Two hundred and thirty-one million, two hundred and forty thousand beats.
In the heart of the capital city of Aethelgard, the Grand Cathedral's deepest, most secure infirmary was filled with the agonizing sound of mindless, wet babbling.
High Priest Malakor stood at the foot of a narrow, iron-framed cot. The air smelled of holy incense and stale sweat. Strapped securely to the bed was the Envoy who had been sent to the northern village of Oakhaven.
The man was completely broken. His eyes were wide, staring at a ceiling he clearly could not see. His fingers twitched in erratic, disjointed spasms, trying to trace impossible geometries in the empty air.
"The healers have purged his system with pure Light mana three times, Your Eminence," Inquisitor Vane whispered, standing respectfully behind the High Priest. Vane looked pale, his gaze actively avoiding the drooling, catatonic Envoy. "There is no trace of curses, no dark arcana, no poisons. His physical brain is perfectly intact."
Malakor reached out, placing his wrinkled, gold-ringed hand on the Envoy's forehead. He closed his eyes, extending his own considerable holy perception into the man's mind.
The High Priest yanked his hand back almost instantly, a sharp hiss of pain escaping his lips.
"Your Eminence?" Vane asked, alarmed.
"It is empty," Malakor breathed, staring at his own trembling fingers. "A curse corrupts the mind. Dark magic twists it. But this... this is a total, conceptual annihilation of sanity. The man's soul has not been poisoned. It has been thrown into an abyss."
Malakor turned sharply, his pristine white robes swirling around his ankles. He marched out of the infirmary, Vane scrambling to keep pace.
"This was not the work of the Elven Mages," Malakor declared, his voice echoing down the vaulted stone corridors of the Cathedral. "Elven magic is bound to the natural world. It is arrogant, but it is logical. The force that shattered this man's mind defies logic entirely."
"The commoners in the border villages are beginning to whisper, Your Eminence," Vane reported nervously. "They say the Duke has captured a dark god and chained it beneath his estate. They are refusing to listen to the new Envoys we sent to replace him. The economic blockade is holding, but our psychological grip on the North is slipping."
"Then we must change the narrative," Malakor stated coldly.
They reached the massive, gold-inlaid doors of the High Priest's private study. Malakor pushed them open and walked to his desk.
"If the commoners believe Arthur Warborn harbors a dark god, we will confirm it. We will officially declare the Duchy a quarantine zone of Demonic Incursion." Malakor picked up a heavy quill and dipped it in crimson ink. "We cannot send the Paladins to breach that Earth dome yet. It is a tactical suicide. But we will prepare the Holy Inquisition for a crusade. When the Awakening Ceremony arrives next year, the King will order the Duke to bring his heir to the capital."
Malakor's eyes gleamed with cold, religious zeal.
"If Arthur refuses, the King's Royal Army and our Holy Crusade will march as one, justified by divine mandate. And if Arthur complies... he will be bringing his dying, cursed son directly into the heart of our power. Either way, the North falls."
Hundreds of miles away, the "dying, cursed son" was currently engaged in an act of staggering, multi-threaded magical architecture.
In the pitch-black silence of the Leyline Nexus, Kaiser Warborn adjusted his internal equilibrium.
One year and four months, the Sightless Sovereign tracked.
His sensory web was cast wide over the Warborn estate, monitoring a new, highly delicate process taking place in the Vanguard's armory forge.
Because of the crushing ambient gravity generated by the Earth dome, the Vanguard Knights were evolving into hyper-dense physical juggernauts. But their weapons were not. A standard steel broadsword, swung with the newly developed, crushing kinetic force of a Vanguard veteran, would simply snap upon impact with an enemy shield.
They needed denser steel. They needed weapons forged in the Anvil.
In the sweltering, soot-stained depths of the armory, Chief Blacksmith Garrick stood shirtless, his massive chest slick with sweat. He was using a heavy sledgehammer to fold a glowing, white-hot billet of northern iron.
"It's too hot, Chief!" an apprentice shouted over the roar of the forge. "If we quench it in the water troughs now, the temperature differential will shatter the blade!"
Garrick paused, wiping the sweat from his eyes. The apprentice was right. To fold the steel tight enough to withstand the estate's new gravity, they had to heat it far beyond standard forging temperatures. But standard water boiled instantly upon contact with metal this hot, creating steam pockets that warped the edge.
"Step aside, Master Garrick," a soft, melodic voice chimed through the din of the forge.
The heavy, muscular blacksmiths parted instantly, bowing their heads.
Princess Lucy walked into the center of the forge. She was wearing a heavy leather smith's apron over her silk gown, her silver veil catching the orange glow of the roaring fires. She did not flinch from the suffocating heat. The ambient thermal grid Kaiser was supplying from below kept her core perfectly stabilized, allowing her to step into the inferno without her Frozen Ice physique violently overreacting.
"Your Highness," Garrick rumbled, deeply respectful. Over the past few months, the Elven Princess had earned the fierce loyalty of the estate's working class. She was not a fragile ornament; she was actively seeking ways to aid the Duchy.
"Bring the billet to the quenching anvil," Lucy commanded gently.
Garrick used massive iron tongs to lift the white-hot, folded steel. He carried it to a solid block of iron in the center of the room.
Lucy stepped forward. She pulled off her right, fur-lined glove, exposing her pale, delicate hand.
She hovered her palm exactly two inches above the glowing steel.
Down in the dark, Kaiser's attention narrowed entirely onto the forge.
She is going to use her core to quench the metal, Kaiser realized. She is going to apply absolute zero directly to the white-hot steel.
It was a brilliantly dangerous idea. If she applied the cold too fast, the steel would instantly shatter into a thousand pieces of shrapnel. She needed to draw the heat out of the metal at an agonizingly precise rate.
Kaiser adjusted his grip on the Fire Leyline. He subtly increased the radiant heat of the floorboards directly beneath Lucy's boots, giving her a massive, stable thermal anchor to lean on so she didn't accidentally freeze her own arm in the process.
Lucy closed her eyes.
She let the Frozen Ice mana leak from her palm. She didn't blast the steel; she gently draped the absolute zero over the metal like a suffocating blanket.
Hssssssssssss.
There was no steam. The sheer, impossible cold of the Princess's mana didn't boil the surrounding air; it instantly deleted the kinetic energy of the white-hot iron. The blinding orange glow of the billet rapidly dimmed to dull red, then to gray, and finally to a dark, gunmetal black in a matter of seconds.
Garrick stared in absolute awe.
He struck the cooled billet with his hammer.
CLANG.
The sound was not the dull thud of standard iron. It was a sharp, high-pitched, vibrating ring that echoed painfully in the ears of everyone in the forge.
"By the blood of the ancestors," Garrick breathed, dropping his hammer. He picked up the cooled steel with his tongs. "The molecular structure... it's perfectly aligned. The absolute cold compressed the grain of the steel flawlessly. This isn't just iron anymore, Your Highness. This is True-Cold Steel."
Lucy smiled beneath her veil, pulling her glove back on. She swayed slightly, the exertion of the precise magical control leaving her dizzy.
"Then I suggest we get to work, Master Garrick," Lucy said, her voice steadying. "We have an entire Vanguard army to re-equip."
From the shadows near the entrance of the forge, Sir Kaelen watched the exchange. The blind assassin leaned heavily on his cane, a profound sense of tactical satisfaction washing over him.
The Elven Princess had found her place within the Anvil. She was no longer just the Duke's political hostage; she was the Vanguard's armorer.
A hundred feet below, Kaiser allowed the heat beneath her boots to return to its normal, ambient hum as she stepped away from the anvil.
The variables are compounding, Kaiser thought, his mind processing the newly forged True-Cold Steel.
The Vanguard Knights were hyper-dense. Now, their weapons would be unbreakable, quenched in the absolute zero of Elven royalty. Arthur's army was mutating into a force that simply could not be measured by the King's current military standards.
Kaiser brought his perception back into his own physical vessel.
He had monitored the Envoy's shattered mind in the capital. He had monitored the forging of the steel. Now, he had to return to his own agony.
He raised his right hand, looking at it in the pitch-black void.
His mastery over the Void mana was absolute, but the physical reality of human biology was a stubborn anchor. His blood and bone could only withstand so much saturation before they began to crystallize.
If I am to step into the capital and cast an eclipse over the High Priest's Cathedral, Kaiser theorized, his analytical mind detached from his own suffering, my meridians must be as dense as the steel Princess Lucy just quenched. I must fold my own soul.
Kaiser gripped the hilt of Silence.
He didn't draw the blade. He used its primordial gravity to forcefully compress his own internal Aura furnace.
He ignited his core, driving the heat to an agonizing, blinding temperature, and then brutally, mercilessly forced it to compress, packing the explosive energy into an impossibly small, dense singularity in the center of his chest.
Blood instantly rushed to his ears. His vision—even behind the blindfold—sparked with violent, blinding white flashes. His bones groaned, the marrow boiling under the intense, self-inflicted pressure.
He was forging his own core using the exact same principles Garrick and Lucy had just used on the iron. He was applying the immense gravity of the primordial blade as the hammer, and his own sheer willpower as the quenching cold.
Beat. Beat. Beat.
The internal metronome slowed to thirty-five beats per minute, his body desperately trying to survive the internal forge.
The thirteen-year isolation was an unyielding crucible. The Duke held the walls, the Princess quenched the steel, and the Sovereign forged the void. The clock ticked relentlessly toward his twenty-second winter.