Siphoning begins, and channels open in the shells.

  He does not see them; he feels the new hollows tunnel through the Glyphos layers. Like valves punched into an artery, they attach to his Core and begin to draw. Mana peels away in discrete, measured pulses. A metronome installed in his being. On each beat, a portion of his output gets pulled out through regulated conduits and disappears into an adjoining engine frame somewhere outside the forge’s inner sphere.

  The drain isn’t a rip. Not yet. It is controlled, efficient. The Gnomes have no interest in waste. Each pulse leaves a slight ache, the sensation of having breathed out more than he meant, then being forced to maintain that emptiness.

  He resists on instinct.

  His Core flares, not a full blast, but a shove against the points of contact. Mana surges backward, ramming into the newly opened channels.

  The lattice flexes.

  For a heartbeat, there is give. A tiny dilation of the arrays, a creak in the structure as power tests tolerance. Hope kicks through his essence.

  The forge counters.

  New glyph-lines ignite around him in crisp, merciless bands. Entire rings of Glyphoses swing into place, snapping over the previous layers. They lock with clockwork precision. A set of tagged lexeme-chains unfurl around his Soul signature, stamping runic identifiers across his outer layers.

  Noncompliant.

  High-Variance.

  Priority-Smoothing.

  The words aren’t read so much as engraved into the way the arrays react to him. Every twitch now carries metadata. Every surge has a label.

  Then the smoothing sequence starts.

  It feels like sandpaper dragged across bare nerve.

  Algorithms, encoded as tightly linked lexeme-chains, latch onto his Mana profile and begin to work across it in broad strokes. They seek spikes and edges—anything that deviate from their acceptable waveform—and rasp them down. The sensation is not heat. Not impact. It is abrasion at the level of concept. As if they scrape at the idea of who he is, shaving off every protruding definition.

  His Core shudders.

  Mana flares again, less controlled. He pushes back, this time in a rising wave, throwing his weight against the shells. The forge responds like a jailer whose prisoner just lunged at the bars.

  More layers slam into place.

  A second smoothing routine joins the first, tuned to catch smaller deviations. Finer grit. It flows over his Core in tighter, more invasive passes, catching details the first one missed, sanding away subtler spikes.

  Anger pulses through him.

  Not the sharp flare of insult. A deeper, older thing. Rage at being reduced from guardian, from divine-tier pivot of a hidden war, to a component, a consumable, and line on a ledger.

  The urge to rage against the bindings built. A part of him yearning to flood every channel with uncontrolled Mana, blow the lattice apart, scorch Gnome Glyphos to nothing.

  The cooling link to Belugmah’s keeps him controlled. It tightens, pulling his intent inward, forcing him into the center of himself. Coveted knowledge—that had been gifted to him before the Garden was attacked by soulless machines—surfaces.

  Glyphos arrays.

  Control lexemes, Diagnostic chains, the standard layering patterns Gnomes used when a Soul fought.

  He recognized the smoothing routines structure.

  They are not simple spells. They are nested programs, a grammar of commands. Measure, compare, tag, adjust. Each pass they make doesn’t just grind. It records. It updates internal tables in the forge’s logic.

  Every time he flares, they log the spike.

  Every time they add a layer, they log why.

  And those logs feed into higher-level routines that decide whether to wrap him in another cocoon or not. He remembers the schema Belugmah forced into him. Hard-failure branches, escalation flags. Once he crosses certain thresholds, the forge will not merely clamp. It will cage him in redundancies. Triple-check everything, cross-harden every path. Turn a prison into a tomb.

  A farmer’s thought slips through the divine anger.

  ‘Pull too hard on a dragon’s tribute, and the Scales double it next season. Fight the ledger openly, and the ledger learns, writes you in darker ink.’

  He stops.

  Not the anger, that remains, molten and bright. He stops the visible flaring. He clamps down within, compresses the wrath into a dense core, and lets the outer layers of his Soul relax.

  The smoothing routines keep rasping, but their focus shifts.

  Without new spikes to grind, they start to settle into maintenance passes, running default profiles instead of escalation. Arrays that were bright with alarm glyphs dim from harsh white to a cooler, steady glow. The forge’s internal tags tick over.

  Variance-High becomes Variance-Moderate.

  Risk-Red drops to Risk-Amber.

  Noncompliant remains, that will not vanish quickly.

  The drain continues.

  Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.

  He feels the Mana leave, measured out in units so precise that he can guess the internal counters by sensation alone. Each extraction has a shape. This slice, tuned to some automaton core. That one, to an artillery node. A third, thick and slow, feeds a stabilizer somewhere in a deep-mining rig, anchoring machines that claw at the world’s bones.

  He is not alone.

  The realization comes as a tremor through the network, not a voice. A vibration in shared channels, faint but distinct. Nearby, other forges thrum. A dozen at least. Maybe more, smeared through the muffled noise.

  Each contains a Soul.

  Their power moves through the same outbound conduits his does, but their frequencies differ. One emits Mana in harsh, staccato bursts, raw and sharp, like a heartbeat forced into arrhythmia. Another flows in long, slow waves, dulled to near-flatness. Some are ragged, laced with static from ongoing resistance. Others are so smooth they barely register as distinct from the background hum of the system.

  Emotion bleeds along the shared infrastructure.

  Not in words, in flavors.

  Panic spikes now and then, a raw metallic taste in the Mana stream. It flares, then gets clipped off, smoothed by foreign routines. A note of resignation rides steady waves from another node, a low, constant thrum like someone humming under their breath. One forge leaks madness. Its occupant has been ground down so long that its pulses loop and twist on themselves, erratic, fragmented, yet still too strong to flatten entirely.

  He listens.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  He cannot reach them. The control channels are one-way, from forge to higher nodes. No inter-Soul link exists at this level. But whoever built this thing made surveillance thorough. The same monitoring lines that watch him also carry ghost-signals from the others. If he can hear them, the overseer routines can too.

  Information.

  Belugmah’s lexemes whisper through his mind, not as voice, but as remembered diagrams. Control, monitoring, reset. Each function has its own Glyphos signature. On a smooth diagram, they’re easy to distinguish. Here, wrapped around his own Core, flooded with sensation, the lines blur.

  He narrows his perception.

  Not outward, he cannot go beyond the lattice. Inward, toward the shells themselves. The Glyphos arrays crowd every inch of his bounding sphere, glowing in shades that tie to function. Some bands pulse in time with the drain, those belong to power-routing. Others flicker when his own Mana shifts, sensors. A third group only stir when smoothing routines adjust, control.

  He tests.

  A tiny ripple in his output, no more than the kind of fluctuation a mortal Soul might produce when it remembers a lost child, or flinches at pain. A wobble in the clean wave he has been feeding the siphons.

  The forge responds.

  Monitoring glyphs brighten in one thin ring, tagging the event. Diagnostic lexeme-chains run a quick check. Compliance metrics tick fractionally upward, expected variance within range. No escalation triggers, no new shells clamp down.

  The ripple bounces.

  It hits one point on the lattice and returns, slightly altered, a faint echo sliding back through his Core. He notes where it struck. The Glyphos around that impact point are of a different pattern, denser, braided with smaller lexemes.

  Surveillance cluster.

  He sends another ripple, shifted in timing.

  It bounces off a different cluster. The echo comes back muted, almost swallowed. Those arrays are thick with reset lexemes, routines meant to flush anomalies, and restore base configuration when local glitches occur.

  Control cluster.

  He works his way around the internal surface in patient, microscopic tests. Every small variation he introduces rides the existing drain, masked as noise in the Mana flow. Each time the forge’s reactions paint a clearer map on the inside of his prison.

  Rings near the equator of his sphere handle power metering.

  Poles carry vertical conduits that link his forge to higher-level nodes. Some of those lines are fat, drawing off his raw output. Others are thin, flickering with probe-signals, status queries, risk assessments, compliance reports.

  Those thin lines don’t only go up.

  They branch sideways, touching other forges in brief pulses. Inter-forge coordination. Nothing sentimental, just machine gossip. This Soul’s output dropped by three percent, that Soul’s smoothing routine failed and restarted. This node’s tags updated from High-Risk to Normalized.

  His own file swims there now.

  Soul-ID: G-Node-???, he mentally labels it, mocking their attempt to reduce him to a reference. Tags: New-Capture. Divine-Tier? Flagged. Preservation-Contaminant: Present. Lexeme-Compatible: Yes.

  That last one cut deep.

  They know he understand their language.

  Of course they did. Belugmah’s gift wasn’t stealth, it was literacy. The forge read the way his Core responded, the way his Mana flickered across lexeme-patterns, and noted the match. The reaction already altered the smoothing routine, more focused on his conceptual edges, less on brute force. They were not just trying to make him quiet; they were trying to make him fluent in their way.

  Safe, predictable, plug-and-use.

  Guilt twisted through the rage; he’d preserved souls to keep them from being chewed like this. Now he was the one on the hook, feeding guns and mining rigs in clean, scheduled pulses. No mist, no dream. Just endless labor measured in output curves.

  ‘Better than Potore furnaces,’ a bitter thought offers. ‘Better than being over pulled, and drained to nothing over and over.’

  Is it?

  Those other Souls, chained in nearby nodes, cycle through panic, despair, numbness. Some still fight. Their spikes trigger escalation. Around those forges, he senses sudden flares of activity as new shells slam down, smoothing ramps increase, redundancy arrays weave tighter. Each surge of rebellion purchases more chain.

  Every misstep earns more iron.

  Farm logic again. ‘A man who thrashes under the yoke gets hog-tied. A village that resists its tithe gets razed and rebuilt with watchtowers.’

  Any open struggle here will do the same.

  His anger does not cool, but condenses, and he smooths his output.

  The decision is not surrender; it is selection. He lets his Mana flow in steady, cooperative waves, matching the profile the forge wants. Minimal variance. Clean sine curves. Predictable, and submissive.

  Within, fury coils tight, banked like a forge-fire smothered under ash.

  The god-forge reacts.

  Smoothing routines throttle back, and the rasping lessens. Their passes become less invasive, more like occasional combs than constant grinding. No new shells clamp into place. The existing layers remain, tight and unyielding, but at least the cage stops growing thicker.

  Monitoring gains priority.

  With the smoothing cost reduced, more of the forge’s processing goes to watching. The diagnostic glyph-chains sharpen. Error-report lines stand out like fine spiderwebs, each one ready to carry word of any deviation to higher nodes.

  Clarity is a weapon.

  With pressure eased, his perception of the lattice’s structure sharpens. He can now distinguish individual lexeme-threads in the denser arrays, see where one command chain ends and another begins. Belugmah’s wisdom overlays like a transparent diagram. Here the macro-controller, there the per-Soul smoothing, and to that side the per-node metering logic.

  He tests again.

  A ripple, minuscule, on the edge of his cooperative flow. The forge registers it as normal variance, no response. But the echo maps another gap, another path where control signals pass, but surveillance does not.

  He collects them.

  A mental ledger forms. These lines: control, those: monitoring. These thin strands, comms up. These others, sideways pings touching neighboring forges. No line is purely one function, but some lean enough to exploit later.

  ‘Later.’

  He forces that word to stay small.

  Belugmah forbad the surface for three years. The Gnomes forbade him any movement beyond this shell. Time here will not feel like years, it will feel like pulses. Query, response, drain. Smoothing pass, tag update, and a monotony of system calls.

  He sets an objective.

  Endure.

  Memorize.

  Decode.

  Nothing noble in it, just work. He understands work. Fields plowed one furrow at a time. Stone chipped one stroke at a time, souls saved one at a time, as tar washed over sleeping villages.

  This is the same labor, scaled, and uglier.

  Outside the lattice, a stronger pulse shoots up one of the vertical comm-lines. A higher-level node querying his status. The diagnostic glyphs around his Core flare in precise patterns as the forge replies.

  Soul: Stable.

  Output: Within Tolerance.

  Risk: Lowering.

  Smoothing: De-escalating.

  Compliance-Score ticks up a fraction.

  ‘Good. Let them be pleased.’ The thought tastes of ash. ‘Happy machines lower their guard.’

  He feels the other Souls some more.

  One nearby is still lucid, its Mana pattern disciplined, compressing outrage into tight, controlled ripples like his. Another has been smoothed nearly flat, its pulses so even they are indistinguishable from Gnome test signals. Yet even that flattened Soul leaks a trace of self, a faint stubborn bump in the wave. Identity refuses to vanish completely, no matter how much sandpaper they use.

  The system can grind, but it cannot erase. Power requires a producer, that necessity leaves space.

  He will live in that space.

  He cannot pull the chains apart, every attempt inscribed into Belugmah’s lexemes shows how they respond: more layers, more routines, more tags. The cost of a big move is permanent confinement. He cannot take that cost now.

  Information has no such price.

  Every monitoring line he traces is a future path. Every control channel he identifies, is a future pressure point. The comm-strands touching other forges, those are not just gossip cables. They are potential voices.

  One day.

  Not today.

  Another drain pulse hits. Mana leaves him in a measured, obedient surge, flowing into whatever engine sits beyond his senses. Perhaps a mech’s arm lifts on that power, perhaps a cannon adjusts its aim, perhaps some deep-miner keeps the rock from closing on a shaft.

  He imagines the machine’s routines reading his output.

  “Source stable. Good throughput.”

  He imagines Gnome engineers nodding, never knowing the Soul they logged as Equipment ID 73-Delta, was watching their Glyphoses, and learning.

  Chains of Glyphoses press tight against his Core.

  He presses back, not with force, but with attention.

  Every glyph-chain that bites into him becomes an entry on his internal list. Every loop that rasps across his essence is counted. Every tag they write onto his Soul gets copied. and turned over in his mind until he knows it from both sides.

  They think they are binding him into the forge.

  He will bind the forge into himself.

  He lets another clean wave of Mana roll out through the channels, smooth and cooperative, like the breath of a dutiful laborer pulling a full cart.

  ‘Work, then,’ he thinks, quiet and cold. ‘I know how to work.’

  He settles into his new boundaries, feels each ring of Glyphos, each monitoring strand, each control node that touches his Core.

  And in that narrowed, mechanized silence, Amon commits, fully, to the only war left to him.

  Not claws, and tar.

  Patterns and patience.

  He masks his will, lets his anger hide in the steady waves, and begins to count every Glyphos chain.