Khaz-Vorrim.

  The Forge of Keeping.

  Even in the game, the name had carried weight. It had been a reward—a capstone, like the pyer having earned the right to touch history. In truth, it had been the First Men's answer to a problem many civilizations preferred to pray away.

  If they wanted to hold their mountain against the myriad threats of the old world, someone had to build the tools to do it.

  The First Men did not only have their size and strength to boast of. They were famous for their craftsmanship. Their steel. Their architecture.

  And their weapons, most of all.

  Not swords and spears in the usual sense.

  Partners.

  The stories always said the same thing, with the same reverence: the First Men forged arms that listened.

  Weapons that learned the hand that held them. That adapted to stance and temperament, to injury and age. That did not simply dull over time, but changed with the bearer, shifting bance and bite, reshaping themselves to match a style that evolved with every battle.

  The warrior ethos was simple.

  Live with purpose.

  Die in battle.

  The weapon was meant to carry you there.

  We reached the Forge at the edge of the avenue, where the City's geometry changed. The stone grew cleaner, less worn, as if the mountain itself had decided to present its better face here. The corridor funneled into a broad nding that opened onto a set of double doors rge enough to admit a small caravan.

  Evelyn stepped forward first, as she always did when something felt like a trap. She put her palm to the seam, tested it, then tried the handle.

  "It's tched," she said, and there was mild surprise in her tone. She leaned her shoulder in and gave it a shove. The doors did not move.

  I frowned.

  Khaz-Vorrim was a sacred pce. Open to warriors who wanted to offer up their bdes and receive something better in return.

  The First Men loved their tests, though. Strength as proof. Strength as admission.

  "Rocher," I said. "You try."

  He stepped up without a word, rolled his shoulders once, then set both hands against the doors.

  The muscles in his forearms rippled as he leaned in.

  Stone groaned. Metal compined.

  For a moment, the doors held.

  Then they gave, slow at first, then with a sudden shift that made the hinges boom.

  Rocher's boots slid half an inch on the dustless stone as the doors swung inward.

  We moved as one, weapons drawn, entering in formation without a word. It was habit now. Instinct.

  "Holy Light," Lumiere invoked. I followed suit.

  The light spilled across a cavernous hall.

  Space swallowed us.

  The ceiling rose so high that our light did not reach it. The upper darkness pressed down like a second sky. Columns fnked the entryway, each one carved with runes so old that the grooves had softened at the edges, yet the lines remained sharp enough to read.

  Too sharp.

  Seraphine stepped forward and crouched, running her fingers along the base of a column. She held them up to the light.

  No dust.

  Not even a film.

  She looked up. "Looks like this pce has been well-maintained."

  Rocher's gaze swept the hall, slow and thorough. Evelyn shifted to the side, checking angles and alcoves.

  The Forge's hall opened into branching corridors. Empty workstations sat along the edges. Racks where tools should have hung. Stone plinths shaped to hold things that were no longer there.

  The pce looked abandoned.

  But it felt inhabited.

  Our footsteps echoed. Our breathing echoed. Even the soft scrape of leather against a scabbard seemed to travel farther than it should.

  I spoke anyway, because silence in a pce like this invited you to imagine your own ending.

  "Stay tight," I said. "It'd be all too easy to get lost in here."

  My voice came back to me.

  Or almost came back.

  The echo carried a faint wrongness, subtle enough that it would have slipped past anyone not primed to listen. The intonation was off. The cadence too mechanical. The echo nded like a line being repeated by someone who did not yet understand why it was spoken.

  Rocher gnced toward me, then away, keeping his attention forward. He heard it too. Not enough to stop him. He simply adjusted, shifting himself half a step closer to my shoulder line.

  We moved deeper.

  Another corridor opened into a wide chamber. Another set of doors stood ahead, smaller than the first but still massive. The runes here were denser, yered in bands around the frame like reinforcing rings.

  Evelyn lifted her ntern. "More doors."

  She tried the handle. It didn't budge.

  Of course it didn't.

  She turned to Rocher. "Want to give it another shot, big guy?"

  The echo answered.

  "Want to give it a shot?" it said.

  My spine prickled.

  I started to turn.

  Something dropped behind us.

  It fell from the ceiling with the clean certainty of a trap releasing. There was no warning sound, no shifting of stone. Only the sudden hiss of air and the metallic snap of impact as a body hit the floor.

  Lumiere jerked, staff coming up.

  I moved before thought, shoving her sideways with my shoulder.

  Cold metal whipped around my ankle.

  The contact was instant. Tight.

  My body pitched forward.

  Then the floor vanished.

  I went up.

  Not lifted by hands, but hoisted by a force that did not care about comfort. My blood rushed to my head as my world inverted. My light swung wildly across the chamber, streaking over stone and rune.

  I hung upside down, suspended by one leg.

  The tail that held me was segmented, each section a pte of dark metal fitted with impossible precision. It flexed with smooth menace, as if it were muscle rather than forged material. The end coiled around my ankle like a shackle.

  A snake.

  A giant metallic snake, long enough that its body disappeared into the shadows above, anchored somewhere in the ceiling's unseen height. Its head rested near the floor, turned toward the party, mouth closed, watching.

  The party surged.

  Rocher stepped in first, faster than anyone, bde already halfway up.

  Evelyn moved in the same breath, knives fshing as she shifted to cut.

  Seraphine lifted Pulseweaver, spell forming in the space between her fingers.

  Lumiere's staff fred with a soft pulse of light.

  "Stop!" I snapped.

  My voice came out sharper than intended, colored by the blood pounding in my skull.

  "Drop your weapons," I said, and forced the words through the rush of inversion. "All of you."

  Rocher halted on a dime, tension locked through his frame. His eyes flicked up to me, then to the snake, then back, like he was weighing my command against every protective instinct he had.

  "Cire," he said.

  "Now," I said.

  Evelyn hesitated for half a heartbeat, then lowered her knives. Seraphine's hands lowered as well, though her posture remained ready to strike. Lumiere kept her staff raised for a moment longer, then lowered it too, though her gaze stayed fixed on the creature's head.

  Rocher stared at me, jaw tight, then followed the others.

  The snake's head tilted.

  Its tail loosened by a fraction. Not enough to free me, enough to signal attention.

  I drew a breath that tasted like copper.

  "We are not here to pilge," I said. "We came to help."

  The snake opened its mouth.

  Then closed it.

  The voice that followed did not match its movement.

  It spoke as if the sound came from the air itself, threaded through the runes in the stone. The words nded with a faint metallic resonance, like a bde being drawn slowly from a sheath.

  In my voice.

  Or its best attempt at it.

  "We are not here to pilge," it repeated, testing the phrase like it was testing the bance of a sword.

  Then, in the same borrowed cadence, it asked, "Then why do you arrive already armed?"

  It was a fair question.

  I swallowed, throat tight from hanging inverted.

  "In case any stray animals got in and made themselves at home," I said. "We've learned through bitter experience that the things living down here are not kind."

  A pause.

  A sound like a scoff scraped through the air, dry and sharp.

  "You believed those monsters would be allowed to desecrate Khaz-Vorrim," it said, and the words carried a mild disdain. "You believed I would allow that."

  I could feel my pulse in my ears. The blood rush sharpened every edge of sensation.

  "No disrespect was meant," I said. "We only came here to help with the seal."

  The snake's head shifted again, slow and deliberate.

  Its attention felt like weight.

  I chose my next move carefully.

  Names mattered to the old gods. Names were contracts.

  "To help you," I said, voice steady despite the inversion, "Phymera."

  The snake went still.

  For a moment, everything in the chamber held its breath.

  Then the tail uncoiled.

  Gently.

  It lowered me with the same care a smith used when setting down hot metal. My boot touched stone. My other foot followed. The blood drained back toward where it belonged. Dizziness hit like a wave, and I steadied myself with one palm on the floor until my vision cleared.

  I rose.

  The snake's body began to change.

  Its segments slid, ptes shifting over ptes with a soft mechanical whisper. Its length condensed, folding inward without losing mass, as if the metal remembered other shapes and moved toward them with relief.

  The head fttened, then reshaped. The body thickened, then narrowed. Limbs formed where none had been. A spine rose in clean increments.

  In the span of a few breaths, the snake became a person.

  My height.

  My proportions.

  My face.

  Except metallic.

  Every contour rendered in dark steel, every line too precise, too perfect, like a statue that had learned to breathe. My light slid over its cheekbones and caught on edges where skin should have softened. Its eyes were smooth ptes that reflected the room back at us.

  It looked at me with my own features.

  It spoke again in my voice, cleaner now, more accurate.

  "Phymera," it said, as if tasting the name I had used. "I've not been addressed as such for a long time."

  Behind me, I heard the party's collective exhale.

  Relief.

  Tempered by the fact that the thing wearing my shape still held all the power in the room.