The sound of an explosion rocked the Anvil Sanctum, followed immediately by a string of inventive curses that echoed off the stone ceiling.

  Elias winced, looking up from his sword maintenance. "Thorne?"

  "I’m fine!" Thorne yelled back, though her voice was tight with pain. "The dummy is dead. Again."

  Elias walked over to the firing range Harth had cleared at the back of the forge. Smoke hung heavy in the air, smelling of lightning and burnt straw.

  Thorne stood before a training dummy that was now missing everything above its chest. She clutched her left arm, her chest heaving.

  She wore the Ignition Cestus.

  It was a brutal piece of engineering: a heavy, articulated gauntlet of dark iron, lined with thick, rune-etched leather. A brass chamber sat on the back of the hand, connected to the knuckles by copper piping.

  But Thorne wasn't looking at the destroyed dummy; she was looking at the gauntlet with a mix of fear and frustration.

  "It’s not working," she spat, kicking a piece of smoking straw. "It fights me."

  "It’s not fighting you," Harth said, stepping out from the shadows with a bucket of cooling water. "You're fighting it. You're trying to cast a fireball, girl. You're trying to shape the magic with your fingers."

  "That’s how I was trained!" Thorne snapped. "You gather the heat, you shape it, you throw it!"

  "And if you do that with the Cestus," Harth rumbled, "you detonate the container in your hand."

  He pointed to the blackened vent on the gauntlet.

  "This isn't a wand. It’s a cannon. Your mana isn't the projectile anymore, Thorne; it’s the gunpowder. You don't shape the fire; you shove it behind the alchemical slug."

  "Try it again," Elias said gently. "Start small. Load a [Frost Vial]."

  Thorne hesitated. Her branded hand trembled inside the heavy glove. She reached into her pouch with her good hand and slotted a blue glass vial into her palm.

  Click.

  "Don't think about freezing the target," Elias coached. "Think about punching the air. Use your mana to break the glass and push the cold away from you."

  Thorne took a breath. She narrowed her eyes at the new target dummy.

  She thrust her left fist forward.

  At the same moment, she pushed a pulse of mana into the glove.

  Crack-boom.

  She mistimed it, pushing the mana before the punch extended.

  The Frost Vial detonated inside the chamber.

  A sphere of absolute zero exploded around her fist. The heavy iron of the Cestus instantly frosted over, turning white.

  Thorne screamed, yanking her arm back.

  "It’s cold! It’s burning!"

  "Don't pull it off!" Harth barked, grabbing her wrist before she could claw at the metal. "The [Aether-Balm] lining! Trust the lining!"

  Thorne froze, panting, waiting for the frostbite to set in, waiting for the skin to peel.

  It didn't happen.

  The lining of the glove glowed a soft, oily grey. It ate the cold. The frost on the outside of the metal stayed there, but Thorne’s hand remained warm.

  She flexed her fingers inside the glove. The joints whined. The ice on the knuckles cracked and fell off.

  "I... I didn't feel it," she whispered, staring at the gauntlet. "The explosion happened around me."

  "That's the symbiosis," Elias said. "The glove takes the damage. You provide the intent."

  Thorne looked at the target. The dummy was untouched. She had blown herself up but survived.

  Her eyes narrowed. She grabbed a [Blast Oil] canister and slammed it into the chamber.

  "Again," she growled.

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  This time, she didn't try to be a mage. She moved like a brawler, stepping into the punch and driving her shoulder forward. Just as her arm reached full extension, she triggered the mana-spark.

  KA-THOOM!

  A cone of directed fire roared away from her palm. It hit the dummy square in the face with physical force, blowing the straw head clean off and setting the remains on fire. The recoil kicked her arm back, but she rode it, grinning wildly.

  "Okay," she breathed, smoke curling from the gauntlet. "Okay. I can work with this."

  With a smile, Elias left Thorne practising her aim and headed for the Echo Garden.

  He hadn't seen Fennroot since the night before, when he had sprinkled the [Divine Ash] into the sprout's sleeping pot. The little creature had been dormant all day, curled into a tight ball of leaves.

  Elias walked into the greenhouse. The air was thick with the smell of rich loam and blooming jasmine.

  "Fennroot?" he called out. "Buddy? Are you awake?"

  He walked to the pot where he had left him.

  It was broken. Shards of terracotta lay scattered on the stone floor.

  Elias's hand dropped to his sword. "Fennroot?"

  A low, vibrating chirrup answered him from the branches of the central oak tree.

  Elias looked up.

  Cindersnarl was lying under the tree, looking up with a bemused expression. And sitting on a branch above him was... something else.

  It was Fennroot, but he wasn't a sprout any more.

  He had grown. He was now the size of a human toddler, or a very large badger. His limbs were thicker, woven from sturdy oak-root rather than green stems. His "head",with the mushroom cap, had expanded into a broad, flat canopy that glowed with a steady, bioluminescent light.

  Tiny, secondary mushrooms grew along his shoulders like pauldrons. He looked less like a plant now and more like a proper Leshei forest spirit.

  [COMPANION EVOLUTION COMPLETE] [FENNROOT -> SYLVAN SAPLING] [ROLE: HEALER / WARD]

  "You got big," Elias said, grinning.

  Fennroot hopped down. He didn't flutter; he landed with a solid thud. He walked up to Elias on two legs, moving with a strange, waddling confidence.

  He reached out a hand-now possessing three distinct, bark-covered fingers-and touched Elias's knee.

  A pulse of warmth flowed through Elias. The ache in his bad calf vanished instantly.

  [ABILITY: VERDANT TOUCH — Restores Health over time.]

  "A healer," Elias whispered. "We finally have a healer."

  Fennroot puffed up his chest. He waved his hand, and a small circle of spectral mushrooms sprouted around Elias's feet.

  [ABILITY: SPORE WARD — Increases Resistance to Status Effects.]

  Cindersnarl trotted over and nudged the new, larger Fennroot with his nose. Fennroot didn't shy away, patting the warg’s snout with a solid thwack.

  "Looks like our pack is complete," Elias said with satisfaction.

  The next morning, the mood in the Keep shifted from industry to dread.

  They gathered in the Codex Vault. Solari was waiting for them by the map table, her light dim and serious. She had laid out a series of ancient blueprints, Dwarven schematics recovered from the Hollowdeep mine.

  They depicted a mountain peak, a massive gate, and a machine that drilled up into the sky.

  "Frostvein Peak," Solari said, her voice heavy with history. "The roof of the world."

  "Did your people build this?" Thorne asked, pointing to the gate structure. "It looks... elegant, but the machinery around it is brutal."

  "We built nothing there," Solari corrected sharply. "The Solmyr lived in the light. We did not need gates to reach the Aether; we were part of it."

  She pointed a slender finger at the machine.

  "The Dwarves built this: the Ascension Gate. They were not content with the earth. They wanted to march into the Divine Realm. They wanted to mine the stars."

  "And they used us," Solari whispered. "They hunted us. They realised that our souls, our crystalline resonance, could bridge the gap between dimensions."

  Elias looked at the Divine Capacitor casing on the table, the shipping instructions stamped on the side: Deliver to Frostvein. Priority: Ignition.

  "The capacitor," Elias realised. "It wasn't just fuel. It was a key."

  "Yes," Solari said. "The Dwarves murdered my people to refine the fuel. They built an engine that runs on genocide. And when they turned it on... the Gods answered."

  "But the Order..." Veyra frowned, tracing the path up the mountain. "They do not seek to mine. They seek to rule."

  "Exactly," Elias said, the pieces clicking into place. "The Dwarves wanted to open the door to steal from the Gods. The Order wants to kick the door down and replace them."

  He looked at the schematic of the Gate mechanism.

  "They aren't trying to move the Child," Elias said, his voice cold. "She is already there. The Gods locked her in the Divine Realm to keep the universe from collapsing. She is the anchor, frozen in time."

  "So the Order is staging a break-in," Thorne realised. "They want to open the Ascension Gate, march into the Gods' own house, and seize the prisoner."

  "They want to bind the World Spirit to the Throne of Creation," Solari said, her light trembling with rage. "They believe that if they hold the leash of the Spirit, they control the laws of reality. They will not just enter heaven, Elias. They will own it."

  "We have to get up there," Elias said, "before they wake her up just to enslave her."

  "The gate is still there," Solari said, "dormant, waiting. If we can reach it... we can open it, not to conquer, but to liberate."

  By midday, they had all assembled at the Crucible Gate.

  The air within the Keep was warm, but the team were dressed for winter.

  Oaken looked uncomfortable. The massive Leshei was wrapped in layers of heavy wool and fur, his stone limbs moving stiffly beneath the bulk.

  "I do not like this," Oaken rumbled. "Stone cracks in the cold. Sap freezes. That mountain is a dead place."

  "We have the Aether-Balm," Elias reassured him. "We coated your joints. It will keep the frost out."

  Veyra was checking her gear. She had replaced her light summer-leaf cloak with a heavy mantle of bear fur. Her mask was pulled tight.

  "The roots sleeping under the ice are old," she murmured. "They do not speak our tongue. We will be intruders."

  "We're always intruders," Thorne said, adjusting the straps on her cestus. She wore a heavy leather coat lined with sheepskin, her bandolier of grenades gleaming in the torchlight.

  She flexed her gauntleted hand. The pilot light inside the chamber hissed, a reassuring blue flame.

  "At least I bring my own heat this time," she grinned.

  Cindersnarl was pacing, his breath steaming in the cool air of the gate room. His new barding was polished, the chainmail lined with leather to prevent it from freezing to his skin. Fennroot sat on his back, wearing his nutshell helmet that Harth had reforged to fit his new frame. They looked ready for war.

  Elias stepped to the front. He wore the Bastion-Breaker Plate, now draped in a heavy grey cloak with a fur collar. Dawnfall hung restlessly at his hip.

  He looked at Harth, who stood by the lever.

  "Keep the fire lit, old man," Elias said.

  "Just bring them back, lad," Harth grunted. "I don't want to have to clean up your mess."

  Elias nodded and turned to the gate.

  "Frostvein," he said. "Let's go break the ice."

  Harth pulled the lever.

  The gate swirled, not red this time, but white.

  A blast of freezing air hit them even before they stepped through.

  Elias lowered his visor.

  "Move out."

  They stepped into the blizzard.