Chapter 108: Eternal Anvil’s Prayer
Krugday fell on the 15th of Highforge — the fourth month, midsummer, when the sun hung in the sky like a forge-fire that refused to bank. The holiest day on the calendar after the Festival of Flame, and the one that drew the kingdom’s attention inward, toward the figure at the center of everything.
Ryn had experienced five months of Ashenveil’s religious rhythm by now. Ordinsday worship every sixth day — the rest day, when the temples filled and the Crucible’s priests conducted services and the city’s forges went silent in observance. Monthly minor festivals — smaller, province-specific, usually involving food and noise and the particular enthusiasm of believers who had been given an excuse to stop working. The regular hum of a civilization that organized its time around its god.
Krugday was different.
The city woke differently. Ryn noticed it before he was fully conscious — the absence of the forge quarter’s dawn percussion, the silence where the morning prayer bells should have been. On Krugday, the bells didn’t ring at dawn. They rang at noon. The morning was kept quiet — a deliberate architectural silence built into the day’s structure. The kingdom held its breath for Krug.
By the time Ryn dressed and walked to the Scholar’s Ward, the streets were already transforming. Black-and-amber banners — Krug’s colors, the colors of the original Forge — hung from every building on every street in every district. The Cog-and-Flame had been supplemented by a second symbol: the Shepherd’s Stick crossed over an anvil. Krug’s personal emblem. The sign of the First Forge.
And the flowers. Ironbloom — a dark orange wildflower that grew in the volcanic soils of the Cinderlands and that someone, at some point in the kingdom’s history, had decided represented Krug’s spirit. They were everywhere. Pinned to lapels, woven into door wreaths, scattered on the cobblestones of major thoroughfares. The city smelled like warm stone and bitter pollen.
"Eight gods," Lysa said, walking beside him. "One pantheon. But today, they all step back for one mortal."
"He’s not mortal anymore."
"He’s not a god either. He’s a Hero — something between. And the kingdom loves him more than it loves the Sovereign, because you can love a man who bled for you in a way you can’t love a system that manages you." She paused. "The Crucible knows this. The Crown knows this. The Sovereign definitely knows this. And nobody says it out loud."
***
The noon bells rang.
Eight bells from eight temples — one for each god of the Eternal Anvil, sounding simultaneously in a chord that rolled across the city in overlapping waves. The Grand Cathedral’s bell — the deepest, a stonesteel giant called the First Voice — anchored the chord. Above it, lighter tones: the Temple of Blooms (Seylith), the Pyreshrine (Vaelthyr), the Hall of Whispers (Lythari), the Study (Orrythas), the Beasthold (Fenrath), the Dreaming Spire (Cassiriel), the Iron Archive (Thurakmar, the Order god).
At the Beasthold’s bell, the Hydra answered. From the Sovereign Lake, two kilometers away, a low harmonic sound — not a scream, not a roar, something deeper, something that came from all three heads simultaneously and that resonated through the ground itself. The creature’s annual response to the Krugday bells. It had done this every year since Krug’s death — Morthan’s journal recorded it as "the Remembrance Tone." No one had trained it. No one had asked it. The Hydra heard the bells that honored the man who had been its first god, and it answered.
Eight bells. Eight voices. One sound.
The Procession of Faiths began at the Grand Cathedral and wound through the city in a circuit that touched every major temple. At its head: Pope Elwyn Asheld, carried in a sedan chair because the distance was beyond what her body could sustain on foot. Behind her: the five Cardinals, walking. Behind the Cardinals: the High Priests — twenty of them, representing every province, every race, every temple district.
And behind the High Priests, the representatives of the eight religions.
This was the part that Ryn watched most carefully. Not the clergy — he’d seen clergy. Not the Pope — he’d seen the Pope. The eight representatives: one from each religion, each carrying the standard of their faith, marching together in a formation that said *we are different and we are one* with the particular diplomatic precision of people who had been saying it for two hundred years and had mostly come to believe it.
The Ordinist standard — the Cog-and-Flame. Carried by a Lizardman priest, because Ordinism was Krug’s faith and Lizardmen were its founders.
The Bloomist standard — a three-petaled flower in silver. Carried by a Human woman from the Pale Coast, Seylith’s territory. Bloomism was the gentlest of the eight religions — focused on healing, growth, and beauty. Its priests were the kingdom’s doctors, midwives, and gardeners.
The Pyreist standard — a column of flame on black field. Carried by a Cinderlands warrior whose expression suggested that marching in a procession was a significant downgrade from his usual activities, which involved fire and controlled destruction.
The Shadowist standard — a crescent moon, half-hidden. Carried by a Kobold who moved so quietly that the crowd around Ryn didn’t notice him passing until he’d already passed. Lythari’s Shadowism was the most secretive of the eight — its temples were invitation-only, its services conducted in darkness, its practices rumored to include things that the other seven religions didn’t ask about because the answers would be uncomfortable.
The Scriptist standard — an open book beneath a burning quill. Carried by a scholar whose eyes never stopped moving — reading the crowd, reading the banners, reading the architecture, reading everything. Orrythas’s faithful didn’t worship. They studied. Their religion was knowledge itself, and their contribution to the pantheon was the educational infrastructure that made the kingdom literate.
The Beastist standard — a wolf’s head wreathed in vines. Carried by a Gnoll whose ceremonial walk was less a march and more a prowl, flanked by two apprentice Wardens in ochre tunics who walked with the measured gait of people whose daily companions weighed several tons. Fenrath’s Beastism was the most primal of the eight — focused on the natural world, the beast domain, the pack hierarchy that Gnolls had built their social structure around for centuries. On Krugday, the Beastist representative carried a secondary emblem: a three-headed serpent in gold thread, honoring the Hydra’s bond to the kingdom’s founding. The creature predated the Beastist religion. The religion had been built to accommodate it.
The Dreamist standard — an eye within a spiral. Carried by a Human from the Shimmerfields who wore robes that seemed to shift color depending on the angle of view. Cassiriel’s Dreamism was the strangest religion — illusion, art, propaganda, the manipulation of perception. The Shimmerfields’ festival culture was Dreamist at its core: beauty as a weapon, wonder as a tool.
The Ironist standard — a hammer crossed with a compass. Carried by a Dwarf — one of the few in the kingdom, a race that had joined late and in small numbers, drawn by the Order domain’s resonance with their innate cultural affinity for structure and regulation. Thurakmar’s Ironism was the bureaucracy’s religion — the faith of administrators, architects, and people who found spiritual fulfillment in the correct filling out of forms.
Eight standards. Eight faiths. One procession, moving through a city that all of them had built together and that none of them owned alone.
***
The procession ended at Anvil Square, where the Krugday ceremony took place before the statue.
Ryn stood in the crowd — thousands deep, every race, every class, pressed together in the square with the patient density of people who had done this every year of their lives. Beside him: Thresh, eyes sharp, cataloging every detail with the reflexive precision of a Kobold trained to observe. Behind them: Lysa, arms folded, watching with the analytical distance of a historian witnessing the present become the past.
Cardinal Theron Krugvane ascended the dais before the statue.
On Krugday, the Cardinal didn’t represent the Crucible. He represented the bloodline. He was not Pope, not priest, not institutional figure. He was Krug’s great-great-great-grandson, speaking for a family that had given the kingdom its spiritual foundation and had watched that foundation grow into something larger than any family could contain.
"Two hundred and four years ago," Theron said, "a man named Krug died."
The square went silent. Not gradually — instantly. The silence of ten thousand people choosing, collectively, to stop making sound.
"He died at a hundred and nineteen, in the Cathedral he had built, surrounded by the family he had raised, in a kingdom that existed because he had decided — at forty-seven, exhausted, grieving, carrying twenty-three people through a swamp — that he would not stop."
Theron’s voice was steady. Not performed. Not oratorical. The voice of a man telling a story he knew so well it had become part of his respiratory system.
"He could have stopped. At every point in his life, he could have stopped. After the massacre that killed his tribe. After the desert crossing that nearly killed the survivors. After the first winter in the swamp, when they had nothing but a collapsed shrine and a voice in their heads that they couldn’t be sure was real. At every moment, stopping was the reasonable choice. The logical choice. The choice that any person with a functioning survival instinct would have made."
He paused.
"He didn’t stop. Not because he was brave — he was afraid constantly, and he said so, to anyone who would listen. Not because he was strong — he was forty-seven years old with arthritis and a bad knee and a tendency to cough when the swamp fog came in. Not because he was chosen — he didn’t know he was chosen. He didn’t know there were tiers of divinity. He didn’t know there were divine spheres and heavenly power and the architecture that held the world together."
"He kept going because he decided that twenty-three people deserved better than what had happened to them. That was the entire reason. Not destiny. Not prophecy. Not divine mandate. A man looked at the people around him and said: I will carry this until someone else can."
The statue glowed. The amber light within the granite pulsed — brighter than normal, brighter than any other day of the year, as if the divine essence saturating the stone recognized its own story being told.
"He carried it for seventy-two years. And then he put it down. And then he became something else — something that we cannot see or touch or speak to, something that lives in the place between mortal and divine. The First Hero. The First Forge."
Theron looked at the statue. His ancestor’s face. The weight of a lineage that lived under the shadow of a legend.
"We honor him today not because he was a hero. We honor him because he was a man. And the kingdom was built by a man who could have stopped and didn’t."
The crowd breathed. Someone was crying — several someones, scattered through the square, the quiet tears of people for whom Krug’s story was not history but identity. They were Krug’s people. All of them. Every race, every class, every province. The Lizardmen who shared his blood. The Humans who shared his faith. The Kobolds, Gnolls, Minotaurs, and Dwarves who shared his kingdom.
The bells rang again. Eight voices. One sound. And beneath the bells, barely audible through the crowd’s silence, the Hydra’s Remembrance Tone — sustained, unwavering, carrying from the lake to the square as if the creature was adding its voice to the tribute.
Overhead, the Gryphon Flights appeared. Both of them — all eight creatures, flying in a V formation that the crowd recognized immediately. The Krugday Flight. An annual ceremony of their own: the Gryphons circling Anvil Square once, banking hard, their bronze wings catching the noon sun, before climbing and dispersing to their patrol routes. A thirty-second tribute from divine creatures to a man they had never met but whose god had created them.
Ryn stood in the crowd with tears on his face and did not wipe them away.
He had been in Ashenveil for five months. He had studied its systems, walked its streets, observed its institutions, cataloged its flaws and contradictions and tensions. He had watched the Academy argue about demographics and the War College demonstrate violence and the Ministry Quarter govern by committee and the Underbazaar trade in shadows.
And now he stood before a statue of a man who had started all of it — not because he was powerful, but because he wouldn’t stop — and he understood, for the first time, why a million people followed a god they couldn’t see.
Because the god had been introduced to them by a man they could love.