Only now did An notice the openings.

  At regur intervals along the wall gaped rectangur apertures. Not gates - just cutouts, as though someone had removed a pair of blocks from the monolith. Some were utterly dark. From others seeped a faint reddish glow, like banked embers. In one, far away, a shadow flickered - and vanished.

  No doors. No grates.

  His companion walked with the same tireless stride, but now there was something more in his bearing - like a man returning to a pce he had once left. A trace of impatience. His head held higher, his shoulders broader.

  Beside him, An felt small and unnecessary. As though he had been accidentally attached to someone else’s path.

  You have a task, he reminded himself.

  What task? To find the owner of the sword? There he was - walking beside him, the hilt at his belt. He had delivered it. And now what? Where did he fit in all this?

  The words of the man in the robe surfaced reluctantly: The system is unstable. Perhaps his real task would begin only here. In this pce he could never have imagined while standing in the open-pn office among the frozen “waiting.”

  The closer they came to the wall, the stronger the sound became.

  At first it was like a dull hum in the bones. Then clearer: blows. Heavy. Monotonous. With pauses between. As though someone were endlessly beating a rhythm with a hammer against colossal anvils. Another sound joined it - higher, sharper: the screech of metal against metal. Sometimes a low, mournful rumble, almost like a song hummed under someone’s breath.

  The air grew warmer. The dry wind carried a distinct scent - coal, overheated iron, burnt oil. His eyes stung - not sharply, not like choking smoke, but like standing far from a fire you already feel before you see it.

  “Old stump,” the man muttered under his breath. Whether about the sound, the smell, or the wall itself, An couldn’t tell.

  He said nothing. His heart seemed to beat in time with the hammering - dull, insistent. He even caught himself matching his steps to the rhythm.

  They approached one of the openings.

  From the outside it looked like all the others: rectangur, far taller than a man, leading inward. The edges of the stone blocks were scorched. The rock had bckened with soot but did not crumble. From within came a steady, wavering light - not yellow, not white, but dense, the color of molten copper or bronze.

  “Here,” the man said. “Closer from this one.”

  He stopped, tucking his hands into his belt. Something shifted within the walls. An wasn’t sure if he imagined it, but for a moment the deep vibration of hammer blows seemed to change - shifted by half a tone. As though something deep inside had paused to listen.

  The man turned to him. Smiled - for the first time truly.

  There was much in that smile: weariness, joy, anticipation, the calm certainty of someone returning to a pce where he had never truly been denied.

  “Welcome to the Forge of the World, technician,” he said. “Here we’ll decide who you want to be: the one who fixes other people’s fractures - or the one who forges something of his own.”

  An opened his mouth.

  He wanted to say: I don’t want anything.Or the opposite - I want to go back.Or ask how many people had ever walked out of here.Or expin that he was not a bcksmith, not a warrior, not -

  But none of those words reached his tongue.

  From the darkness of the opening, fme burst forth.

  It shed outward like the tongue of some colossal creature, tearing free from the depths. Not the soft, dancing fire of a campfire, not the neat glow of a torch - but a dense, furious torrent of incandescent light. It smmed into the space before them, flooding everything with blinding orange-red brilliance, and surged toward them.

  Heat scorched his skin. The air screamed.

  An had only enough time to raise his hands to shield his face.

  And then everything was consumed by fire.