fragment of a mission long passed. Yet it lingered. If he found it again, he would taste it. Not out of hunger, but to weigh the truth of the dead man's words for a review, after all he could not let the record be left inaccurate if the pie was not deserving of the praise it was given. He had been taught better.
Beside it lay a short sword, plain but solid. The steel whispered faintly against the air, an intonement promising it would never dull, never fail to bite through resistance. A blade for work, not ceremony.
The pack itself was simple leather with a broad sling. Its whispering was subtler, promising space beyond what its shape suggested. Enough to carry what a man needed for the road, though not endless, never without limits. A craftsman's trick, not a god's.
A small pouch of coins sat neatly beside it. Thirty pieces, stamped with the Anvil on one side, a locust on the other. Payment. Or tether. He slipped it into the pack with a dry sound.
He added a waterskin and his own mask. The obsidian face was featureless, implacable. Looking at the weapon's rack, he saw swords of all kinds, spears, daggers with intricate designs as well as flintlock's. He had been taught to use all of these weapons and even the flintlocks which could not normally even break the skin of a junior Glaive if in some bizarre case they could not evade the trajectory of the pellets.
However since he could also use a candle as a weapon, it had seized to be about the shape of the tool itself. He was the weapon at the end of the day. Picking up three more sets of spare daggers and a short sword, he strapped some to his body and others he shoved into the pack.
When he left the armory, the Tenders were still at their work. The corridors smelled of blood and ash. No Glaive stood guard at the gates, no Terminus sent him off with orders or blessing. He was alone.
Beyond the walls of the Anvil, the world opened. The land bore scars of the quake: fissures cut through the black rock, and no birds stirred in the ash-hung sky. Even the air seemed wary here, as if animals themselves refused to linger near the Forge's ruin.
He chose north. Toward the city. Toward whatever remained of the world beyond the Anvil. The tracks of survivors, or deserters, were plain in the dust, fleeing the fortress in panicked lines. He followed them, his stride steady, his purpose a knot he could not yet untangle.
Behind him, the Anvil loomed silent.Ahead, the world waited.And somewhere on the road, a man named Corvene Shade