Before the hammer, came the heat.

The Smith tossed Zoe’s soul into the heart of the forge where she hung, suspended, as burning gas coiled about her. White heat hugged her, caressed her, stroked her until her skin trickled and her bones flowed. It was no mortal flame, but Skein excited to the point of dissolution. She felt herself breaking down, and it was a long slow pain. It filled her mind.

She could not control this moment, and anxiety compounded the pain. Would it continue until her body melted away into nothing? She gritted teeth that slid down her throat like hot marshmallows. Taste of bone as her tongue melted.

She would endure, but it continued, until even her sense of self liquified.

With shocking efficiency, the Smith threw her molten soul onto the anvil. He stood godlike. A titan whose head brushed the ceiling of infinity. Muscles like stacked mountains. Ten thousand arms gripped ten thousand hammers, raised them high, and struck.

The first blow destroyed any semblance of Zoe. Her body smeared out across the anvil. The hammer came again. And again. Each strike rumbled her with thunder. Spread her wider. Her consciousness strained… Mind expanded… snapped…

The smell of singed metal filled her.

One of the Smith’s hands swapped out the hammer for a pair of tongs. He pinched her flattened head, twisting the tongs through supple flesh, and pried something alive and wriggling. It tugged back, resisting, but the cosmic Smith was inexorable. He pulled a red wormlike being free of her soul: Zoe’s Blood essence.

After all, she would have to forgo it if she walked the path of [The Bell At The Centre Of The World].

With a flick of his wrist, the Smith threw away the bloody worm. It squirmed through space and vanished amongst the fires. Off to resume its place in reality.

Before her soul could cool any further, the Smith returned her to the fire.

She burned, the lack of Blood essence changing her. The Smith had stripped a layer of imperviousness from her, and the heat now bubbled her molten soul.

Again, she was pulled from the inferno and placed upon the anvil, and ten thousand hammers swung. Each strike caused her soul to fold in upon itself, expelling weakness, and arriving at a function.

When the ringing thunder died, Zoe burned bright and hard in the center of the anvil. Her body compact, and beside her, beaten from her soul, lay a glowing child. The color of milk and honey, her Faith essence stood on chubby little legs and floated away. It rose like a balloon into the fire and void of the forge before it vanished.

Zoe felt small. Hollow. She stared up at the descending hand like a mouse waiting for a hawk’s talons. The road to death is paved with mistakes. Was this another one?

The smith snatched her up and examined her with his blindfolded eyes. He sniffed the heat rising from her soul.

[What do you think?]

She slipped from his grip of heat and steel and fell into her own. A tiny doll of light and clay cradled in her palm. She stood shoulder to shoulder with the Smith, both of them staring down at the soul. Such a fragile thing to transform, but isn’t that always the way? A soul is a malleable thing. Porous. Immortal only in that it never truly breaks down, it merely fades, and spreads…

She clutched her soul with a possessiveness she never experienced before.

“You’re not finished”

[Why do you say that?]

She gazed at the Smith without trembling. Forced herself not to feel fear.

The Smith might be a core component of the System, one of the original beings who ascended into the cosmic entity that altered her world on the whims of a god. But she was also a part of that system. She was a single cell in the intergalactic body.

And she knew such a grotesquely vast organism is doomed to disorder, though it may strive for unity.

This striving filled her now. She opened her hand and offered her soul up to the Smith.

“I stand on a line between disorder and resonance.”

[This body walks such a line.]

“But this body isn’t walking!” She didn’t know how else to say it, but it was true. “Maybe it just feels odd without Blood essence, but it’s not animated. It’s not alive!”

The Smith grinned.

[Few people from new worlds can spy imperfections in a newly forged body. Even those in the tutorial struggle, and they have lessons. You are the first outside the tutorial to meet me, how curious that you know this when you should not.]

He grinned and leaned forward, and his face was a sky of yellow teeth.

[But such questions are not my domain. I am but a simple blacksmith. Though I warn you, Zoe Chambers, as is my prerogative, be wary of such tricks with the Witch.]

And with those words, he tossed Zoe back into the forge to continue his work.

###

Zoe floated as her soul drowned in heat. The flames rose higher and hotter, and she could hardly stand the torture. Flames scraped her, licking away her substance, as she wisped away through oblivion’s needle eye. Her rage snarled against the capricious universe that placed her in this moment, but it was uncertain lashing. She was a dog scrabbling up a muddy bank only to slide back down. She wanted to give up, to let herself go and evaporate…

But she remembered Oriz’s warning.

One day, after a battle with the worm that ended with Zoe’s legs shattered, they had sat atop a dune. While Zoe enjoyed the gentle breeze, Oriz spoke.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“At the core of the Crimson Armada is the trinity: the Smith, the Witch, and the Gambler. They began as three survivors of an ancient skirmish, pursued by their enemy into deep space. For a thousand years they were hounded by an empire. For a thousand years they survived. For a thousand years they grew in power, until they became the Crimson Armada system. They ended the thousand year conflict in a single day when they took the empire for themselves, all twelve trillion souls.”

Zoe reeled at the sheer scale, and Oriz continued.

“For half a million years, it survived by hoarding power. In its mind, the fleet is only ever a day away from scattering to the winds,” Oriz leaned forward. “The system fears the very path the system imposes upon us on pain of monstrosity.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the system loses its godhood, it will have to restart its journey. The journey from mortal to god is paved with luck and desparate survival. Who is to say that someone who survived once could do it again?”

Zoe sat, chilled, despite the balmy wind. She believed everything Oriz said, but that only made her reality more unstable. What did it mean for religion, for her place in the universe, that gods warred across the galaxy while her species struggled with fire?

But Oriz had a lesson beyond the history.

“The system is stingy. Every notification costs energy. Every reward, every upgrade, the shaping of flesh or land, all burns through the System’s power. If it can perform half a job, it will do so. When the Smith forges you, there will be imperfections. Nothing that you cannot fix down the road, but it will be difficult. These bottlenecks arrest your momentum, and can inspire suicidal levels of desperation.”

Zoe sat still and intent.

“How do I spot the imperfections?”

Oriz smiled.

“To teach you would take months, if not years, of rigorous study, and that’s if you already knew the name of the body path you desired.”

“So what can I do?”

“I will give you the advice my master gave me.” She smiled fondly, before continuing. “There are always mistakes. The worker knows where they could improve their craft, or where they rushed, or distracted. Doubt riddles the artist's mind. Let them seek perfection on your behalf.”

“So, lie?”

Oriz shrugged.

“The Smith will cheat you. Best respond in kind.”

###

From the forge to the anvil and back. A loop of thunder and burning pain. Her soul became liquid, solid, lightning, hope. Ten thousand hammers struck ten million times.

So time passed in the system's heart.

###

Zoe blinked. At some point, the link between her mind and soul snapped. Untethered, she raced through true unconsciousness until she woke.

The Smith stood some distance away, leaning on a hammer with a handle as tall as his chest. Zoe lay upon the anvil. She stood and walked and felt…

Nothing?

She frowned. Her body felt the same as before. Not even particularly warm. With a frown, she moved into the beginning stance of the Grasping Vine. She stepped, with little effort, into the first steps. Her fists moved faster than she expected, and she tightened her stance. She kicked the air, punched heat, and circled. The Smith watched.

The Grasping Vine spoke to her, a constant spiraling pursuit of unity with the enemy. Responding to their movements with her own. Creating unity.

The whole exists only to break.

She stumbled at the thought. Her breathing faltered and her stance collapsed. She sighed and shook her head. It felt like there were new grooves in her brain, and her thoughts kept slipping.

[Are you satisfied?]

She forced herself into the moment.

"I have no choice but to be satisfied."

[You are not so sniveling now I have performed my services.]

"I never sniveled."

The Smith laughed.

[It is time for you to go, Zoe Chambers. I hope you make it to level 60. It would be good to meet you again.]

The Smith raised his hammer, and reality trembled with anticipation.

Zoe raised her hands — only momentarily distracted by their perfect symmetry — and stepped forward.

"What is the point of all this? Why are we leveling up? Is it to become a system like you?"

The Smith gripped his hammer above his head. Ten thousand hands upon the handle. He grinned.

[Who were you before you became a crusader?]

"I'm a doctor."

He placed one hand over his heart. Fingers spread wide, and Zoe noticed for the first time that each finger had too many knuckles. Reality stretched. Thinned. She stepped back.

And realized where she stood: a nightmare.

[I was a thief.]

A forge is a place of hard shadows. As the Smith towered, those shadows deepened. Abyss streaked the burning reality of the forge. The Smith looked down at her, and she was so small it sickened her. His hands pressed down around her like walls of flesh. Knuckles seethed under his skin. Splitting. Fusing. She felt like a beetle trapped by children.

The hammer remained lifted by a tangled mess of hands as he leaned down. The bandage across his eyes fell away. He leaned closer until a single eye above filled the sky.

Flesh gouged and seared into blindness.

[The greedy hoards the bright things. You shall know them by the burns in their eyes.]

Zoe collapsed under the pressure of the gaze that was not. Her flesh squirmed. Terrible gravity pressed her down like spined marble. Her skin snapped. Bones split. She screamed, but the Smith stole the sound.

Her new body crumbled. A deep purple bled from the dust. She remained in that leaking puddle and reflected the Smith. Ripples passed across the surface. Fear on a fundamental level. It permeated her like oil through a rag. She choked on the terror, but it vanished and left only a gaping hole in her mind.

The Smith stole her fear.

Sheer blankness. White cliffs and white holes. Her mind sat locked into place. Her emotions ransacked. No thoughts allowed. She became a witness.

There was only one truth.

The eye above her throbbed with ancient pain. Nothing else could be true in the weight of this agony. The pain refreshed every second. No scars on a wound that cannot heal. Skein squirmed like living rivers in the charred landscape. The pupil gaped. Blood trickled from the hole in the flesh, and then it poured. A steaming cascade to wash away a world.

[Who is to say what any of us will become?]

The blood flooded her dusty remains. She became mud, became whole, only so she could drown. Pulled by the twisting current. Her mouth filled as she struggled to stay afloat. Blood filled her stomach. Weighed her down.

[Go into your world that matters so little and do whatever you wish.]

She sank into the blood. Darkness swallowed her.

[Play with the trinkets of my enemies.]

The Black Star chain around her throat spasmed like a pinned snake.

[But never forget, Zoe Chambers. You are mine.]

The hammer came down.

And the forge vanished.

Zoe fell through the air. She tumbled head over heels toward the shining lake. The freshwater stretched out under the sun. She splashed and sank into the warm water. It swallowed her. Light faded as she sobbed underwater. The weight of alien emotion begged her to keep sinking. Away from the light and into the darkness. Find the bottom and grab hold of the mud.

She kicked. Mind reeling. Fought her way to the surface and gasped for air. Her breathing wild, she tried to calm herself, but it took minutes. She couldn’t stop crying, and so she dove under the water and swam, as long as her breath held, toward the shore.

But she stopped short when voices rippled through the water. The words passed over her body. They sounded garbled, but she recognized the voices.

She floated to the surface a hundred feet from Gool’s camp. A small clearing amongst some thin trees. Gool’s skin had healed smoother, with a surface like polished wood. He whistled along to the kettle as he lifted it from the fire and poured out two cups of tea.

One for him, and one for Oriz.