The first hammer fell without a hand behind it.
Its blow travelled through the forge floor into Nissa's bare feet. A second followed. Then a third. The sound kept the same distance between each strike, too exact to be work and too slow to be music.
The forge had once employed six hundred people. Her senses remembered them as warmth along the walkways, as the clatter of tools set down badly, as curses thrown across the noise when a crane cable snarled. There had been children waiting beyond the gates at shift-change, their faces pressed between iron rails for a glimpse of fathers and mothers coming home black with soot.
There was no warmth now.
The roof lanterns burned a tired amber over ranks of Mechanist golems. They were tall things of riveted iron and square joints, each with a brass seal fixed where a heart would have been. They stood at the workstations in the places left empty by the cull. One lifted an ingot. One turned a wheel. One swung the heavy press hammer.
Strike.
