The hills behind the Cloudridge Order were supposed to be empty.

  Aldric had heard the stories—old mines played out decades ago, a few scattered ruins from before the Order's founding, nothing worth exploring. The elders discouraged disciples from wandering too far. "Dangerous terrain," they said. "Unstable ground." The real reason was simpler: spellblade disciples had no business being anywhere but the training grounds, and mage disciples had better things to do than scramble through rocks and scrub.

  But Aldric needed to get away.

  The news about the Ironwing Pact inspector had settled into his bones like a cold weight. He'd spent the morning training, the afternoon pretending to rest, and by late afternoon he couldn't stand the walls anymore. He told himself he was just walking. Clearing his head. Nothing more.

  The path wound up through pine and scrub oak, the air growing thinner and cooler as he climbed. Cloudridge's buildings shrank behind him until they were just grey shapes against the mountainside. The sounds of the Order—voices, the distant crack of training spells—faded into birdsong and wind.

  He walked for an hour. Maybe longer. He wasn't counting.

  The terrain grew rougher, the path dissolving into a game trail that switchbacked up a rocky slope. Aldric followed it out of habit, his feet finding purchase on loose stone while his mind churned through the same thoughts it had been chewing on for days.

  An inspector. Resource allocation. They're not even pretending it's about anything else.

  He thought of Therin, who was barely scraping by on his stipend. Of Kira, who'd sold her spare training clothes last month to buy a healing salve. Of Dace, who never spoke but whose hands shook when he thought no one was watching.

  What happens when they decide we're not worth even this much?

  The trail crested a ridge. Aldric stopped, catching his breath, and looked down into a narrow valley he'd never seen before.

  It was small, maybe two hundred paces across, sheltered by steep walls of grey stone. A stream ran through the center, catching the late afternoon light. And at the far end, half-hidden by overgrown brush, stood a building.

  It was old. That much was clear even from this distance. The roof sagged, the walls were stained with decades of weather, and the windows were dark. But smoke rose from a crooked chimney—a thin grey thread against the blue sky.

  Someone lived there.

  Aldric hesitated. The sensible thing would be to turn back, return to the Order before dark, and forget what he'd seen. But the smoke meant someone was there, and the building looked like a forge—he could see the shape of a chimney, the remains of what might have been a workshop attached to the main structure.

  What would Fel do?

  The question came unbidden, as it often did. Felix would have walked straight down there, probably whistling, and started a conversation with whoever he found. Felix had never been afraid of strange places or strange people.

  Aldric wasn't Felix. But he was curious.

  He started down the slope.

  ---

  The forge was older than he'd thought.

  Up close, he could see the bones of what it had once been—a proper workshop, with a main forge area, storage rooms, living quarters built onto the side. The stone walls were thick, built to last, but decades of neglect had left them cracked and weathered. Moss grew in the crevices. The windows were clouded with grime.

  But the door was solid. And the smoke kept rising.

  Aldric stood at the entrance, listening. From inside came a rhythmic sound—metal on metal, steady and unhurried. A hammer, maybe. Or something else.

  He knocked.

  The sound stopped. Silence stretched for a long moment.

  Then: "What?"

  The voice was rough, irritated, muffled by the door.

  Aldric blinked. "I— I was walking. I saw the smoke."

  "So?"

  The word hung in the air. Aldric felt suddenly foolish, standing at the door of a stranger's forge in the hills, with no good reason for being there.

  "I'll leave," he said.

  He turned to go.

  "Wait."

  The door creaked open. An old man stood in the gap, squinting against the light. He was weathered and grey, his face lined with decades of sun and wind. His hands were calloused, blackened with soot and old scars. Iron filings clung to the hem of his tunic.

  He looked Aldric up and down with the flat assessment of someone who had better things to do.

  "Spellblade," he said. It wasn't a question.

  Aldric stiffened. "How did you—"

  "The way you stand. Weight forward, shoulders loose. You're used to moving, not standing still." The old man's eyes narrowed. "Also, you smell like the training grounds. Cheap oil and desperation."

  Aldric didn't know what to say to that.

  The old man grunted. "Well? You coming in or not? I don't have all day."

  He turned and walked back inside without waiting for an answer. Aldric stood frozen for a moment, then followed.

  ---

  The interior was chaos.

  Not dirty—exactly—but cluttered in a way that suggested a mind too busy to care about organization. Workbenches lined the walls, covered with tools, metal scraps, half-finished mechanisms, and papers covered in cramped handwriting. The forge itself dominated the center of the room, its coals glowing faintly despite the lack of active work. Shelves held jars of screws, springs, gears, and components Aldric couldn't identify.

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  And in the middle of it all, on a table near the forge, sat something that looked like a mechanical arm.

  It was incomplete—just a framework of metal rods and joints, with wires running through it like veins. But it was clearly meant to be an arm. The fingers were articulated, each joint precise, the whole thing built with a level of craftsmanship that made Aldric's breath catch.

  The old man noticed him looking.

  "Don't touch that."

  "I wasn't going to."

  "Good." The old man moved to the table, picking up a small tool and peering at the mechanism. "It's not ready. The elbow joint keeps binding. I've tried three different pivot configurations, but the force distribution is all wrong."

  He was talking to himself now, or maybe to the mechanism, his voice trailing into mutters. Aldric stood awkwardly, unsure whether he should leave or stay.

  "What is it?" he asked finally.

  The old man glanced up, as if surprised Aldric was still there.

  "An arm. Obviously."

  "I mean— what's it for?"

  "Nothing. Everything." The old man shrugged, turning back to his work. "I'm trying to build something that moves on its own. Not like a puppet—something that actually moves. Understands force. Distributes weight. Walks."

  "Walks?"

  "Walks. Runs. Doesn't matter." The old man made an adjustment to the mechanism, frowning. "The point is to figure out how force moves through a system. How to transmit it without losing half of it to friction and bad angles. That's the real problem with everything—force bleeds off in the wrong direction, and you end up with a machine that can barely lift itself."

  He spoke with the intensity of someone who had been thinking about the same thing for a very long time. Aldric found himself listening despite himself.

  "Like a lever," he said.

  The old man looked up sharply. "What?"

  "A lever. You push on one end, and the force goes to the other. But if the pivot point is wrong, you lose—"

  "I know what a lever is." The old man's voice was sharp, but his eyes had sharpened too. "Where did you learn that?"

  Aldric shrugged. "Books. Observation. It's not complicated."

  "No." The old man set down his tool. "It's not complicated. But most people don't think about it. They just push and hope."

  He studied Aldric for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he held out his hand.

  "Garrett."

  Aldric took it. The grip was firm, calloused, warm. "Aldric Voss."

  "Voss." Garrett's brow furrowed. "Merchant family?"

  "Yes."

  "Hm." He released Aldric's hand and turned back to his work. "Don't see many merchants' sons wandering the hills. Or spellblades. What are you doing out here?"

  "Thinking."

  "About what?"

  Aldric hesitated. The question was blunt, but there was no malice in it—just curiosity, or maybe boredom.

  "About how to get stronger," he said finally. "How to make my training mean something."

  Garrett snorted. "Training. That's what they call it at the Order? Running in circles and hitting things?"

  "More or less."

  "Useless." Garrett waved a dismissive hand. "All that mystical nonsense. Mages throwing energy around like children with too much coin. No understanding of how anything actually works."

  Aldric felt a flicker of something—surprise, maybe, or amusement. He'd never heard anyone dismiss mages so completely.

  "You don't think much of arcanism," he observed.

  "I don't think much of anything that can't be measured." Garrett picked up a gear, turned it over in his fingers, set it down. "Force, mass, leverage—these are real things. You can see them, calculate them, build around them. But mana?" He made a face. "Invisible. Unpredictable. Everyone talks about it like it's some great mystery, but half the time they're just making excuses for why their spells don't work."

  Aldric stayed quiet. He'd heard mages talk about mana his whole life—the flow, the resonance, the channels. It had always seemed like a language he was supposed to understand but didn't.

  "Can I ask you something?" he said.

  Garrett grunted. "Ask."

  "Force transmission. You said the problem is force bleeding off in the wrong direction. How do you fix that?"

  Garrett looked at him. Really looked, for the first time since Aldric had walked in.

  "You want to know about force transmission?"

  "I want to understand."

  The old man was silent for a long moment. Then he turned and walked to a shelf, pulling down a rolled-up parchment covered in diagrams.

  "Here." He spread it on the table, weighing down the corners with gears. "This is a simple linkage. Two arms connected by a pivot. You push here—" he pointed "—and the force travels through the arm to the other end. But look at this angle."

  Aldric leaned in. The diagram showed the linkage at different positions, with arrows indicating the direction of force.

  "If the angle is too steep," Garrett continued, "the force doesn't go forward. It goes sideways. Wasted. You lose half your power before it ever reaches the target."

  "And the solution?"

  "Better angles. Or—" Garrett paused, his eyes narrowing. "Or you change how the force moves through the system entirely. Instead of one path, you create multiple paths. Distribute the load."

  Aldric stared at the diagram. Something was stirring in the back of his mind—a connection he couldn't quite grasp.

  "Multiple paths," he repeated.

  "Yes. Like—" Garrett stopped. His eyes moved to Aldric, then back to the diagram, then to Aldric again. "Wait."

  He stepped closer, his gaze fixed on Aldric in a way that made Aldric want to step back.

  "Stand still."

  "What—"

  "Quiet." Garrett circled him slowly, his eyes moving over Aldric's body like he was examining a mechanism. "Your mana. How does it flow?"

  "I don't—"

  "Think. When you channel it, where does it go?"

  Aldric frowned. "Everywhere. Through my whole body."

  "Not outward? Not projected?"

  "No. Inward."

  Garrett stopped circling. He stood in front of Aldric, his weathered face creased in thought.

  "Inward," he muttered. "Through the whole body. Multiple paths."

  He turned back to the diagram, his hand moving over the arrows.

  "If force is bleeding off in the wrong direction, you don't push harder. You change the paths. Distribute the load." He looked at Aldric again. "Your mana— it runs like a linkage in one of my schematics. Multiple channels, all feeding into each other."

  Aldric's heart was beating faster. "I don't understand."

  "Neither do I." Garrett's voice was gruff, but there was something else in it now—interest, maybe, or the spark of a puzzle half-solved. "But I've been looking at force transmission for forty years. And what you're describing... it's not like what the mages do. It's like a machine."

  He turned away, muttering to himself again. "Multiple paths. Distributed load. Could work. Could— but the angles would have to be precise. Very precise."

  Aldric watched him, his mind racing. He'd spent two years trying to understand his own mana, feeling his way through the dark with no guidance and no framework. And now an old man in a ruined forge was talking about it like it was a mechanism he could take apart and rebuild.

  "Can you show me more?" he asked.

  Garrett glanced back. "More what?"

  "The diagrams. The linkages. How force moves through a system."

  The old man studied him for a long moment. Then he snorted.

  "You're a strange one, Voss. Most people who find this place run away screaming about ghosts or bandits." He turned back to his workbench. "Come back tomorrow. I'll have something for you to look at."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Did I stutter?" Garrett picked up his tool and turned back to the mechanical arm. "Now get out. I have work to do."

  Aldric stood for a moment, unsure whether to laugh or protest. Then he nodded, turned, and walked to the door.

  "Garrett."

  The old man didn't look up. "What?"

  "Thank you."

  Garrett grunted. "Don't thank me yet. You haven't learned anything."

  Aldric stepped outside. The sun was setting, painting the valley in shades of orange and gold. The air was cool and clean, and for the first time in days, the weight on his shoulders felt a little lighter.

  He started back up the trail, his mind full of diagrams and angles and the memory of an old man's voice saying, Your mana runs like a linkage in my schematics.

  He didn't know what it meant. Not yet. But something had shifted—some door had cracked open, and beyond it was a path he'd never considered.

  Force transmission. Multiple paths. Distributed load.

  Felix's voice surfaced in his memory: When you can't go forward and you can't go back, look for the third option.

  Maybe this was it. Not a teacher, not a mentor—just an old man with a different way of seeing things. A perspective that had nothing to do with arcanism and everything to do with how the world actually worked.

  Aldric climbed the ridge as darkness fell, the lights of the Cloudridge Order twinkling in the distance below. Tomorrow he would go back. Tomorrow he would learn more.

  And maybe—just maybe—he would find a way to turn the only thing he had into something that mattered.

  ---

  A hermit blacksmith who dismisses magic as nonsense. A spellblade whose mana flows like a machine. And a connection neither of them expected.

  But Garrett has seen something in Aldric's mana—and tomorrow, the real work begins.