Noise and machines, sparks and fire, pistons and gears.
The Anvil of All Worlds was, as always, in motion. It was a world of sound. A world of lights. A world of endless work. It never stopped. There was a sun in this world—though the thick layer of smog completely obscured the sky, the world itself still brightened in the morning and darkened in the evenings. Yet the machines never stopped. Even lesser servants paused their work and enveloped themselves in a starlight cocoon for brief minutes of rest every few weeks. Nothing here did. Metal didn’t tire.
Amid the crushing macerators and conveyors to building-sized furnaces, a lesser servant slung a sloppy tendril over a gap between catwalks. Oily tar oozed along the bridge, moving mass to the other side little bits at a time to keep the tendril from snapping under the weight. As the grotesque ballet of ever-shifting sludge continued, one of the sparking serpents crossed high overhead.
The lesser servant stilled, still looped between the catwalks, trying its best to look like nothing more than a puddle of pollution and oil. The harsh industrial lights gave it the needed iridescent look, though anything intelligent would have noticed a blob of oil failing to fall through the catwalk’s grated gaps.
Keeping itself from falling through was something of a struggle. If the gaps were wider, it would have been impossible, but it could form mouths filled with sharp teeth on its undersides. As long as it was careful, it could use those teeth as platforms to balance the rest of itself above the catwalk. It did leave a trail of small gouges, but nothing had noticed the trail yet.
The serpent also failed to notice the lesser servant. It drifted on high in the air, undulating languid and without apparent alarm.
Once sure that the serpent wasn’t going to loop back around, the lesser servant finished pulling itself across the gap. The last trail of its tendril sucked into the main mass with a slurping noise that was drowned out by a whirring blade cutting chunks of metal apart.
It continued along, carefully balancing on its sharp teeth. It didn’t know where it was going. The master directed it from afar, sending nudges through the Stars, commanding it over the endless factory. It could only hope the master knew what it was doing. It had a purpose to fulfill. If the master fumbled or if it failed to execute the master’s commands correctly and ended up returned to the Stars, it wouldn’t be able to fulfill that purpose.
It didn’t know what that purpose was just yet. Nudges through the Stars weren’t enough to know the end goal. Yet the master must have an end goal. Unless that end goal involved its death, it couldn’t do anything to risk that purpose.
The latest nudge pushed it toward the conveyor belt leading away from the large furnace. That was good. The furnace heat boiled away the outer layer of its oily skin if it got too close. The air here did help against that—it was thick and foggy and left a protective residue over everything, including its outer layer—but it didn’t help to the point of being able to get too close.
One of the mechanical eyes swung past on a gantry. The off-yellow light crossed directly over the lesser servant, making it freeze once again, but swept past without pause as it started inspecting the macerator.
At the end of the catwalk, a railing prevented anyone on it from accidentally stepping onto the conveyor. Tall metal barrels of liquified glowstone cruised along the belt, moving from one part of the impossible factory to the next. It wasn’t the fastest conveyor belt around, but it wasn’t the slowest either.
The lesser servant oozed between the gaps in the railing, unhindered. It clung to the edge and waited for the right moment. If it tried the slow oozing way it had used to cross the catwalk gap, it would end up stretched to the snapping point. Instead, it had to wait and watch the barrels.
One went past now, now, now, now—
It jumped, pushing off the railing. One barrel zoomed past underneath. The leap carried it along the route of the conveyor belt, matching the momentum enough that its tendrils snapping down to latch onto the barrel didn’t sheer it to pieces.
Squirming around, it quickly maneuvered just behind the barrel, using it as a shield to block the rushing wind. As the factory tore past, it settled in to wait. It wouldn’t be getting off the conveyor belt anytime soon.
Arkk peeled his hand off the crystal ball, taking a short breath. Scrying into the Anvil drained him a whole lot more than scrying around Mystakeen. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle, but it was notable.
But he had some time to rest for the moment. The lesser servant would take at least an hour to reach its next destination. He would check in half that time, just to make sure it wasn’t in danger of overshooting its stop, but that was mostly a precaution.
Portals in the Anvil were far and distant apart, just as they were in the Underworld and here in the regular world. But, unlike the Underworld, the Anvil had ways of moving rapidly around its land. Not as rapidly as the teleportation rituals, but enough.
They had finally found another portal. This one wasn’t under constant observation.
That meant they had opportunities.
“Are you sure Agnete got your message?”
“She saw it,” Arkk said with certainty as he looked over to Zullie. The witch sat on top of one of the workstation tables where a littering of crystalline shards sat around her.
The crystalline shards came from the highlands portal structure, carefully removed under Zullie’s direction so as to not impact its functionality. They had tested it by connecting to the Silence after shaving off portions.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Arkk asked, frowning down at the assembly she was making.
Using magic that Arkk couldn’t begin to identify or explain, Zullie was slowly shaping the crystalline fragments into an archway of their own. Deep violet light clung to her fingers as she moved them over the fragments. In that violet light’s wake, the crystal shards were sealed back together as one single structure.
It was much smaller than a proper portal. A full-sized carriage could go through those. This could fit a gremlin upright or a human if they crawled. Dakka might be able to fit through if she stripped out of her armor and even regular clothes. Most orcs would probably get stuck at the shoulders. Lithe and far narrower than orcs, elves could fit through.
Zullie frowned, huffing indignantly. “Have I ever steered you wrong?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
She pursed her lips. “No,” she said. “But I’m not steering you wrong now. I can see how the portals work. I can do this. They are planar magic on a level far, far beyond anything I ever saw before coming here but they are just planar magic. I’ve been investigating this magic for longer than I’ve known you.”
“Alright,” Arkk said. “We probably only have one chance at this—”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you sure you don’t want Savren here? Or even Hale?”
Zullie dismissively waved a hand before plucking another shard of the archway off the desk. “We all have our specialties. This is mine. They would only be bumbling around, distracting me.”
“If you’re sure.”
“Arkk. You’re distracting me. Go busy yourself with your skeletons or… anything else.”
“I’m surprised you aren’t more interested in the skeletons. You sure abandoned any research involving the Necropolis awfully quick.”
Zullie shrugged. A little spark of light jumped from her finger to the crystalline archway, fusing the shard to it. “Just because it’s taboo doesn’t mean I’m all that fascinated with necromancy. I enjoyed learning it, but it is hardly my passion.” She paused, looking up toward the ceiling. “Besides,” she said slowly. “They kind of creep me out.”
“They… creep you out?”
“They’re too… real? Yeah. Something like that.”
Arkk squinted, not quite understanding what she was getting at.
Despite being blind, she noticed his confusion. “Necromancy, the kind I learned and the kind I taught you, is like… We animate a dead body instead of a pile of sticks because of various magical principles tying the deceased form to motion and life. But it isn’t all that different from grabbing a few sticks and waving them around like a puppet. They are puppets. Nothing more. Just puppets made from bones.
“Those undead from the Necropolis? They’re like people.” Zullie frowned, picking up another shard. “No. Not like people. They are people. I don’t like the implications. Honestly, the whole experience soured the idea of necromancy for me.”
“I spoke with some of them about the necromancy we’ve been using. None of them seem to mind. In fact, Yoho taught me a better way to raise undead. Mindless still but far more… limber and mobile. Much more effective warriors.”
Zullie pointed the shard at Arkk—except she missed the angle by several degrees—and scowled. “That only makes the situation more disturbing. Why don’t they care that we’re puppeting around dead bodies? Those puppets could have been raised into people like them. It’s weird.”
That was a fair point. Arkk supposed he hadn’t given it much thought. Maybe there was something wrong with the bodies he had brought back. Maybe they were too old to have been raised back into people or… something else. Yoho had looked over the small army of goblin undead he had risen without a hint of disapproval.
Maybe Yoho just didn’t like goblins.
“Anyway,” Zullie said, fusing another shard to the full structure. “Get out. You’re still distracting me.”
Arkk decided not to argue this time. He stepped over to the door, looking back one more time as Zullie, without uttering any incantation, picked another shard from the pile and zapped it to the small archway.
He wasn’t sure if she had noticed what she was doing. He wasn’t sure if he should comment on it.
Shaking his head, Arkk turned to the door and left.
There were no parts of the Anvil of All Worlds that could be considered desolate. Not a single patch of land had gone untouched. Over the last few weeks, the lesser servant had slipped around, sneaking through pipes and over tall buildings. Not once had it come across natural ground. There wasn’t a single stone, not one tree, not even a blade of grass poking out between metal tiles.
If the world had ever been anything but the factory, there was no evidence for it.
Except, that wasn’t quite true. Raw ore, stone, even trees all entered the factory, carried on massive locomotives in bulk. They split off, carried throughout the factory by conveyor belts and mechanical arms to be turned into parts and products. They had to come from somewhere.
It wasn’t the lesser servant’s problem. At no point did the lesser servant care about the properties of this world. It would never have considered the idea of where the raw material came from if not for the nudges in the Stars from the master wondering the same thing.
But the master was more concerned with other things at the moment.
The lesser servant crossed over a long stretch of empty pathway. One of the few places in the entire Anvil that wasn’t in motion. It felt… vulnerable. If a gantry swung past with one of those mechanical eyes, there would be nowhere to hide. It could try to burrow away—its teeth could easily chew through the metal tiles—but previous experiments conducted by the master showed that the mechanical eyes were particularly alarmed when they discovered any damage to the factory. Even a small hole bored through a panel that wouldn’t ever cause structural problems or interfere with operations brought down a yellow-light alarm.
When the yellow lights began spinning, hordes of mechanical men emerged from buildings and over catwalks, rushing to repair whatever damage the eyes discovered. That would only draw more attention here.
At best, the lesser servant could spread itself thin, hoping to be seen as nothing more than a puddle of spilled oil.
It could see its destination now. A tall crystalline archway, covered with runes and markings. Unlike the one it had come through, this section of the Anvil was sparsely populated. A transit route with a great many conveyors and locomotives but few actual machines and even fewer of the creatures that lived in this realm.
The archway was inactive. No liquid-like membrane was stretched over its center. That was what the master expected.
But it couldn’t get started right away. Instead, the nudges from the Stars directed it to hide, pressed up into an amorphous blob right at the base of the archway’s leg. There it waited, and waited, and waited…
It waited until an off-yellow light crossed overhead as one of the eyes swung past on its gantry. The mechanical eye continued on its gantry’s tracks without pause, not noticing anything amiss.
The eye certainly would have raised the alarm if the servant had already started. Now, it had time to work. The nudges in the Stars told it that the gantry here only crossed over once a day or so, leaving plenty of time.
Its task was an unusual one. The typical duties of a lesser servant were to dig and build. The magic that linked the creatures to the fortress would convert everything they consumed to its equivalent value in gold, deposited in the treasury. When the time came to construct, it did the opposite, taking gold and converting it into reinforced stone, tiles, and whatever else was needed.
Here and now, its task was to take apart the crystalline archway and carry it elsewhere in the Anvil. It couldn’t consume the archway. It had to carefully use its sharp teeth to peel it apart into shards.
A daunting task, but a possible task.
The lesser servant got to work.
“So, problem. How is Agnete going to assemble the portal on her side?”
Zullie paused her work, turning her head toward Arkk. She didn’t answer right away, instead lifting her glasses up ever so slightly, resettling them on her nose. Slowly, she looked back down to the few remaining crystalline shards on the desk.
“Zullie?”
“Uh… Why don’t we take a few of these down to the forge and see if we can figure out another way to merge them together.”
Arkk pressed his lips into a tight frown. Zullie got too hyperfocused on things to have noticed the problem herself. This was his fault. He should have thought of the problem earlier.
“We better hurry,” he said.
They wouldn’t have much time once discovered.