Six nights of readings said the door under campus was patient.
I came down off the mountain knowing there were more doors than one.
Four objects, and for those I needed my shop.
I stood in the dark between the garage wall and the fence, where the yard can't be seen from any window, and hooked two fingers into the seam that follows me around. It opened top to bottom, a line of warm orange light standing in the October dark, tall as a door.
I stepped through, and the crickets shut off mid-note behind me.
The Atelier took a year to build, and I did not build it alone. Vidra did, an artificer, a world away now, and the room still runs on her design.
It ran a hundred yards under a vaulted stone ceiling, with a dome at the top that let in daylight from a sky that does not exist. That light came down cold and blue through the dust in a single shaft, and it landed on the floor in the middle of the room and never moved, no matter what hour it was where I came from.
Everything else in the room was lamplight. Hundreds of small amber lamps down the galleries and the shelf-ends and the bench runs, all of them lit, all of them warm, because she could not work in the cold blue and would not hear otherwise.
Two tiers of gallery ran around the walls, packed floor to ceiling. Racks of armor. A wall of firearms. Swords on stands. Crates and jars and drawered cabinets, ten years of a machine world's leavings and ninety years of everywhere else.
There was a skull on the second gallery the size of a hatchback, from something I killed in a river. I had not moved it.
The whole room smelled like hot iron and lamp oil and quench-water and old paper, and under that, very faintly, the cinnamon oil Vidra used on her hands.
It was completely quiet in there. A hundred yards of forge hall, no wind, no traffic, no birds. Just the burners breathing, and the lamps, and whatever noise I brought in with me.
I spent a year building this room. An afternoon inside it runs about ten minutes on the other side of the seam.
The shop hands came out to meet me before I was six steps in.
There are nine of them, knee-high to waist-high, brass and dark wood, built like nothing in particular. Vidra made them in a bad winter to fetch and hold and carry so that her hands stayed free, and they are either directly underfoot or completely absent, and you will not predict which.
They don't talk. The one with the cracked faceplate got to me first and stood on my boot.
"Yeah, I know, it's been a while." I crouched and knocked twice on its chest plate. "Longer than it should have been, and you've all been extraordinarily patient about it. Tonight we fix that."
I straightened up and looked down the bench runs. "I need the small forge up and running. Somebody bring me a coffee can and about six roofing nails out of the bin, and I want a flat river stone, palm-sized, from the yard barrel."
They scattered. Something metal went over somewhere in the dark down the west run, and nobody admitted to it.
Down in the far bay, twelve shapes stood under canvas in two rows, a head taller than me each, exactly where I ordered them down before the last siege.
I looked at them for a while.
"Not yet," I said.
I went to the bench.
Cogspire taught me that what you're pouring in is the thing you meant.
[ SKILL — GODSMITH'S HAND ]
Forge active. Intent accepted: "nothing that wants to hurt them gets in."
Grade: relic. Suppressed to grade: hardware store.
The stock came in over my shoulder in small brass hands. The bench went warm under my palms and the air above it turned the color of a struck match, and I built four things out of a coffee can, six roofing nails, most of a busted extension cord, and a flat river stone.
The shop hand who had found the stone had spent ten minutes at the yard barrel deciding on it and was very satisfied.
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The first was a house key.
My mother has lost her house key eleven times that I know about and probably twenty that I don't, and she keeps a spare under the third flowerpot, which is the first place anybody looks. So I forged her one that comes home.
[ SKILL — WARRANTY ]
Bound. Item self-repairs. If separated from owner, item returns. If taken by force, item returns and the taker is logged.
Brass, a little worn on the bow, exactly like the one on her ring. I'd get it onto that ring on a Sunday and she'd never know the difference, except that she'd stop finding it in the bottom of the good purse and stop blaming my father for it.
The second was a porch light bulb. I built it to burn the same tired yellow as the old one, because nobody ever looks at a bulb.
The third and fourth went into a padded tray, and a shop hand carried the tray to the door with enormous seriousness and would not let me take it off him.
Four hours of work, eight minutes of night.
I put my hand on the cracked faceplate on the way out and told them all I'd be back inside the week. Then I stepped through into my parents' back yard with the crickets coming up to full volume around me.
Alder Street at one in the morning.
Cut grass and dryer vent and somebody's late barbecue two houses down, the chest freezer in the garage cycling on, moths knocking against the porch bulb.
I changed the bulb standing on the front step in the dark. Then I put two fingers on the door frame and said the words I'd sworn on a world with a white sun, in a language nobody on this planet has ever heard spoken out loud.
[ SKILL — SANCTUARY ]
Location named. Household of Sauvage, Alder Street.
Oath extended. Anything crossing this threshold with harm already decided will find the threshold longer than expected.
[ SKILL — CONSECRATE GROUND ]
Ground sanctified to the property line. Undead and demon-class entities cannot act within.
The crickets kept going. Down the block a dog reconsidered barking and settled instead. Nothing else about the street changed.
Mrs. Alvarez's kitchen light was on across the way.
Inside, I went through the house with my hands.
[ SKILL — FIELD MODIFICATION ]
Touch-based. 41 devices upgraded. Failure modes closed.
The smoke detectors will now go off for real smoke and never again for my mother's fish. The water heater will not rupture this decade or the next. The breaker box will hold through a lightning strike on the pole outside.
My father's truck has brakes that cannot fail, tires that cannot blow, and a seatbelt that will hold against more force than the frame around it. He will drive it for twenty years and tell everyone that Toyotas are just built better.
I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
The fourth step creaks. It has creaked since I was fifteen and it is how my mother knows I'm home. She has never let me fix it, and she has complained about it every week of my life. I put my hand on the rail and thought about it for a good ten seconds.
I left it alone.
Upstairs, my parents were asleep with the fan on. I stood in the hallway outside their door a minute, listening to two people breathe, then put my palm flat against the wall.
[ SKILL — WHITE WARD ]
Placed. Healing passives maintained on this structure. Duration: indefinite while anchor holds.
Occupants: 2. Cellular repair, immune response, and sleep quality elevated. Effects will be attributed to clean living.
[ SKILL — MARKED FOR THE DARK ]
2 targets marked. Locatable by user at any range, on any world, permanently.
I used it on my mother and my father while they slept, so that no matter what opens, or where, or how far it throws them, I will always know which direction to run.
I locked up on the way out and left the key on the counter where she'd think she'd forgotten it.
Then I stepped back through into my parents' yard and stood a second getting my bearings. The Atelier runs a hundred yards. The yard is forty feet across. I knew that. My legs needed a moment to agree.
Campus at two-forty in the morning.
The commons was a long wooden deck between the library and the science hall, with tiered planter benches down both sides and a double row of live oaks that the university planted eight years ago and was very proud of. In the daytime it was the loudest place on campus.
At two-forty it was boards and wind and the sprinkler system running its cycle two sections over, that flat tick and hiss and the smell of wet cedar coming up off the planks.
I walked the row and put my hand on each of the eight trees, one at a time, and introduced myself.
[ SKILL — WORLDROOT STRIDE ]
8 nodes seeded. Transit lane open between all nodes.
Any tree, anywhere. No prior meeting required.
Ythra's Great Spirits gave me that skill with a lot of ceremony and I used it on eight oaks in forty minutes. The oaks here are young and none of them has ever been asked for anything.
Then I knelt at the base of the third planter, where the deck boards ran over a maintenance gap, took the flat river stone out of my jacket, and pushed it up under the joist where nobody will ever have cause to look.
[ SKILL — WHITE WARD ]
Placed. Anchor concealed. Radius: 60 yards.
[ SKILL — ANCHOR SIGIL ]
Placed. No teleportation, phasing, or planar egress within radius.
Note: sigil does not prevent ingress.
Sixty yards of one deck on one campus in one town, and fourteen thousand people enrolled here. I could cover a bench. The rest of it was a company and a year and eight billion strangers, and none of that had started yet.
The sprinklers shut off at three. I walked home and slept four hours.