The Eternal Forge was a sphere of absolute, golden silence. Suspended in the high exosphere above the capital, the divine sanctum of the Sovereign Imperium existed completely decoupled from the noise and blood of the continent below.
Zephyr sat at the center of the Forge, his consciousness expanded outward, locked into a macro-scale projection of the continental grid.
He did not see the world through the lens of human tragedy. He did not hear the wailing of widows or smell the thick, coppery stench of blood that had stained the Sector Four Industrial Hub a year prior. He experienced the Sovereign Imperium purely as a vast, shifting topography of thermal energy, demographic density, and Faith Point accumulation.
The massacre at Sector Four—the death of thirty thousand Rootist laborers at the hands of Harsk Fenward—rendered in Zephyr's vision as a sudden, sharp spike of kinetic energy, followed immediately by a permanent, dark void where the labor force used to be.
