A pulse enters the lattice.

  Amon feels it push through the forge-shell, a slow, methodical shove that makes the inner Glyphos shiver around his Core. Channels that had lain cold, stir and open one after another.

  The siphoning begins again.

  Mana peels off him in neat, measured slices. Each beat strips the same portion, not a spill, not a tear, but a regular harvest. A timer had been installed, and on each tick, the Gnome machine took its due.

  His Core wants to flare.

  It remembers lakes of Tar, sleeping dragons, a Garden full of sparkling Soul stars. Rage creases through his essence, a violet-black surge that wants to flood every new channel, and burn out the Glyphoses.

  He keeps that rage bundled tight.

  ‘Let them have their due.’

  Each taking sharpens the detail of his map.

  The first siphon-chain touches the Core like a cold hook. Glyphoses at its base tell him what it thinks it is doing. Measure, regulate, export. The chain bites, drinks, carries his Mana away along a line he cannot see, out into an engine frame hung somewhere beyond his narrow sphere.

  He notes the feel of it, the rhythm, and the precise volume each pulse extracts.

  One.

  Another channel opens. Different weight, different pull, tuned to a thinner stream. Its Glyphoses carry tags for baseline, variance, acceptable drift.

  Two.

  More valves punch through the inner weave, each attaching at a slightly different angle, each keyed to a different part of his flux. One watches peaks, one sips from lows, one takes only when the others falter.

  Three. Four. Five.

  Every new chain earns a place on his internal ledger. He builds that list without words, a stacked sequence of impressions—angle, draw, Glyphos flavor—filed and fixed. The Gnomes think they are binding him with their chains.

  But he binds the chains.

  He lets another pulse roll out clean and even, a farmers breath pulling weight uphill. The lattice tastes the output, judges it stable, returns no clamps, spikes, or new routines.

  ‘Good.’

  The first smoothing routine slides across his Core, a fine, abrasive film of Glyphos. It runs its diagnostic pattern. Sample, compare, adjust. Where it finds spikes, it pares them down, shaving the edge off anything that strays beyond tolerance.

  His instinct is to shove back, but such actions would bring…consequences.

  Arrays and chains, the syntax of Gnome logic, the patterns used when a Soul fights. He recognizes the structure of the smoothing script. How it was not a simple binding, but a code.

  Measure. Compare. Tag. Correct.

  Each pass it makes, is written down into an invisible table. It logs his spikes, the degree of each correction, the cost. Those logs feed higher routines, the ones that decide, on some distant node, whether this forge deserves a heavier cage.

  The film scrapes, unpleasant, but he keeps his output smooth. The next siphon-beat takes what the forge expects, no more, no less. The diagnostic bands no longer flare in alarm; they glow steady, dull, and pleased.

  That earns him something… spacing.

  Additional bindings do not descend, no new clamps to bite down.

  Space is a gift.

  He turns his attention on the three main families of chains looped through the shell. Distinct in flavor, though tangled in form. Fat bright strands, heavy with command lexemes. Dull, thick lines that hum with monitoring queries. Thin, quick threads that skip around the sphere, touching multiple nodes in sequence.

  Control. Monitoring. Comms.

  No line is pure, but some lean.

  He nudges. A micro-pulse, so small it barely stirs his own surface, it rides out along one of the dull humming lines. He shapes it to match background noise, a harmless tremor that could be nothing more than thermal drift, and metaphorically no different than a farmer bumping a cart wheel over a stone.

  The ripple slides along the band, brushes the outer logic, and returns without triggering clamps.

  Pleased, he sends a second micro-pulse, this time on a thinner, quicker thread that tasted, in passing, of other forges. He keeps it smaller still, a variation buried inside acceptable variance. The line twitches, but no escalation flags fire, and no new routines spin up.

  Those are comms.

  He files that thread with the others in his ledger.

  Drain-beat. Smoothing pass. Diagnostic tick.

  The pattern settles.

  Outside his shell, other Cores pulse and dim, blurred in his narrowed perception. Souls he pulled from villages, Curtlers and Golsers from the deep realm, a crab-king who still raged against his betters, all fed into the wider network. Out there, their screams dissolve into furnace-roar.

  Here, the hum of the forge takes over.

  He stays with the routine long enough that it begins to feel natural. Breathe in. Pulse out. Let the smoothing film do its pass. The Gnomes love predictability; he gives it to them, layer by layer, until his output curve could serve as a training diagram.

  Each time the lattice relaxes, he steals sight.

  He rides the returning ripples from his own channels back along the shell, tasting where they brush other Glyphoses. He senses where control lexemes merge with monitoring tags, where the logic splits. This way to smoothing, that way to hard fault, that line up toward supervisory nodes.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  Belugmah’s provided diagrams overlay in his mind.

  Macro-controller there. A dense knot of command chains that set global parameters, allocate drain quotas, decide when to rebind, or release. Per-Soul smoothing wrapped close to him, the grit that just scraped his Core. Per-node metering out on thicker rings, comparing his performance to other forges, watching for anomalies that might be systemic.

  He tests again.

  A barely-perceptible bump in his own output, timed between two siphon beats, a half-heart jump that never exceeds the upper tolerance. The metering logic notes the variance, tags it normal fluctuation, logs it, moves on.

  But the echo from that test tells him more.

  The bump travels down three strands. Two pulse into the metering logic only. The third brushes a thin line that stutters off toward the smear of another Soul.

  A cross-link.

  He holds the knowledge close. The urge to knock, to send a pattern down that shared line, licks at him like flame.

  ‘Not yet.’

  He remembers mud on boot-soles, furrows drawn straight by repetition. Days broken into rows, each pass of the plow a chance to notice where stone lies under the soil. This is no different.

  Glyphoses instead of roots, drain-beats instead of heartbeats.

  Work.

  Belugmah’s link thins as the Celestial spends itself in other wars, but the imprint remains. Constraints, warnings, but there is no Tar, Mist, nor Garden.

  The forge is his world now, and he accepts it.

  There is no field to walk, no pool to tend, no fox at his heel. There is only the cage, the chains, the rhythm.

  He sets his tasks: endure; memorize; decode.

  The smoothing routine makes another pass, finer this time. A second layer of grit laces through the first, tuned to catch subtler spikes. It runs tighter circuits, sampling more frequently, saving more precise data about his flux.

  The anger at that intrusion rises again, dull and heavy. He lets the anger roll through his center, then pushes it down into the deep, burying it under his new, machine-steady pattern.

  On the next drain-beat, he sends out a slightly more complex tremor on one of the comm threads. Three shallow pulses spaced in an irregular, deliberate rhythm.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  He keeps the amplitude trivial, the timing nested inside the noise spectrum the routines treat as normal. The diagnostic bands do not brighten, and no smoothing layer thickens.

  The pattern flows outward.

  If any mind touches the same line with awareness, they will feel it. A foreign structure in the usual mutter of the system, not revelation, just intention.

  Contact, if it does occur, would come back from elsewhere in the cluster some day ahead, but not now.

  Now, the forge replies to its own watchers.

  A stronger pulse shoots up a vertical comm-line that runs through his shell, passed him, toward a higher node. The diagnostic bands around his Core flare in strict, segmented patterns as the logic assembles a status report:

  Soul: stable. Output: within tolerance. Variance: decreasing. Smoothing: effective. Risk: lowering.

  The query fades. The higher node accepts the assessment. No escalation flags.

  His reward arrives in silence, and the smoothing routines ease, if only a little. They still pass, still log, still sand, but they no longer thicken. No third layer drops, and no emergency clamps bite.

  Monitoring gains priority.

  With the cost of constant correction reduced, more of the forges mind can watch. Diagnostic glyph-chains sharpen around him. Error-report lines stand ready, fine threads that will flare bright and fast if deviation crosses the narrow space he has marked out.

  Clarity increases.

  He sees better.

  The earlier blur of Glyphos bands resolves into finer strands. He distinguishes individual lexeme-threads inside dense arrays, sees where command chains latch onto control nodes, where those nodes push instructions down toward his siphon-valves.

  He learns their lexemes.

  The Gnomes write their machines in the same grammar Belugmah forced into his being. Motion. Binding. Shut. Open. Smooth. Tag. Compare. He reads their structures as they wrap around him. He imagines hands carving runes into metal, the same way his own tar-armored fingers carved Glyphos into stone masks in the dark.

  If he can write it, he can read it. If he can read it, he can shape his flow around it.

  Not override. Not yet.

  This is a new field, and he walks it one row at a time.

  Drain-beat. Output. Smoothing pass.

  He slips a test into that routine. A nudge on a comm-line here, an absent ripple there, small deviations held below the thresholds he has already tasted. Each experiment shows him which diagnostic glyphs flicker, which remain dark.

  One nudge causes nothing.

  A different nudge, on a line he suspects runs close to a control node, makes a tiny monitoring glyph brighten on the far side of his shell before fading.

  He logs that too.

  Some strands carry command both ways. Some only up. Some touch him only to listen, never to push.

  He separates them.

  Comm. Control. Monitor.

  A pattern emerges.

  The forge is not a single mind; it is a stack of minds. At the bottom, near him, per-Soul routines that watch only his flux. Above them, per-node systems that compare him to other forges in this cluster. Above those, macro-controllers that look at total output, redirect flow, allocate drain budgets, and adjust smoothing.

  His position sits low. Dangerous enough to watch, not important enough to lock down with redundancy. Not yet.

  ‘Good.’

  He keeps the curve smooth, the pulses reliable. The routines and the Gnome overseers behind them grow used to the way he behaves.

  Stable.

  Stable for two years, if he can hold it.

  The thought of time presses. In the Garden, the war above measured days. Shelling cycles, dragon attacks, Tharnell pushes. Here, time reduces to sequences in the lattice. How many drain-beats, how many smoothing passes, how many status queries.

  He shrinks his world until it fits inside them.

  He stops thinking of years, and moves to a measurement of work units.

  Each unit: one more pass of his attention over a new part of the lattice. One more chain classified. One more gap in monitoring logged. One more thin comm-thread located, and placed on his mental map.

  The map takes shape.

  Not a picture, not lines in space, but a sense of structure around his Core. Dense control clusters, heavy and rigid. Broader monitoring fields, slow and thorough. Quick, whisper-thin buses that run through all of it, carrying chatter the Gnomes do not read as speech.

  Comms are terrain.

  He memorizes routes.

  Here a thread touches three forges before looping back to a diagnostic hub. There a line runs from his shell into a bank of cap-chains that store Mana before dumping it into a distant engine. Somewhere above, a thick trunk leads to what feels like the heart of this node cluster, a place where the Gnome overseers attention flickers in regular patrols.

  He does not push that trunk.

  Not yet.

  Rage hums at his Core, wanting out. He had lost so much, Thicketon, Magda, the kids. Now too the Garden, erased by uncaring light. Once saved Souls, now fed into furnaces. Everything he preserved, now part of the same machine draining him.

  The urge to flood every channel he has mapped with raw, unshaped Mana rises again.

  Belugmah’s low, ever present, but very distant presence, presses down.

  Patterns. Patience.

  He holds.

  The forge hums. Siphons drink. Glyphoses run their smooth, bright circles.

  The Gnomes receive the data they expect, a stable, compliant god-core. Clean pulses. Acceptable variance. No cause to add more chains, no cause to move him into a higher-risk category.

  They label his forge as low-maintenance. Lower priority.

  They look away.

  In the narrow space under their notice, Amon works.