The next morning I woke before the sun had fully risen and squinted at the clock.

  6:30.

  For once, I did not have to leap from bed in terror. I even had time to eat breakfast like a civilized human being. When I arrived at the forge exactly on time, Master Duran looked up slowly, as though unsure whether he was witnessing a miracle.

  “About time you got here on time,” he said.

  “I fell asleep at a reasonable hour,” I replied. “It was deeply unsettling.”

  “Hm. Don’t let it happen again.”

  We worked through the morning without incident. Hinges. Nails. Brackets. Practical things that held the world together quietly. I tried to focus on the rhythm of hammer and anvil, but my mind kept drifting back to the mountain.

  By sunset, I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

  “Master Duran?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve started a personal project,” I said carefully. “And I was hoping you might help me with it.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “That sentence never leads anywhere good.”

  “It’s not illegal,” I said quickly.

  “That is not reassuring.”

  “Just… come see.”

  He studied me for a long moment, then set down his hammer with a heavy sigh. “Fine. But if this involves goats again, I am leaving.”

  The climb up the mountain was quiet. Duran conserved his breath and his patience. When we reached the cave entrance, he frowned.

  “You’ve been exploring,” he said.

  “Only a little.”

  “That is never true when you say it.”

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  We stepped inside. The cave narrowed before opening suddenly into the vast chamber beyond.

  Duran took three steps forward.

  Then he stopped.

  The lantern light spread outward, crawling across metal instead of stone. It climbed over a massive curved surface, then higher—over layered plates thick as fortress walls.

  For a moment, Duran didn’t speak.

  He walked farther in.

  The light reached a joint the size of a windmill hub. A cable thicker than a tree trunk lay coiled against the ground. Above us, armor plating rose and rose until the darkness swallowed it entirely.

  Duran slowly lifted the lantern higher.

  The machine did not fit inside the cave.

  The cave fit around the machine.

  “By the gods…” he said quietly.

  He approached one of the legs and placed his palm against the metal. It was wider than the forge’s chimney. He knocked once.

  The sound that answered was deep. Not a clang. A resonance. As if the mountain itself had replied.

  “This isn’t large,” Duran muttered. “Large is a wagon. Large is a ship.”

  He stepped backward, craning his neck.

  “This is impossible.”

  I watched him carefully. I had felt the same thing the first time—like my mind refused to measure it properly.

  “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer at once. Instead, he circled one enormous foot, boots echoing in the chamber. The toes alone were the size of plow blades. Stone had hardened around the base, anchoring it in place.

  “The joints,” he said finally. “Look at the joints. Those are not decorative. They’re engineered to move.”

  He stepped back again, trying to see the whole shape at once.

  “It would stand taller than the watchtower,” he murmured. “No… taller than the entire town hall.”

  I swallowed.

  “I found a way inside,” I admitted.

  Duran’s head snapped toward me. “You went inside that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at the machine for a long moment, then at me, then back at the machine.

  “You will not be climbing around in there without support beams, ropes, and at least two exits,” he said firmly. “If one of those plates shifts, you’ll be crushed flatter than sheet metal.”

  “I wasn’t going to take it apart,” I said quickly. “I don’t want to dismantle it.”

  That made him pause.

  “No?”

  “No. I want to fix it.”

  The words sounded much smaller out loud than they had in my head.

  Duran looked up again at the towering colossus, silent and rusted and buried in stone.

  He walked a few steps backward until he could see more of it at once. Even then, the darkness swallowed its upper half.

  “Fix it,” he repeated slowly. “You want to repair something that could step over our town like a fence.”

  “Yes.”

  The silence stretched.

  Finally, Duran let out a long breath.

  “If this thing ever stood,” he said, “it would cast a shadow over half the valley.”

  He looked at me again, not annoyed now, not skeptical.

  Measuring.

  “And you think two blacksmiths can wake it.”

  I hesitated.

  “Yes.”

  Another long silence.

  Then, slowly, Duran nodded.

  “Well,” he said, voice steady, “if we’re going to attempt something completely unreasonable… we’ll need scaffolding.”

  For the first time, the machine did not feel like a secret.

  It felt like the beginning of something enormous.