The Everburning City

Interlude II, The Last Full Measure, Part 1

Sally

Sally Carathal's heartbeat felt like a hammer was swinging inside of her chest, striking her ribs like pounding spikes into a railroad. The reverberations, imagined as they might be, left her hands quivering in her sleeves, and her mouth was parted just enough to keep her teeth from chattering.

The bone-rattling fear had started when Sally first felt the Golem's thunderous step, and hadn't stopped since.  And it had only gotten worse now that she could see the monster, head and shoulders taller than the wall it had destroyed. Part of what held her in place wasn't courage, but the worry that her legs weren't strong enough to carry her through her terror.

Fear was a strange feeling for a Crafter. Her will commanded flame. Though her thoughts alone the air could blaze and burn with heat. Her power could melt stone or rend towers. In most way that mattered, she was fire, perhaps even more than she was a creature of meat, blood, and bone. And yet, she was afraid.

She looked around, at the only five other people left for miles. All of them, like her, wore a Crafter's red coat. Most of them she only knew by reputation, but she knew those reputations well. Crafter Tuomas Idriel, who designed the ceramics that piped the Spire's flames throughout the City. Verity Oal, who worked in metallurgy making metals that could only be made at the impossible temperatures a Crafter could heat a forge to. Daev'lia Yoak, who has helped guide nearly a hundred Crafters to graduation over four decades. Ulia the Stormcloak, who's heat haze could turn the air into blue and green light. They were, in some ways, more power than the entire City hosted during the Fist Invasion.

And they had never seemed small before tonight.

Even Garland Kohl just looked the part of an old man resigned to his fate, standing on the battlements as the end of the world came marching. And until tonight, Sally could not have imagined Crafter Kohl as anything less than fire made flesh. Black ash for skin, long hair that waved like smoke as it rose from a flame, and a voice that sounded remarkably like the roar of a furnace,

"So that's a Golem," Crafter Kohl said at last. His tone was light, as if they were only out here on a research trip. "They really didn't embellish it on the Fourth Tapestry."

No one responded. For Sally, much of it was simply not being able to think about conversation.

Crafter Kohl turned around, light on his feet, and tucked his hands into his coat pockets. He grinned at them all, and the air changed. The damp cool air of the far fields was washed away in a blast of air that threw Sally's coat back. The air shimmered around her, felt warm and heavy, and — uniquely to Crafter Kohl — smelled like old books.

"I trust you all remember the heat haze," Crafter Kohl said, as his power bent the air around him to his will. "There isn't always cause to use it, but waging war with the Craft beings here. Within your heat haze, everything is subject to your will. The air inside, the stone you touch, all of it exists because you allow it."

Sally took a deep breath, and reached out with her will. She seized the heat in the air around her, and all at once she became more. She saw with more than her eyes now, as fire shimmered in the air around her. She could smell the dust at her feet even as her power scorched it, taste the air as her power rippled through it, and see by the light her own fire made.

She smiled, her fears shrinking into insignificance as she became fire.

Crafter Kohl was looking at her, with a knowing grin and eyes that seemed to glow with their own candlelight. He looked away, from one crafter to the next, nodding to each of them in turn. "Your shadows will wait back at the train. It isn't protocol, and Oversight will give the guild an earful when they hear about it, but I don't want any of you distracted. You've been asked to fight, so the City can put up with you being able to fight at your best."