“The Anvil does not ask if the iron is willing. It only tests its strength.”
He pointed a gloved finger at a recruit near the front. “You. Run to the Archivist’s Tower. Summon Master Elms. Tell him a Sealing is required.”
The recruit bolted. Jaedon gestured to the far end of the drill yard, where a solitary, waist-high block of dark stone stood beneath a jutting iron overhang. “To the Anvil. March.”
They walked in silence, the rain drumming a grim cadence. Gaeb stumbled along in the center, looking like a man walking to the gallows. When they reached the overhang, Gessa saw that the “Anvil” was not stone, but a massive, pitted slab of raw, black metal. Cold iron.
They waited in the downpour until Master Elms appeared, hurrying from the main complex with a leather satchel shielded under his cloak. The gentle Talent-Sensor looked sorrowful, his hazel eyes heavy as he approached the trembling boy. He unpacked a weighted mallet and a thick, iron-inlaid chisel.
“Wyvern Cohort,” Jaedon addressed them, his voice cutting through the storm. “Look closely. You see cruelty? You are wrong. This is the only mercy we can offer the weak.”
He paced the line, his green eyes hard. “Magic is not a gift you can return. It is a fire in your blood. Without the discipline to forge it, without the will to bind it, it does not simply go away. It festers. It grows wild. It will consume his mind in madness or burn his body to ash. To release him now, untrained, would be a death sentence—for him, and likely for those around him.”
Jaedon stopped beside Gaeb, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder—not to comfort, but to hold him in place. “We cut out the rot so the man may live. We silence the noise so he may find peace.”
Master Elms spoke softly to Gaeb. “Place your hand on the iron, child. Trust in the silence.”
Gaeb, weeping silently, stepped forward. He placed his trembling hand flat on the cold metal block.
Elms positioned the chisel against the back of the boy’s hand. He did not hesitate. He swung the mallet.
It wasn’t the wet sound of cutting flesh; it was the ringing, metallic strike of a magical brand. Gaeb screamed—a high, tearing sound that was cut short as his knees buckled. He slumped against the table, gasping.
On the back of his hand, angry and red, was the fresh brand: an empty circle with a horizontal bar through it. The Null Mark.
The effect was immediate and horrifying. Gessa watched as the light simply went out of Gaeb’s eyes. He slumped, panting, looking suddenly smaller, hollowed out, as if a part of his soul had been subtracted from his existence.
Around his neck, the affinity locket that had swirled with the blue potential of a Wayfinder drained of all color. In a heartbeat, it turned a dead, inert grey.
“It is done,” Elms whispered, lowering the mallet.
“He is safe now,” Jaedon announced to the horrified cohort. “Safe from the torment of the Wild Blood. Safe from the burden of duty. He is Sealed. He will live a long, quiet life, and he will never touch the currents again.”
Jaedon walked slowly down the line of recruits, meeting each of their eyes.
“But know this: once the seal is poured, it never breaks. There is no second chance. You are Iron, or you are nothing.”
He gestured to the attendants who had arrived with Elms. “Take him to the infirmary. Then show him the gate.”
As they led the weeping, stumbling boy away, Jaedon turned his back on them.
“Pick up your burdens,” he ordered. “The slope awaits.
Later that evening, the barracks were oppressed by a suffocating, terrified silence. The image of Gaeb’s grey, lifelesslocket seemed to hang in the air like smoke, choking off the usual banter.
As Gessa limped back to her room, Finn, the earnest, quieter recruit, fell into step beside her. He didn’t look at her; his face was pale, his eyes fixed on the stone floor.
“When you stumbled on the ridge,” he whispered, his voice tight. “I thought...” He swallowed hard, unable to finish the sentence.I thought you were going to drop it. Like him.
He glanced at her then, a fleeting look of fearful respect. “You kept moving. Even with that ankle.”
He hurried off before she could reply, disappearing into his room as if afraid to be caught speaking, but the acknowledgment hung between them. It wasn’t a compliment; it was a recognition of survival.
By the end of that week, three more recruits were gone, unable to withstand Jaedon’s forging.
Interspersed with the brutality of the drill yard were sessions in the lecture halls. While Master Rowan’s history lessons were a welcome respite, the classes on Ley Line Theory with Master Orlan were a different kind of challenge. Orlan was a dry, meticulous man who spoke in complex, academic terms. His Soul-Beasts, a pair of sleek, industrious beavers, would sometimes sit attentively on his lecture table, occasionally tapping a chunk of polished wood against a complex chart of intersecting magical currents as if to emphasize a point.
The subject matter made most of the young recruits’ eyes glaze over. They fidgeted, doodling in their notebooks, lost in the theoretical depths of magical harmonics and nodal resonance. But for Gessa, it was captivating.
