1. The Night the Workshop Answered

Kael Ardent had lived alone in the workshop for eleven months, and he had learned to tell the time by its sounds.

The pipes knocked at six. The old clock over the door lost two minutes every day. And at night, when the city went quiet, the metal shelves ticked as they cooled, like a crowd of tiny people whispering about him.

He was seventeen. His father had been dead for a year, and nobody had ever told him exactly how the fire started.

That night he was walking home with a bag of groceries and a bad feeling. The streets near the old rail yard were empty. A shadow stepped out of an alley, then another.

"Nice bag," said the first one. "Hand it over."

Kael did not want to fight. He never wanted to fight. He held out the bag, and that should have been the end of it.

But the second boy grabbed his collar, and something under Kael's shirt began to burn.

It was not like a fire on the skin. It was like a word being written into him, one stroke at a time, in a language he had never learned. He fell to his knees. Light poured out from his chest in red and gold lines, a circle inside a circle inside a circle.

The two boys backed away. "What is that? What is that?"

The air in front of Kael folded like paper. Someone stepped out of the fold.

He was tall and covered in dark armor, scratched and dented from a hundred battles. A scar ran from his left eyebrow to his jaw. He looked at the two frightened boys, and they ran without another word.

Then he turned and looked down at Kael.

Kael stared up at him. The face under the helmet was his own face, only older and harder, with eyes that looked as if they had forgotten how to be surprised.

"So it's you," said the armored one. He looked Kael up and down, from his muddy shoes to his shaking hands.

"You're weaker than I expected."