By the time he was fourteen, Sunny had killed forty-one Nightmare Creatures and the leather case was nearly full.
The kills had blurred together in a way that troubled him when he allowed himself to think about it, which was rarely. Each one was different in the details, a creature with stone-hard scales that required him to use the environment to break them, a creature that moved in perfect silence and hunted by heat, a thing with whip-like limbs that could strike from across a room, but the experience of killing them had smoothed into a single continuous act, the way individual brushstrokes blur into a painting when you step far enough back. He remembered the tactics and the techniques, because those were useful and worth retaining. He did not remember what any of the creatures looked like when they died, because that information served no purpose.
He noticed this, too. He noticed that the useless details were the ones he was losing, and that the useless details were always the ones that involved what a thing looked like when it stopped being alive. The anatomy of death, which had been vivid and specific during the first kill, had faded to abstraction by the forty-first. Creatures died, and they left shards, and the shards went into the case, and the case went into his pocket, and the pocket went back to the east wing, where Sunny ate dinner and slept and woke up and did it again.
He was inside a system, and the system was working, and the system's most elegant feature was that it had made its own operation invisible to the person it was operating on.
Lira had once looked at the case with an expression that might have been pity, but it vanished before Sunny could be certain.
One evening, a few weeks after the forty-first kill, Anvil came to the training room and didn't talk about tactics or creatures or the Dream Realm. He stood by the window, as usual, but his posture was different, shifted by a degree so slight that anyone else would have missed it. His shoulders were set a fraction lower, and his weight was distributed evenly rather than favoring his right side the way it normally did. Sunny had spent five years cataloguing the small variations in Anvil's body language, and this configuration was new.
Anvil was carrying something. Not physically. Internally, the way people carried things they didn't want to set down because setting them down meant looking at them.
"What do you know about legacies?" Anvil asked.
Sunny considered the question. "Legacy clans are families of Awakened whose bloodlines consistently produce powerful Aspects. The older and more established the bloodline, the more likely each generation is to exceed the last. Most of the political and military power in both the waking world and the Dream Realm is concentrated in the hands of Legacy clans."
Anvil nodded. "And what determines the strength of a Legacy?"
"The achievements of the bloodline's founders. The Spell tracks lineage. Each generation inherits not just genetic predisposition but something closer to accumulated potential, the weight of every Nightmare conquered and every rank ascended by the people who came before."
"Correct."
He was quiet for a while. The setting sun turned the ash fields gold, and the light through the window was thick and warm and made the training room feel, briefly, like a place where someone might rest rather than a place where someone learned to kill.
"There was a clan," Anvil said. "The most important Legacy clan in human history. They were called the Immortal Flame."
Sunny sat cross-legged on the stone floor and listened, because listening was what he did when Anvil spoke, and because the tone of Anvil's voice had shifted again, down into a register Sunny had never heard him use. It was quieter, and the words came more slowly, as though each one had to be weighed before it was released.
"Their founder was among the first wave of people infected by the Spell. He fought during the initial chaos, when millions of Nightmare Creatures poured into the waking world and whole nations fell. He was one of the people who pushed humanity back from the edge of extinction, and he became the first person to ever conquer the Second Nightmare. The first Master. His daughter, Smile of Heaven, carried that legacy forward. Under her leadership, the Immortal Flame didn't just survive in the Dream Realm. They expanded it. They pushed the boundaries of human territory further than anyone thought possible, conquering regions the other clans had written off as death zones."
He paused.
"She was also my closest friend."
Sunny blinked. In six years, Anvil had never volunteered a personal detail. He had never mentioned a friend, an ally, a relationship of any kind. He existed, as far as Sunny could tell, in a state of perfect professional isolation, connected to the people around him only through the mechanisms of command and obedience.
But the way he said the word "friend" carried something that the rest of his vocabulary didn't. It was not warmth, exactly. It was more like the place where warmth had been before it was carved out, a hollow space that still held the shape of what had filled it.
"Tell me about her," Sunny said.
He regretted it immediately. In six years, he had never asked Anvil a personal question, because personal questions implied a relationship that extended beyond function, and their relationship did not extend beyond function. He opened his mouth to retract it, to replace it with something clinical and appropriate.
But Anvil was already answering.
"She was the most stubborn person I have ever known," he said. "She had a vision for what humanity could become in the Dream Realm, a world where humans didn't just survive but expanded, claimed territory, built something permanent. Every other leader of her era was focused on defense. Holding the citadels, maintaining the boundaries, keeping the Nightmare Creatures out. Smile of Heaven wanted to push forward. She wanted to take ground, and she wanted to hold it, and when people told her a region was impossible, she conquered it to prove them wrong."
His voice was the same flat monotone it always was. The content of what he was saying was the only thing that had changed.
"She was reckless with herself and careful with everyone else. She would walk into a death zone alone to scout it before she'd let any of her people follow, and then she'd come back and plan the assault so thoroughly that the casualties were a fraction of what anyone expected. Her people loved her for it, because she treated their lives as though they mattered, and in the Dream Realm, that kind of leadership was rare enough to be revolutionary."
Sunny listened. This was not a tactical briefing. This was not a lesson about threat assessment or the mechanics of human loyalty. This was a man talking about someone he had lost, and the fact that the man was Anvil made the experience feel less like a conversation and more like watching a stone wall develop a crack.
"She was careless about one thing," Anvil said. "She chose a husband who was brilliant but incomplete. Broken Sword came from nothing. He climbed from the bottom of the world to the top of it on nothing but talent and will, and he married the most powerful woman alive, and he loved her in a way that was absolute and unconditional and, in the end, self-destructive."
He turned from the window.
"When Smile of Heaven was lost, Broken Sword didn't mourn her. He challenged the Third Nightmare. He became the first Saint, because becoming a Saint was the only path that might lead to the place where she'd been taken, and he would have torn apart the fabric of the Dream Realm itself if he thought she was on the other side."
Something in Anvil's voice shifted, so faintly that Sunny almost missed it.
"I was part of the cohort that conquered the Third Nightmare with him. Broken Sword, myself, and others. We became the first Saints, side by side."
He let the silence hold for a moment before continuing.
"A few years later, Broken Sword died exploring a region that would later be classified as a Death Zone. He went looking for her, and the Dream Realm killed him for it. Their Memories were sold, their people scattered, their allies abandoned them. By now, the clan is functionally dead."
He turned from the window and looked at Sunny with those flat grey eyes.
"All except one. Smile of Heaven had a daughter. The clan's last heir. She has no Memories, no protectors, no resources. The name Immortal Flame still carries weight in every corner of the waking world and the Dream Realm alike, but the girl behind it has nothing to back it up."
Sunny waited, because the logic didn't connect yet. A powerless girl from a dead clan didn't sound like a target, famous bloodline or not. She sounded like a symbol with nothing behind it.
"But the Immortal Flame did not produce ordinary Awakened," Anvil said, as though reading the question Sunny hadn't asked. "Every generation surpassed the last. Her grandfather was the first Master. Her mother was the most formidable Ascended of her era. Her father became the first Saint. If this girl survives her First Nightmare and enters the Dream Realm, she will not be ordinary either. And if she becomes even a fraction of what her parents were, the balance of power that keeps humanity from tearing itself apart will shatter."
His voice hadn't changed pitch or volume. But something in the cadence had hardened, the way metal hardens when it cools.
"Threats are not measured by what they are. They are measured by what they will be if left unchecked."
Sunny processed the information about the target carefully over the following days.
The curriculum was shifting. For six years, Anvil had taught him to observe, to analyze, to kill, but always in the abstract. The merchant assignment had been the closest thing to a real target, and even that had been explicitly framed as an exercise. This was different. Anvil was drawing a line from history to a living person, and the direction of that line was unmistakable.
He thought about it during his morning training sessions, while the instructors ran him through blade drills that his body could perform without requiring his full attention. He thought about it during the applied studies with Lira, navigating the outer rings of Bastion with one part of his mind while the other part turned the problem over and over, looking for the shape of it.
The shape had a flaw. Anvil was describing a girl who had nothing. No clan, no Memories, no protectors. The threat was theoretical, a projection of what her bloodline might produce if the Spell chose to be generous. Sunny had been trained to assess risk, and killing someone for what they might become rather than what they were felt less like risk management and more like something else. Something older and less rational, wearing the disguise of strategic necessity.
But Anvil's justification also had a logic to it that Sunny couldn't dismiss. The Immortal Flame's bloodline was, by every available metric, the most powerful Legacy lineage in human history. If the daughter inherited even a fraction of her parents' potential, the consequences were genuinely unpredictable. And unpredictability, in a world where the balance between the great clans was the only thing preventing catastrophic war, was a legitimate threat.
He filed the flaw alongside the logic and decided that both were true at the same time, the way Anvil's love for Smile of Heaven and his order to kill her daughter were true at the same time. The world was apparently built to accommodate contradictions, and the people in it survived by choosing which contradiction to act on and which to ignore.
Sunny did not yet know which one he would choose. He filed that, too, in the place where he kept the things he noticed but couldn't afford to mention.
The evening Anvil returned to deliver the operational details, Sunny was ready.
"You want me to kill her," he said.
He said it flatly, without inflection, because inflection would have implied an emotional response, and Anvil had not asked for an emotional response. He had presented information, and the information led to a conclusion, and Sunny was stating the conclusion to confirm that he'd followed the logic correctly.
Anvil regarded him for a long moment.
"Not yet," he said. "She is still young. She hasn't even been infected by the Spell. When the time comes, she will attend the Awakened Academy, undergo her First Nightmare, and be pulled into the Dream Realm as a Sleeper."
He crossed his arms.
"That is when she will be most vulnerable. A Sleeper has no allies in the Dream Realm. No Memories to rely on unless they earned them in their Nightmare. No way home until they find a Gateway and escape. She will be surrounded by strangers and dependent on others for survival in an environment that kills the unprepared without hesitation."
"You want me to be one of those strangers," Sunny said.
Anvil nodded once.
"You will enter the Academy as what you appear to be: an orphan from the outskirts with no Legacy connections, unremarkable and invisible. No one will connect you to Clan Valor. You will get close to her, earn her trust if necessary, and when you are both pulled into the Dream Realm, you will ensure that she does not escape it."
The setting sun had dropped below the window's edge, and the room was darkening by degrees. Anvil's face was half in shadow, and the effect made him look less like a man and more like something carved from the same dark stone as Bastion's walls.
"Do you understand?" he asked.
Sunny understood.
He understood the way he understood anatomy and poisons and lock mechanisms: as information that had been presented, processed, and filed. The daughter of the Immortal Flame was a target. The Academy was a staging ground. His childhood in the outskirts was a cover story, which was convenient because it was also true. The mission had a shape, and the shape made sense, and the logic was clean.
Somewhere beneath the logic, in a place he'd learned not to visit, something stirred. It was small and quiet and easily ignored, and it had the texture of a question he already knew the answer to but didn't want to ask aloud.
He ignored it.
"I understand," Sunny said.
Anvil studied him for another moment. Then he nodded, and something in his posture relaxed by the smallest fraction, the way a craftsman's hands relax when a joint fits flush and the measurement holds true.
"Good," he said. "We have two years. That's enough time to prepare you properly, but not enough to waste."
He moved toward the door.
"Starting tomorrow, your training changes. Everything you've learned until now has been foundation. What comes next is application."
The door closed.
Sunny sat alone in the darkening room and thought about the daughter of the Immortal Flame. He didn't know her name, which meant Anvil didn't want him to know it yet, which meant the name carried weight that could interfere with his preparation. He didn't know what she looked like or how old she was or what her Aspect would be, assuming she survived her First Nightmare at all.
He knew only that she had nothing, that she was young, and that someone wanted her dead badly enough to spend six years forging a weapon specifically designed to kill her before she could become something worth fearing.
He thought about the way Anvil had said the word "friend," and the hollow space it had left in the air. He thought about the crack in the logic, the gap between "she has nothing" and "she must die." He thought about how Anvil's voice had hardened when he talked about what the girl might become, and how that hardening sounded less like strategic calculation and more like something older and less rational.
He thought about how Anvil had said "I loved what she built" with a voice that belonged to a completely different person, and how the person had disappeared again the moment the sentence ended, sealed back behind the same stone wall that kept everything else out.
Then he stopped thinking about it, because thinking about it served no tactical purpose, and Anvil had trained him to recognize the difference between productive thought and the kind that only made you weaker.
He stood up, returned to his room, and cleaned his knife.