The first hundred million prayers arrived as heat.
Zephyr received them beneath the black vault of the Eternal Forge, each one a pressure in the architecture he had built across the continent. They did not come as voices. Voices belonged to individual throats, and individuality had become a thin thing in the years since the cull. The prayers came as force: compressed, repeated, sharpened by hunger and habit until whole provinces pressed against the same inward point.
The Forge answered with light.
Molten lines opened under the stone platform. Far above them, beyond the dark roof, the new Spire in Ashenveil gathered the pressure and sent it down through the lattice of belief. The movement was not graceful. It had the weight of a river forced through a gate too narrow for it.
Zephyr watched the count rise.
Two hundred million.
