Jacob had been prepared for an argument, or at least some perfunctory refusal, the sort of dismissive answer that would leave him quietly cursing Isaac for sending him to a place that seemed determined to waste his time with needless complications.

Instead, Fred's ready agreement felt almost disorienting, as though a problem he had already begun to resent had simply dissolved before it had the chance to fully form. The ease of it unsettled him in a way he couldn't quite explain.

"You're going to show me the entrance… just like that?" Jacob asked, his tone more curious than accusatory, his gaze fixed on Fred as though trying to catch the faintest sign of a hidden catch.

Fred's smile was faint but confident. "Well, you passed what might be called our little test. It's only fair we let you in."

With a casual motion, he snapped his fingers, and a rune shimmered into existence in the air before him. As it flared to life, the sound of a bell rang softly through the shop, the tone clear and deliberate, and when the final chime faded, the front door swung open without a hand upon it.

The woman who had left earlier entered once more, her face stripped of expression, her eyes dull and unfocused. She moved to stand at Fred's side, her steps measured and unhurried, yet there was something deeply unnatural in the way she carried herself, mechanical, deliberate, as though whatever subtle spark separated the living from the lifeless had been quietly removed.

What followed was stranger still. The two bodies lying in mangled heaps on the floor began to change. Bone shifted and straightened with muted cracks, flesh drew itself together in careful seams, and skin knit over wounds until no trace of injury remained.

A moment later, they stood as if nothing had happened, their eyes just as empty, their movements just as deliberate, and they joined the woman at Fred's side in perfect unison.

Jacob's surprise was evident, though not for the reasons Fred might have imagined. The sight of controlled puppets was unusual but hardly unheard of; runes designed to strip a person's will and replace it with obedience were difficult to craft but far from unknown.

No, what unsettled him was not the act of control itself, but the nature of the rune Fred had used, the subtle structure within its lines that marked it as something far rarer and far more significant than anything he had expected to encounter here.

In truth, if Fred had only brought the mage back inside, Jacob might have dismissed it as nothing more than a moderately advanced control rune, a rare skill, certainly, but not beyond the bounds of what an experienced mage could accomplish.

It was the restoration of the two broken men that changed everything. Bones that had been splintered and twisted only moments before were now perfectly aligned, flesh restored without scar or seam, eyes vacant yet clear. That was no work of simple compulsion.

Golems.

The three of them had to be golems, and not the crude, hollow caricatures that craftsmen often tried to pass off as human-like, but creations of such fidelity that Jacob could not find a single flaw to betray their nature. The rune Fred had activated was not merely one of command; it was a tether, a link that allowed him not only to issue orders but to restructure, repair, and direct them with complete precision.

Golems were rare enough on their own, expensive to make, difficult to maintain. But to have ones that could pass for human in both appearance and movement was something else entirely. Such craftsmanship demanded not only technical mastery but an artistry so refined that Jacob could think of only a handful of people in the city capable of it. And if the creator was who he suspected, then the more pressing question would be why such a master had chosen to hide their skill in the unremarkable heart of the Barchend district.

He pulled himself from his thoughts, the shock replaced by an anticipatory curiosity, and rose quickly, already eager to meet the blacksmith who might be behind this work. Fred, wearing that same faintly amused smile, stepped toward the center of the room and gestured for Jacob to follow.

"By the way," Jacob said as they walked, the question slipping out with a casualness that didn't quite match the focus in his eyes, "what would you have done if I'd attacked the woman as well?"

It was partly genuine curiosity, partly an attempt to reverse-engineer the rules of whatever strange test he had just passed. Refusing to help would have meant failure, that much was obvious. Joining the attackers would have been failure as well. Being too weak to protect Fred would have led to the same outcome. There was a narrow path between those extremes, and he wanted to understand it.

Fred didn't pause in his stride. "Hmm. If you had, you would have failed the test. She hadn't done anything wrong."

Jacob nodded as though confirming a conclusion he had already reached. Yes, the only correct response had been to stop the two men and save Fred's life, nothing more, nothing less.

They came to a halt in the very center of the store, and Fred, without any explanation, crouched and pressed both palms flat against the floorboards. From beneath his hands, a rune bloomed outward, its lines unfolding in measured, deliberate patterns until the design encircled them both completely. The moment the last arc of light locked into place, the floor beneath them simply vanished.

Jacob had no time to prepare before gravity took hold. He and Fred dropped straight down, the air rushing past his ears.

With the lingering memory of his humiliating yelp during the ascent at the World Tree still fresh in his mind, Jacob forced himself into silence, expecting that the fall would last only a handful of seconds. But the drop went on, the black shaft around them stretching endlessly, and with each moment the temperature rose. The warm air became uncomfortably hot, the scent of smoke creeping into his nose until it stung. Minutes seemed to pass, and with them came the first edges of panic, slow and unwelcome.

Fred's voice cut through the rush of air, calm but carrying an edge of warning. "Don't fight back. If you do, you'll die."

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Before Jacob could ask what he meant, a faintly glowing rune detached itself from Fred's side and streaked toward him. Trusting instinct, or perhaps just the tone in Fred's voice, he forced himself to remain still.

The rune struck his chest and sank into him, dissolving as though it were nothing more than ink poured into water. A breath later, a dense film of dull, grey light spread across his skin from head to toe, and the stifling heat evaporated as if it had never been there.

The landing came without warning. His boots struck solid ground, the impact muted by the strange protection clinging to him. He stayed upright for all of three seconds before his knees buckled, pride making a stubborn but short-lived attempt to keep him standing.

"Come on, we don't have all day," Fred said, the faint impatience in his tone suggesting he had done this enough times to be bored by it. "Recover quickly, and let's get you a weapon."

Jacob, still catching his breath, didn't bother to answer. After a moment he forced himself upright and turned toward Fred, who was already walking away without so much as a glance over his shoulder. Jacob hurried after him, his gaze sweeping the surroundings as he tried to take it all in.

The first thing he noticed was that without the barrier, he would have been roasted alive within seconds. The ground, walls, and even the high ceiling gave off a steady red-orange glow, the kind of heat that seemed to radiate from the very stone itself.

The space was vast, its breadth broken only by the occasional massive column, and from somewhere ahead came the rhythmic hammering of metal on metal, deep, deliberate strikes that rang through the air like the heartbeat of the place itself.

As they advanced, the deep, metallic rhythm grew steadily more forceful, each strike carrying enough weight to make the air itself seem to vibrate, until the sound pressed so heavily on Jacob's ears that he found himself involuntarily wincing with every blow. The faint red glow from the surrounding stone brightened as they went, until the walls were no longer merely illuminated but seemed to burn with a steady, molten light of their own. And then they reached a heavy iron door.

"Sir likes to work as close to the core as possible, at least one of the minor cores," Fred said casually, as though describing nothing more remarkable than a preference for good ventilation. "He prefers the natural heat."

Jacob gave a brief nod, but his mind was far from calm agreement. The idea of deliberately building a forge within reach of a core, minor or not, struck him as the sort of decision only a certain kind of person could make, someone who either possessed extraordinary skill and power or had long ago made peace with the constant risk of being incinerated in minutes.

The thought left him with a sharper sense of exactly who he was dealing with. Fred himself was no ordinary craftsman's assistant, and whoever this blacksmith was, he had to be operating at a level Jacob rarely encountered; rank three at the very least, perhaps higher. Belemir might be competent in his own way, but Jacob doubted the attendant could so much as stand comfortably in this place.

Fred pressed a hand to the heavy iron door before them and eased it open. The hinges groaned faintly, and at once a wave of heat spilled into the passage, the sort of dry, radiant warmth that reminded Jacob of standing slightly too close to a hearth, not unbearable, but enough to make him aware of it through the protective barrier that still clung to his skin.

He stepped forward to look inside, and the sight struck him so unexpectedly that his foot caught on the threshold, forcing him to stumble back to keep from falling outright.

The first thing that seized his attention was not the figure of the blacksmith or the array of weapons, but the heart of the room itself. It was not a forge in any familiar sense, it was a minor core, its deep, living glow casting light and heat across the chamber in a way no man-made furnace ever could.

Suspended in the centre of the chamber was a pulsing sphere of nickel and iron, its surface faintly shifting as if alive, the whole mass bound and contained by a density of mana so great that the air around it seemed to ripple. The pressure it gave off was suffocating even from a distance, and the heat radiating from it was the kind that would reduce even a rank two to ash in seconds without protection.

It hovered in place with quiet, terrible steadiness, and beside it stood a huge anvil, a scattering of half-finished weapons, and, most strangely, a small basin of water that, despite the oppressive heat, remained perfectly still, its surface unbroken by steam.

At the anvil, the source of the deafening rhythm came into view. A tall, broad-shouldered man, completely bald and without so much as a trace of hair on his body, stood bare-chested before the glowing metal.

His arms moved in a steady, practiced rhythm, drawing back a massive hammer and driving it down with a force that sent sparks scattering in short-lived arcs of light. The muscles along his back and shoulders tightened and released with each motion, his skin reddened by the constant exposure to the core's heat, and yet his face remained composed, focused entirely on the work before him.

Without pausing for breath, he reached for a pair of long tongs, lifted the sheet of metal he had been shaping, and plunged it directly into the heart of the core.

For an instant, the metal seemed to melt into its own glow, turning the colour of burning coals before he withdrew it and returned it to the anvil. Again the hammer fell, and again the air rang with its impact.

The process repeated a dozen more times, core, anvil, hammer, until at last he carried the metal to the basin, lowering it into the water with a hiss that was swallowed almost instantly by the constant roar of heat. He let it cool, drew it out again, and set it on the anvil with the quiet care of a man certain in the weight of his own strength.

When he finally looked up, he dragged the back of one forearm across his brow, smearing away the sweat that had gathered there, and his eyes found Fred first, lingering for a moment before shifting to Jacob. There was no immediate hostility in the look, but something in its directness made Jacob's throat tighten.

"How much money do you have?" the man asked, his tone level but carrying the weight of expectation.

It was a simple question, yet Jacob found himself hesitating, still caught off guard by the sheer presence of the man and the scale of the place. A faint flicker of irritation crossed the blacksmith's face, and then he turned his gaze past Jacob, towards the faint darkness clinging to the boy's shadow.

"I can feel you there," he said evenly. "How much does the boy have?"

Belemir didn't speak at first. Instead, a small leather pouch slipped soundlessly from Jacob's shadow and slid across the floor until it came to rest by the blacksmith's feet. The man crouched without ceremony, picked it up, and loosened the drawstring with one thick finger, tipping its contents onto the flat of the anvil.

Gold coins spilled out in a muted cascade, their clinking quickly drowned beneath the low hum of the core. He glanced over them briefly before muttering, almost to himself, "Just a couple hundred thousand gold… not enough to buy you anything worth the trouble."

Jacob blinked in surprise. A couple thousand gold was no small sum, it was more than most would see in a year, but as his eyes drifted towards the minor core pulsing steadily beside the man, its heat warping the very air, he began to understand the scale of what they were dealing with. In this place, near this level of craft, such an amount might indeed be considered trivial.

The blacksmith's hand paused suddenly among the scattered coins, his expression sharpening as he lifted a single piece from the pile, a coin unlike the others, black as obsidian yet glinting faintly when it caught the light. Jacob frowned, unable to place its significance, but the man's reaction was telling; he regarded it with a quiet, knowing look before nodding once, as though a question had been answered.

"A friend of Isaac, then," he said, his voice losing none of its steadiness. "Or…" his gaze lingered on Jacob's features, "more likely his brother." He slipped the coin into a pocket without further comment, gathered the gold back into the pouch with practiced efficiency, and tossed it into Jacob's shadow, where it vanished as though swallowed whole.

"Very well," he said at last, his attention now fixed squarely on Jacob. "What weapon are you looking for?"

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