Chapter 210: The Forge Reopens
The engineering district of Bastion Seven smelled like it always had.
Hot iron. Quenching oil. Coal smoke that never fully cleared out of the rafters no matter how many exhaust runes they carved into the ceiling.
Draven walked in through the eastern service door with his hood up.
Nothing had moved in a month.
Long benches sat exactly where they had been, laid out with tools nobody had picked up. A half-shaped ingot rested on an anvil, cold and gray, abandoned mid-strike.
At the far end of the hall, under a heavy canvas tarp, sat the thing they had all built together.
The glass test chamber from the prototype run still stood beside it. The interior was clean. Perfectly, uselessly clean. The last thing it had ever held was air.
Men moved through the hall in slow, purposeless circles. Sweeping floors that were already swept. Sorting bolts into trays that had been sorted twice.
One of them stood in front of the tarp with his back to the door.
