The inside of the building did not match the outside, which I should have expected, because nothing about Vale ever matched what it was supposed to be.
The ground floor opened into a workshop the size of a basketball court. Steel beams crossed overhead, hung with chains and pulleys and things I could not name. Workbenches lined the walls, covered in tools that ranged from ordinary hammers to devices that looked like they belonged in a laboratory run by someone with no respect for physics. Blue-white light came from somewhere I couldn't identify, casting everything in the cold glow of a forge that had learned to hold its temper.
The air smelled like hot metal and ozone and something underneath that made my teeth ache, the same wrongness I felt around mana-dense equipment.
And there, at a bench near the back, working over something that glowed orange between a pair of tongs, stood a woman.
