Chapter 78. The Nameforge

We found the forge at noon when the light was rudest.

Neris brought a thing wrapped in black cloth to the council table and laid it down like a sleeping animal. It rolled once, heavy, and stopped. No one breathed.

“From under the second engine,” she said. “It cracked when the leg snapped. There’s a door under the ridge. Not just a foxhole. A house.”

Mavienne peeled the cloth back. Inside lay a bar of iron the size of my forearm. It glowed faintly from within—hot with a heat that wasn’t temperature.

Letterforms swam along the surface, not legible—recognizable. The way you know a signature even if you couldn’t spell it. Names, squeezed and hammered until they forgot how to be separate.

Orla set two fingers to it and hissed. “Don’t touch it bare. It feels like being called by the wrong voice.”

“That is a temple bar,” Mavienne said, low. “From our own gate. See the bevel? He melted it with the inn door and the midwife’s sign and the ston