Chapter 97: Forging of the Anvil
1st of Ignvar, 251 AF — Festival of Flame
The city woke early.
Ryn had been in Ashenveil for seventy-eight days. Long enough to find his dormitory in the Scholar’s Ward. Long enough to learn that the Academy’s entrance examination was harder than anything he’d imagined — not because the questions were obscure, but because the baseline assumption was that applicants could already read, write, and perform arithmetic at a level that Coldhollow’s trade-ledger education hadn’t prepared him for. He’d passed. Barely. The examiner — a Scriptist scholar with spectacles and a expression that suggested she’d been grading papers since the dawn of time — had written "CONDITIONAL ADMIT" on his form in red ink and told him he’d need to complete remedial literacy within the first term or forfeit his seat.
He was completing remedial literacy. He was also learning that the Academy taught things he hadn’t known existed. Geography with maps so detailed they showed individual rivers. History that traced the kingdom’s growth decade by decade, from a single settlement to twelve provinces. Natural philosophy that explained weather patterns and crop rotation and metallurgy and the properties of stonesteel at a level that made his village smithing look like guesswork. Divine creature biology — a mandatory introduction course that covered the Beast domain’s role in creating and sustaining divine creatures, the bond mechanics between Warden and creature, and the current census of active creatures in the Dominion. Ryn had stared at the textbook illustrations for hours. The Hydra. The Gryphons. The Ironwyrm. Cross-sectional diagrams of scale structure, bond-resonance charts, feeding schedules. Someone had turned the creatures into science.
And theology. Every student took theology, regardless of faith registration. The Academy taught comparative religion — all eight gods of the Eternal Anvil, their histories, their domains, their contributions to the kingdom. The course was technically neutral. In practice, every lecture circled back to the same conclusion: the Anvil held because the Sovereign held it. The other seven gods served because the alternative was worse.
Today was the first day of the new year. 1st of Ignvar, 251 AF. The Festival of Flame.
The dormitory had emptied before dawn. Students who normally slept until the second bell were dressed and moving in the grey pre-morning light, pulling on their cleanest clothes, combing hair that normally received no attention. Ryn’s roommate — a Kobold named Thresh, from the Athenaeum Province, whose academic performance made Ryn feel like a particularly slow rock — had been dressed since midnight.
"You’ve never seen a Festival?" Thresh asked, his amber eyes wide in the kind of disbelief that Kobolds expressed by holding very still and blinking rapidly. "How is that possible?"
"Coldhollow doesn’t celebrate it. We do the Howl for the Frostfang. Different calendar."
"Not different. The Forge Calendar applies everywhere. The Frostmarch uses it." Thresh fastened his collar. "Your village must be very far from everything."
"It is."
"Then you’re going to want to stand near the front," Thresh said. "The Myth-Speaker only performs once a year. And the fire — you need to see the fire." He paused. "And stay for the Flyover. That’s after the ceremony. The Gryphon Flights do a formation pass over the plaza. Both Flights. Eight Gryphons in diamond formation at three hundred meters. Last year, the lead rider — Sylka Windrider — did a barrel roll." His eyes went wide again. "A barrel roll. On a divine creature. Over ten thousand people."
***
The Grand Cathedral was full.
Not full the way it was on ordinary Ordinsdays, when worshippers occupied maybe a third of the pews and the rest of the space felt generous and open. Full the way a river was full during flood season — every seat taken, every aisle packed shoulder to shoulder, bodies pressed against the walls and stacked on the gallery balconies and spilling out through the triple arches into the plaza where the overflow crowd gathered around broadcast stations.
Ryn and Thresh had arrived an hour before dawn. They’d secured standing positions along the east wall, midway down the nave. Close enough to see the altar. Far enough to feel the scale.
And the scale was staggering.
Three thousand people inside the Cathedral. Maybe ten thousand more in the plaza, listening through relay horns — cone-shaped amplifiers mounted on iron stands, connected to the interior by speaking tubes that ran through the walls. A technology that the Forge engineers had developed specifically for this purpose: the ability to project a single voice to a crowd of thousands.
The interior was transformed. Every column wrapped in amber cloth. Every window backlit by oil lamps that turned the stained glass into sheets of living flame — including the western window with its depiction of the Hydra in battle, the stained-glass creature blazing with backlit gold as if the divine fire in its scales had come alive. The Cog-and-Flame above the altar burned — not the small gold flame of ordinary services, but a blaze three meters high, fed by a concealed oil reservoir, throwing light across the entire nave. The heat reached Ryn from thirty meters away.
On the altar platform, the senior clergy stood in formation. The Pope — Elwyn Asheld — occupied the central position. An old Human, seventy-something, in robes of white and gold, her posture so straight it looked structural rather than biological. A silver chain around her neck held the Papal Cog — the symbol of the Crucible’s supreme authority. Behind her, five Cardinals in red-trimmed robes. Behind them, the High Priests in black.
The crowd was silent. Ten thousand people, and the only sound was the crackle of the altar flame and the faint whistle of wind through the gallery windows.
Then the drum started.
A single drum. Somewhere in the cathedral — Ryn couldn’t see where — a percussionist began a slow, steady beat. Not a rhythm. A heartbeat. Low, resonant, each beat vibrating through the stone floor and into Ryn’s legs.
The heartbeat of the forge. The heartbeat of everything.
The Myth-Speaker stepped forward.
He was a Lizardman. Old. One of the oldest Ryn had ever seen — Lizardman longevity stretched to a hundred and twenty years, and this man looked like he’d challenged every one of them. His scales had faded from forest green to pale ash-grey. His hands, clasped before him, were steady. He wore the robes of a Cardinal — red-trimmed, cog-pinned — and on his left breast, a symbol that Ryn didn’t recognize but that made three thousand people shift in their seats.
The sigil of House Krugvane. Krug’s Flame.
Theron Krugvane. Cardinal of the Crucible. Great-great-great-grandson of the First Forge. The man who told the Myth every year because the Myth was his blood.
He didn’t reach for a scroll. He didn’t open a book. He stood in the firelight, two hundred and fifty years of history coiled in his voice, and began.
***
"In the age before names—"
The words came slow. Each syllable measured. The drum beneath them, steady.
"—when the world was empty of gods, and mortals lived and died in darkness, a Voice spoke from the ruin of a forgotten shrine."
The Cathedral held its breath.
"The Voice had no body. It had no army. It had no believers."
Theron paused. The fire crackled.
"But the Voice had Knowledge."
The word landed. Ryn felt it in his chest — not as sound but as pressure, the way a heavy object pressing down on a table created a stillness in the wood.
"Knowledge of the shape of all things. The structure of all power. The design behind reality itself. The Voice saw the world the way a smith sees raw ore — not as it was, but as it could become."
The drum beat. Once. Twice.
"The Voice called the first fire into the first forge. And from that forge, it shaped the first believer — not from clay, but from conviction."
Theron’s voice dropped. Quieter now. More personal. As if he were telling a secret.
"A Lizardman named Krug. Whose will was iron and whose faith was the first flame."
Behind Theron, the statue glowed. The amber light within Krug’s granite form pulsed brighter — whether by coincidence, by design, or by something that had no name — and the warmth that Ryn had felt on his first visit intensified until the air around the statue shimmered like a road in summer heat.
No one gasped. No one pointed. Three thousand people watched the statue glow and accepted it the way they accepted sunrise. This happened every Festival. This always happened.
Because something in that statue is listening. And it knows the story is about him.
The thought came unbidden. Ryn filed it.
"Krug walked the desert with twenty-three souls at his back," Theron continued. "Twenty-three. Not an army. Not a congregation. A handful of survivors from a world that had already discarded them. Lizardmen, Kobolds, one Gnoll scout. Starving. Wounded. Walking because the Voice told them to walk, and they believed — not in the Voice’s wisdom, not in the Voice’s plan — but in the fact that standing still would kill them."
The drum quickened. Barely. A fraction of a beat faster.
"They built the first altar in the swamp. From that altar, the Voice became the Architect. From the Architect, the Grand Ordinator. From the Ordinator, the Iron Sovereign."
Now the fire responded. The altar blaze climbed — not dramatically, not theatrically, but steadily, the flames deepening from amber to white-gold, the heat pressing outward like a hand opening.
"And as the Sovereign grew, lesser gods bent the knee."
Theron’s voice was iron now. The story demanded it. This was not the gentle part.
"Some came in conquest — broken on the anvil of war."
The congregation knew the next line. Three thousand mouths opened. Five thousand in the plaza, hearing through the relay horns, opened theirs.
"Some came in wisdom — choosing the hammer’s protection over the storm’s destruction."
The communal recitation began. Not shouting. Not chanting. Speaking. Together. The way a family says grace — familiar, practiced, the words worn smooth by repetition.
"Some came in desperation — dying flames seeking a larger fire."
Theron raised his hands. The Cardinals behind him stepped forward. The drum peaked — not a crescendo but a held note, the heartbeat at its strongest.
"Eight gods. Eight flames. One anvil."
Three thousand voices.
"And above them all, the Iron Sovereign — the god who saw all others not as rivals but as raw material, waiting to be forged into something greater."
Silence. The drum stopped.
Theron’s voice changed. Quieter. He’d reached the part that was not in the canonical Myth — the part he added three years ago, when the elders of Ironhold’s Warden Academy had petitioned the Crucible to include the Creature Covenant in the Festival liturgy.
"And from the Sovereign’s hand came the beasts of the divine."
The murmur that went through the Cathedral was not surprise — it was anticipation. The newer section of the Myth, but already beloved.
"First, the Hydra. Born in flame. Bound by the First Warden — a minotaur whose scarred hands held the creature’s fire and whose family would hold it for generations beyond his death."
In the western window, the stained-glass Hydra blazed with backlit amber. Three thousand heads turned toward it.
"Then the Gryphons — bronze wings in the sky, golden eyes watching the borders. And the Ironwyrm — fire in the earth, guardian of the mines. The Sovereign’s creatures, bonded to mortal Wardens, because even a god’s beasts need mortal hands."
He paused. Let the silence work.
"Two hundred and fifty years. The creatures still watch. The Wardens still serve. The First Hydra — Gorthan’s Legacy — sleeps at the Sovereign Lake, older than any living memory, dreaming dreams that no mortal can read."
Three thousand people were silent. Outside, in the plaza, ten thousand more.
"One Anvil. One Purpose. One Sovereign. And his creatures beside him — flame and wing and iron. Now and always."
Theron spoke alone. His voice cracked on the last line — not weakness, not age. Emotion. The emotion of a man whose ancestor walked from a swamp and whose descendants now stood in a Cathedral that took forty years to build.
"One Anvil. One Purpose. One Sovereign."
The fire roared. The statue blazed. Three thousand people rose to their feet and the sound of it — the rustling of thirteen thousand bodies in the plaza surging upward — was the sound of a civilization remembering where it came from.
***
The Flyover came at noon.
Ryn and Thresh had pushed through the festival crowd to the western edge of Anvil Square, where the view opened toward Sovereign Lake. The Hydra was awake — all three heads raised, tracking something in the sky that the human crowd couldn’t yet see. The creature knew. It always knew when the Gryphons were coming.
Then Ryn heard them.
Not the creatures themselves — the crowd. A wave of heads turning eastward, a collective intake of breath, and the word passed through thirteen thousand people in a whisper that became a roar:
"Flyover! Flyover!"
They came from the east, out of the morning sun, and the timing was deliberate — a formation entrance designed for maximum visual impact. Eight Gryphons in a diamond pattern, four from Flight Alpha and four from Flight Beta, their bronze plumage catching the light so that they trailed fire across the sky. The wingbeats were synchronized — a deep, rhythmic WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP that Ryn felt in his sternum. Eight riders in ceremonial grey, harnesses locked, signal horns at their hips.
At the formation’s apex: Sylka Windrider. Lead Warden of Flight Alpha. Her Gryphon — the largest of the eight, its wingspan a full forty-two meters wingtip to wingtip — banked over the plaza in a slow arc that brought the creature so close Ryn could see the individual feathers, each one marked with the faint golden shimmer of Beast-domain blessing.
Thirteen thousand people cheered. Not the orderly applause of a religious ceremony. The raw, unstructured noise of a crowd watching something that made their chests tight and their eyes burn.
Children on shoulders pointed. Veterans who had served alongside the Flights stood at attention, fists over hearts. The one-armed Lizardman from the fountain — Ryn recognized him, three rows back — saluted with his remaining arm, his jaw set, his eyes wet.
Sylka’s Gryphon banked left, then right, then —
The barrel roll.
Thresh screamed. Actually screamed — a sound of pure, undiluted Kobold delight that carried across the plaza. A forty-two meter wingspan divine creature inverted over thirteen thousand people, rider locked to the saddle, golden eyes never breaking from the crowd below. One complete rotation. Perfect. The crowd erupted.
The other seven Gryphons followed in sequence — not barrel rolls, but tight spirals that carried them over the Cardinal districts, the Citadel, the Cathedral tower. Their shadows crossed the plaza like the hands of a clock. Each pass drew another roar.
Then the formation broke east, toward the lake. As the Gryphons passed over the Sovereign Lake, the Hydra raised all three heads and released a sound that was not a roar and not a howl but something between — a bass vibration that Ryn felt in his teeth from four hundred meters away. The screaming head’s metallic harmonic. A greeting. A recognition. One divine creature acknowledging eight others.
The Gryphons dipped their wings. A salute.
The crowd went quiet. Not silence — awe. Thirteen thousand people standing in a plaza watching a twelve-meter divine serpent and eight bronze-winged war-beasts exchange a greeting that was older than their grandparents’ grandparents.
"Every year," Thresh whispered, his voice cracking. "Every year I see this and every year I forget how to breathe."
The Flyover ended. The Gryphons climbed, reforming into diamond, and banked south toward their patrol circuit. The Hydra settled back onto the embankment, three heads arranging themselves in the resting pattern that Morthan would document in tonight’s journal entry as: Post-Flyover behavioral state — elevated alertness for 12 minutes, followed by standard rest cycle. Emotional interpretation: satisfied.
***
Afterward, the festival spilled into the streets.
Anvil Square became a market, a fairground, and a stage simultaneously. Food stalls sold everything from Southmark seafood to Frostmarch elk to Cinderlands fire-roasted peppers that made Ryn’s eyes water from three meters away. Musicians played on raised platforms — drums, stringed instruments, iron bells, a Gnoll throat-singer whose bass vibrations Ryn felt in his teeth. Children ran between adults’ legs carrying sparklers — iron wire dipped in a chemical compound that burned in the Cog-and-Flame’s colors.
"First Festival?" someone asked.
Ryn turned. The voice belonged to a young woman his age — Human, dark-haired, wearing the grey Academy tunic with the blue shoulder-stripe of a second-year student. She held two cups of something hot.
"That obvious?"
"You’ve been standing still for ten minutes. With your mouth open." She handed him a cup. "Forgebrew. Tastes terrible. Drink it anyway — it’s tradition."
He drank. It tasted like someone had boiled iron filings in honey. He drank more.
"Lysa," she said. "Second-year. History track."
"Ryn. First-year. Conditional admit."
"Northern Reach?"
"Coldhollow."
She whistled — a low, impressed sound. "That’s the edge of the map. How long did it take you to get here?"
"Twelve days by caravan."
"Twelve days on the Iron Road." Lysa shook her head. "My grandmother talks about before the roads. She says when she was young, the Northern Reach was three months of forest track. The roads changed everything."
"Who built them?"
Lysa looked at him.
"The Sovereign," she said. Not with reverence. With the matter-of-fact tone of someone stating a fact as basic as gravity. "He designs everything. The roads, the relay system, the curriculum, the creature program." She gestured toward the lake. "Did you know there’s a school for Wardens? The Warden Academy — separate from our Academy. Harder to get into. They only take twelve candidates a year and most wash out. My friend Kelliv applied — brilliant woman, top marks in Beast-domain theory — and she was rejected because her bond-resonance scores were too low. You can’t learn resonance. Either your body harmonizes with a divine creature’s energy field or it doesn’t. It’s like being born with perfect pitch."
"What happens if you get in?"
"Four years of training. Creature biology, bond maintenance, tactical deployment, emergency veterinary procedures — apparently there’s a whole module on ’What To Do When Your Divine Creature Is Injured And Larger Than Your House.’ Then you’re assigned to a creature. Bonded. For life." She paused. "The Gorvaxis family — the ones who handle the Hydra — they don’t even go to the Academy anymore. The bond passes through their bloodline. Father to son for three generations. It’s almost hereditary at this point."
"Is that allowed?"
Lysa shrugged. "The Crucible debated it. Decided that creature bond-stability was more important than equal access. The Hydra has only accepted three Wardens in two hundred and fifty years. If the Gorvaxis line breaks, there’s no guarantee any trained Warden could replace them. So they get special dispensation." She sipped her Forgebrew. "It’s pragmatic. Everything here is pragmatic."
She said it casually. The way you’d describe how a watermill worked. Not blasphemy. Not dissent. Just architecture.
"That’s what the Academy teaches?"
"That’s what the Academy is," Lysa said. "The Sovereign built the Academy because educated believers are more productive believers. Productive believers generate more for the kingdom. More for the kingdom means more for the Sovereign. He built the Warden Academy because trained handlers maintain creatures more efficiently, which reduces the divine cost of sustaining them — which means more of the Sovereign’s power goes to everything else. It’s not charity. It’s investment."
She took a sip of Forgebrew. Made a face.
"Still tastes like boiled metal. Come on — the sword demonstrations start in the War College yard at noon. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Pyreist knight set his blade on fire and cut a post in half."
She walked. Ryn followed. Because in a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people, on the first day of a new year, someone had handed him a cup and said drink it anyway — it’s tradition, and that was enough.
Behind them, in the Cathedral, the altar flame settled back to its normal height. The statue’s glow dimmed to its resting state — the faint amber pulse that visitors mistook for candlelight reflected on stone.
It was not candlelight. It had never been candlelight.
In the granite, something that had once been a Lizardman named Krug settled back into the vast, warm patience of a Hero who had heard his own story told two hundred and fifty times and had never once corrected the parts they got wrong.
At the lake, the Hydra dreamed. In its dream — if divine creatures dreamed — it flew with the Gryphons it had watched since their creation. Bronze wings and golden eyes and an endless sky. The oldest creature in the kingdom, reliving a freedom it had never possessed and didn’t know how to name.
Morthan felt the dream through the bond. He didn’t record it in the journal. Some things were not data.