Chapter 98: First Forge’s Shadow
The Academy’s history wing had a wall.
Not a decorative wall — a record wall. Floor to ceiling, three meters wide, carved into the stone in letters so small you had to lean close to read them. The names of every believer who had been part of the original twenty-four — the group that the curriculum called "The Remnant" and that everyone in the kingdom simply called "The First."
Twenty-four names. Most of them Lizardmen. A few Kobolds. One Gnoll. Each name carved in stone with their title beside it — the title they’d earned, the title the kingdom remembered.
Krug — The First Forge. High Priest. Founder of The Crucible. First Hero of the Eternal Anvil.
Silsk — The Steady Hand. Administrator. First to organize a supply chain. First resident of The Eternal Forge (Paradise).
Nix — The Cartographer. Architect of the Iron Road. Creator of the first territorial survey.
Gorthan — The First Warden. Bond-Keeper of the Hydra. Father of the Gorvaxis Line.
The names continued. Some Ryn recognized from theology lectures. Most he didn’t. But all of them were carved in the same depth, the same font, the same stone — because the Academy didn’t rank the Remnant. They were equals. Twenty-four people who had walked from nothing into a swamp and started a civilization.
Ryn ran his fingers along Gorthan’s name. The stone was cool. Not warm — only the Cathedral statue carried that particular weight. But beneath the carved letters, someone had scratched a small addition in a hand less formal than the mason’s: (Hydra still lives. Year 251.)
He stared at it. Someone — a student, maybe, or a visiting Warden — had updated the wall. A living footnote. Because the creature Gorthan had bonded two hundred and fifty years ago was still sleeping at the Sovereign Lake, and someone thought that mattered enough to carve into the rock beside its creator’s name.
"He was a minotaur."
Ryn turned. Lysa stood behind him, holding a stack of books — the Academy’s idea of light reading, which was four hundred pages on pre-Covenant territorial history.
"Gorthan," she clarified, nodding at the name. "First Warden. He bonded the Hydra the day it was created — the Sovereign shaped it from divine energy and Beast-domain power, and Gorthan was the one who reached out and touched it. No one told him to. The history texts say the creature was agitated — three heads, brand new, no behavioral patterns, no conditioning. Dangerous. Gorthan walked up to it, put his hand on its jaw, and the bond locked. Instant. Like the creature recognized him."
She set her books on the bench beside the wall and sat down. After three months, Ryn had learned that Lysa didn’t do anything casually. When she sat, it meant she was about to teach him something, and the lesson would be longer than he expected.
"He died at sixty-eight. Natural causes. The Hydra screamed for three days. Not roared — screamed. The metallic head — the one that can shatter bone at two hundred meters — released a sustained harmonic for seventy-two hours. They heard it in the outer provinces. People thought it was an earthquake. When Gorthan’s son Vorthan took the bond, the creature didn’t respond for six weeks. Just lay in the marsh, silent. The Wardens thought it had died."
"But it didn’t."
"It accepted Vorthan. Eventually. Because Vorthan smelled like his father — not metaphorically. The creature operates on chemical recognition, divine resonance, and something the Warden Academy calls ’emotional imprint’ that they can’t actually measure." Lysa paused. "Three generations now. Gorthan, Vorthan, Morthan. The Gorvaxis family tree *is* the Hydra’s family tree. Separate them and you might lose both."
Ryn looked at the wall again. Twenty-four names. Twenty-four people who built a world. And one of them had created a bond so deep that it had outlived three generations of his bloodline.
"What do you know about Krug’s death?" Lysa asked, shifting subjects.
"He died," Ryn said. "And became a Hero. The First Forge."
Lysa gave him the look she reserved for answers that were technically correct and spiritually empty.
"He died at a hundred and nineteen. Peacefully. In his sleep, in the Cathedral he’d built, with his family around him. His son — Tharik Krugvane, the first to carry the house name — was there. His grandchildren were there. Half the city was outside. And the Hydra was at the gates."
Ryn blinked. "At the Cathedral?"
"The creature wasn’t stationed at the lake yet — that came later. In those days, the Hydra was still at the southern border garrison. But on the night Krug died, it broke its containment lines and walked north. Thirty kilometers in six hours, through the outskirts of the city, past the checkpoints. Nobody stopped it. Nobody could — it was a twelve-meter divine creature moving with purpose, and the soldiers had the good sense to get out of the way. It reached the Cathedral gates at dawn. Three heads pressed against the stone. It stayed there for two days."
"Why?"
Lysa looked at him. "Krug was the first person to touch it after Gorthan. He’d been there the day it was created. He’d blessed it. He’d walked beside it during a war. The creature didn’t bond to Krug — that was Gorthan’s bond — but it *knew* him. The way old animals know the people who were there at the beginning."
She leaned forward.
"And then he wasn’t dead. He was *more*. The divine power — whatever sacred force the Sovereign commands that we don’t understand — transformed him. Not resurrection. Not necromancy. Something else. His body died. His *being* didn’t. He became the First Hero of the Eternal Anvil, and the kingdom gained a weapon that no enemy has ever matched."
"Weapon," Ryn said.
"Weapon," Lysa confirmed. "Heroes aren’t saints, Ryn. They’re not angels sitting on clouds singing prayers. They’re soldiers. The most powerful soldiers that can exist in this world — divine-tier warriors who reside in the Sovereign’s Paradise and descend to the mortal plane when the god needs something broken. Krug hasn’t been seen publicly in a hundred and eighty years. He doesn’t visit his descendants. He doesn’t appear in temples. He’s not the kind grandfather watching over his family from the afterlife."
She pointed at the carved name on the wall.
"He’s the knife in the sheath. And the Sovereign decides when the knife comes out."
"And the creatures?"
Lysa tilted her head. "What about them?"
"Are they weapons too? The Hydra, the Gryphons — are they just... tools?"
Something crossed Lysa’s face. Not offense. Discomfort. The expression of someone who’d thought about something and didn’t like the answer.
"The Warden Academy teaches that divine creatures are a bridge between mortal faith and divine will. A bond — creature to handler, handler to community, community to god. The official position is that creatures serve the kingdom’s interests under the Sovereign’s guidance." She paused. "The unofficial position — the one the older Wardens talk about after the lectures end — is that nobody really knows what divine creatures *are*. They’re created by divine power. They grow. They learn. They grieve. The Hydra mourned Gorthan for three days. Is that a weapon grieving its operator? Or is it something else?"
She stood. Picked up her books.
"The uncomfortable answer is: it doesn’t matter. Because whether the Hydra is a tool or a person, it serves the Sovereign. And the Sovereign uses it for war. The Hydra’s feelings about Gorthan don’t change the fact that its primary function is to burn things."
She walked toward the archives. Ryn stayed.
He looked at Gorthan’s name on the wall. The First Warden. Bond-Keeper of the Hydra. Father of the Gorvaxis Line.
And below it, in scratched, informal script: Hydra still lives. Year 251.
Not Hydra still serves. Not Hydra still fights.
Lives.
***
In the Grand Cathedral, Cardinal Theron Krugvane knelt before the statue.
He did this every morning. Before dawn, before the priests opened the doors, before the first believers arrived for morning prayer. In the darkness of the nave, lit only by the altar’s resting flame and the amber glow that pulsed within the granite, Theron knelt at the base of his ancestor’s image and prayed.
Not for salvation. He had that — the Sovereign’s divine architecture guaranteed every faithful believer a place in the Eternal Forge after death. Not for guidance — the Crucible’s administrative machinery produced more guidance than any one Cardinal could process. Not for miracles — he’d witnessed enough of those to know that they were tools, not gifts.
He prayed for patience.
Sixty-two years old. A Lizardman entering the final third of his extended span — the Life domain blessings pushed Lizardman longevity to a hundred and forty now, maybe a hundred and fifty for the most devout. Theron had perhaps eighty years left. Long enough to see the kingdom change. Long enough to watch the Crucible navigate waters that were becoming deeper and darker with each passing decade.
The Pope was dying.
Not publicly. Not dramatically. Elwyn Asheld presided over the Festival of Flame with the same steel-spined composure she’d maintained for fifteen years of her papacy. She spoke clearly, moved decisively, and projected the image of institutional permanence that the Crucible required. But Theron had been her Cardinal for twelve years, and he knew the signs. The way she paused between sentences — not for emphasis but for breath. The way her hands gripped the lectern — not for oratory but for balance. The slight tremor in her right eye that her veil concealed from everyone in the Cathedral except the man standing three feet behind her.
She was seventy-four. Human. No Life domain extension — the blessing enhanced lifespan, but it didn’t reverse age. She had years left, not decades. And when she died, the Crucible would face its most dangerous transition since its founding.
Who becomes Pope?
The question sat in Theron’s mind like a stone in a shoe — always present, always sharp, impossible to ignore. The Dual Pillar System was explicit: the same house could not hold both the Crown and the Papacy. House Veyrath held the Crown. House Asheld held the Crucible. If Asheld’s line produced no suitable successor — and Asheld’s current heir was a twenty-year-old clerk with more piety than ambition — the Papacy would pass to another house.
House Krugvane was the obvious choice. The most revered religious house. The descendants of Krug himself. Theron was already Cardinal — the jump to Pope was a step, not a leap.
But obvious choices invited opposition. House Asheld’s allies wouldn’t surrender the position quietly. The other Cardinals had their own ambitions. And somewhere in the machinery of divine politics, the Sovereign was watching — always watching — and the Sovereign’s preference was the only vote that mattered.
Theron looked at the statue. His ancestor’s face, carved in stone, lit by the amber glow that pilgrims called holy and that theologians called "unexplained residual divine presence."
What would you do?
The statue didn’t answer. It never answered. Heroes didn’t communicate through stone. They didn’t speak through prayer, didn’t appear in mortal dreams, didn’t walk among the living. Whatever Krug had become in the Eternal Forge was a Hero’s existence — elevated, transformed, sealed away from ordinary channels of contact. The statue was stone and memory and whatever fraction of the Sovereign’s power saturated its structure.
Theron had heard the stories, of course. The kind believers shared quietly at the edges of theological propriety — a grandmother dead for eleven years who appeared in a grandchild’s dream to give one sentence of advice. A soldier’s father who visited the night before a battle to say only: I know. Priests called these "faith echoes." Theologians debated whether they were divine communications or grief producing visions. Theron had always categorized them as unprovable and therefore untheological.
But the statue wasn’t going to answer, and faith echoes — if they existed at all — didn’t appear on demand. Theron stood, his knees creaking, and adjusted his robes.
[SOVEREIGN VARIABLE — PLACED]
[Target: Theron Krugvane, Cardinal, Ashenveil]
[Observation: He asks the right question through the wrong channel. Noted.]
[Note: "Faith echoes" are not myth. The channel he needs exists. He has not found it yet.]
[Status: Monitor. No intervention.]
Outside the Cathedral windows, the faint sound of wingbeats. A Gryphon’s dawn circuit — the first patrol of the day, passing over the Cathedral district at precisely 0530, as it had every morning for as long as Theron could remember. The rhythm of the kingdom. The heartbeat of a system that never paused.
"Your Eminence."
A young priest — Human, nervous, holding a scroll — waited at the edge of the nave. The daily briefing. Crucible administrative reports, temple attendance figures, construction updates, inter-house correspondence, intelligence summaries from the Ministry of Whispers that Theron was technically not authorized to receive but that Vrenn Myrvalis sent anyway because the Kobold spymaster operated on the principle that information was wasted on people who didn’t need it.
"What’s first?" Theron asked.
"The Pope requests your attendance at the Crucible Council. Ninth bell."
"Subject?"
The priest hesitated. "The Mechanist pamphlets, Your Eminence. They’ve appeared in the Southmark. Bridgeport and two neighboring towns."
Theron’s jaw tightened. The Mechanists. The heresy that wouldn’t die — the persistent, infuriating belief that the Sovereign was not a true god but a "system entity" who exploited divine rules rather than embodying divine truth. It had been a fringe theory for decades. Whispers in academic corners. Graffiti on temple walls in the outer provinces.
Now it was pamphlets. Printed pamphlets. The printing press — Orrythas’s gift to the kingdom — had been designed to spread knowledge. It was spreading doubt instead.
"Inform the Pope I’ll attend," Theron said. "And send word to Cardinal Asheld as well. If this has reached Bridgeport, it’s in the Southmark trade network. Which means House Draeven knows about it."
"House Draeven, Your Eminence?"
"If pamphlets are moving through Bridgeport, they’re moving through Draeven’s trade routes. The question is whether Callister Draeven is ignoring them, tolerating them, or funding them." Theron’s expression was unreadable. "Prepare a brief for the Council. Include the Ministry’s last intelligence summary on Southmark belief patterns."
The priest bowed and left.
Theron stood alone in the Cathedral. The altar flame burned low. The statue glowed. Outside, the Gryphon’s wingbeats faded south.
The first problem is never the heresy. The first problem is always who benefits from it.
He walked toward the Crucible Hall. Behind him, the carved granite eyes of the First Forge watched his great-great-great-grandson leave, with the patient, ancient gaze of a Hero who had once told his own god: "Are we the good side?"
That question still didn’t have an answer. Two hundred and fifty years later, it still didn’t have an answer.
***
Ryn found the Krugvane Chapel on his fourth day of looking.
It wasn’t hidden — nothing in Ashenveil was hidden; the city was designed for function, not mystery. But the Chapel was small, and it sat in a residential quarter between the Cathedral district and the Scholar’s Ward, and the street it occupied was narrow enough that you could walk past the entrance twice without noticing.
Inside: a single room. Stone walls, a low ceiling, wooden pews for maybe thirty people. The altar held no gold flame — just a simple iron cog, unlit, resting on a folded cloth. On the wall behind the altar: a painting.
Not the grand, idealized portrait that hung in the Cathedral gallery — Krug the legend, Krug the hero, Krug the symbol. This was smaller. Simpler. A Lizardman in working robes, seated on a stone bench, holding a carved walking stick. No divine light. No dramatic pose. Just a man, sitting, looking forward with an expression that the painter had captured with surgical precision.
Tired. He looked tired.
Not weak-tired. Not giving-up-tired. The tiredness of a person who had carried something heavy for a very long time and had set it down only after making sure someone else could pick it up. The tiredness of completion.
And beside him in the painting — so subtle that Ryn almost missed it — a shape in the background. Behind the bench, half-hidden in shadow, the triangular silhouette of a head with golden eyes. The Hydra’s central head, resting on the ground beside the First Forge’s bench. Not threatening. Not guarding. Just *there*. The way an old dog lies beside the chair of someone it had known its entire life.
The painter had understood. Whoever had made this painting had seen what Lysa had described — the creature at the Cathedral gates, pressing its heads against the stone. And they’d painted the truth: not a weapon mourning its commander, but something older and simpler. A creature beside a man.
Below the painting, a plaque:
Krug. The First Forge.
Year 0 – ~72 AF.
"I am the forge. I am the flame."
Ryn sat in the empty pew and looked at the painting.
Not at the legend. At the man. And at the golden eye in the shadow behind him.
Forty-seven when he walked from the desert. A hundred and nineteen when he died. Seventy-two years of building, fighting, praying, losing, winning, burying friends, baptizing strangers, learning to lead people he didn’t understand, and trusting a voice in his head that had never fully explained itself. And beside him, for most of those years — a creature whose bond belonged to another man but whose loyalty extended to everyone who had been there at the beginning.
What kind of person did that?
Not a hero. Heroes were what you became after. Before — during — you were just a person carrying something you couldn’t put down.
Ryn sat in the Krugvane Chapel for an hour. He didn’t pray. He didn’t recite. He just sat with the painting and the silence and the understanding that the kingdom of a million souls was built by a man who looked tired, and a creature that never left his side.
When he left, he noticed something he’d missed on the way in. A small sign beside the door, hand-lettered, not official:
Open always. Enter quietly. He rested here.
He rested here.
Not ruled. Not conquered. Not commanded.
Rested.
Ryn touched the iron cog on the doorframe — the same gesture his mother made every morning in Coldhollow, touching the Cog-and-Flame above the door. It was automatic. It was becoming habit.
He wasn’t sure when that had happened.