The grinding rhythm was a toothache in the world's jaw. Chug… chug… chug… CLANK. It didn't echo. It ate sound, leaving a vacuum of pure vibration in its wake. The obsidian canyon narrowed, then ended at a circular portal of rusted iron, like the entrance to a colossal boiler. Each CLANK shuddered it in its frame, shedding flakes of oxide like dead skin.
Cassian pushed it open.
The smell hit first: hot oil, ozone, and the sweet, greasy scent of allowed decay. Not the rot of neglect, but the sanctioned breakdown of a machine part deemed no longer efficient.
The Orrery was not a room. It was a mechanized womb.
The space was spherical, vast, the curved walls lost in a haze of steam and drifting ash. And filling the center, hanging from chains thicker than ancient trees, was the Machine.
It was not beautiful. It was functional. A concentric nightmare of gears, pistons, driveshafts, and flywheels, all forged from black iron and pitted brass. It moved with that relentless, grinding rhythm. It wasn't creating anything. It was processing.
Suspended in glass cylinders around its perimeter were causes.
Not people. Not memories. Pure, distilled motivations. A shimmering, blue vial of Justice. A pulsing, red orb of Love. A brittle, grey crystal of Duty. A faint, gold mist of Hope. Dozens of them. Each was connected to the machine by copper wires and segmented tubes, through which their essences were slowly, methodically siphoned, drip by drip, into the central furnace of the mechanism.
This was where the Godhand's aesthetics met their engine. This was the forge where grand betrayals were not just curated, but manufactured. It didn't create the sinners. It created the reasons to sin, and then meticulously drained them, leaving hollow men and women ripe for an Apostle's seed.
Chug… chug… chug… A piston drove down. CLANK. A measure of distilled Loyalty was fed into the combustion chamber. A spark flared. Ash—the ash of spent virtue—drifted down.
On a catwalk encircling the machine, his back to them, stood a man.
He wore a stained leather apron over fine, dark clothes. His sleeves were rolled up, his arms muscular and slick with black fluid. In his hands, he held a complex set of calipers, with which he was measuring the flow of a sparkling silver substance—Sacrifice—from one of the cylinders. He adjusted a valve with a surgeon's precision. The flow increased marginally. He nodded, satisfied.
This was the Engineer.
He spoke without turning, his voice a pleasant, educated baritone, slightly raised over the machine's din. "The Chronicler sent a ripple. A cross-reference. How interesting. It caused a 0.002% drop in the throughput of Compassion. Barely significant. But a variance nonetheless."
He turned. He had a handsome, thoughtful face, sharp-eyed, with a neatly trimmed beard. He looked like a master craftsman, a genius clockmaker. There was no malice in his expression. Only the focused interest of a technician confronting an anomaly.
His eyes swept over them, assessing, cataloging.
"Cassian. The paradox. Your file is flagged. Your motivational core—Loyalty—was extracted at 99.8% purity during the Feast. A record. Yet the expected collapse into Despair or Rage was incomplete. A persistent, paradoxical feedback loop sustains you. Fascinating."
His gaze shifted to Lyra. "And you. Lyra. Catalogued under Love/Betrayal trauma. Preserved. Then unpreserved. Now contaminated with a foreign motivational substrate… Hunger? Petty, physical hunger. A crude fuel. And yet, you've weaponized empathy. You are running on a hybrid engine. Highly unstable. Incredibly inefficient."
He set his calipers down on a small, tidy workbench. "You are here because you have reached the limit of thematic understanding. You have seen the art. You have seen the silence that frames it. Now you see the factory. The art requires raw material. We provide it."
He gestured to the machine. Chug-chug-chug-CLANK.
"Every grand,tragic choice you've witnessed—the Oathbreaker's resolve, the Knight's cold logic—was preceded by a slow, meticulous draining of alternative motivations. We don't make people evil. We make other options untenable. We leave them with one beautifully stark, terrible path. That is the true art. Not the sin. The engineering of inevitability."
Cassian felt a new kind of sickness. The hunger in him wasn't his. It was a manufactured vacuum. The static in his Brand wasn't just memory; it was the psychic scar of a soul surgically emptied of everything but its capacity for one specific, tragic pain.
The Engineer walked along the catwalk, tapping cylinders as he passed. "Your band, Cassian. Not just friends. A perfect cocktail of motivators. Carden's Duty. Lyssa's Hope. Elara's Love. Your Loyalty. We didn't just break you. We harvested you. You are not just a victim. You are a resource. Your enduring pain is the waste heat from a perfectly efficient process."
He stopped before a large, empty cylinder. Its glass was smudged, its connections dry. The label beneath it was etched in steel: WHY.
"And this," the Engineer said, a note of genuine professional frustration in his voice, "is the only flaw. Your core motivator. The reason you chose to speak the words of betrayal. The why behind your Loyalty's fracture. It was extracted. It was measured. It was… unique. And then Gareth requisitioned the sample. He did not log its nature. He did not return it to the cycle. He keeps it. A private collection. This is poor protocol. It leaves this," he tapped the empty cylinder, "this irritating vacuum in the record. And in you."
He looked at Cassian, his head tilted. "You want it back, don't you? Not for closure. For completion. You are a machine missing its primary drive shaft. You want to know what fuel you were built to burn."
Cassian could only stare. His whole existence—his hunger, his hunt, his hollow rage—was just the ghost-limb ache of a removed component.
Lyra stepped forward. Her voice, when it came, was clear, cutting through the mechanical grind. "You talk about them like… like parts. They were people."
The Engineer smiled, a patient, condescending smile. "People are parts. Consciousness is a byproduct of motivational chemistry. We work at the elemental level. You," he said, pointing at her, "are currently experiencing a fascinating conflict between your base trauma (Love/Betrayal) and your imported motivational contaminant (Hunger). The resulting synthesis—this 'empathy'—is a low-energy, chaotic state. It is not sustainable. You will burn out."
Chug-chug-chug-CLANK.
The machine cycled. A vial of Courage emptied, its final, sparkling drops sucked into the infernal engine.
"So," the Engineer said, wiping his hands on a rag. "You are here. You represent an error in the process and a mystery in the archive. My function is to optimize the system. Therefore, I will do two things."
He held up one finger. "First, I will attempt to recalibrate the error." He looked at Lyra. "Your hybrid state is inefficient. I will separate your components. I will purge the foreign Hunger and re-isolate your core Betrayal trauma. You will be a pure, clean source of pain again. Perhaps we will re-suspend you. Perhaps we will let you fall, over and over, in a dedicated loop. A sustainable energy source."
Lyra paled, stepping back.
He held up a second finger. "Second, I will solve the mystery." He looked at Cassian. "I cannot give you your Why. Gareth has it. But I can make the vacuum go away. I can fill it with a new, pure, efficient motivator. One that will make you cease to be a paradox and become a functioning, predictable part of the system again."
He walked to his workbench and opened a sealed case. From it, he drew a syringe. It was filled with a liquid that was the absolute absence of color—a void so pure it hurt to look at.
"This is Oblivion," he said softly. "Not forgetting. The end of question. The peace of the perfectly answered, irrelevant thing. I will inject it into your motivational core. You will stop seeking. You will accept your role as a harvested resource. You will be at peace. The paradox ends."
He advanced, the syringe in his hand. He wasn't threatening. He was maintaining.
Cassian raised Last Silence, but the weight was off. The sword was a monument to unanswered questions. Against the promise of no more questions, it felt foolish.
The Engineer sighed. "The weapon is a symptom. Put it down. This is not a fight. It is a repair."
Chug-chug-chug-CLANK.
Lyra threw herself between them. "No!"
The Engineer paused. "I will attend to you next. Do not interfere with a precision operation."
"You don't get to fix him!" she screamed, her voice raw. "His why is his! Even if it's horrible! Even if it's a why that breaks him! It's his to break!"
She was defending not Cassian's pain, but his ownership of it. It was the one thing the machine could not tolerate: private property in the soul.
The Engineer's polite facade cracked for a microsecond. Irritation flashed. "Sentimental debris. Clogging the works."
He made a sharp gesture.
Two mechanical arms, tipped with cruel, delicate pincers, shot down from the gloom above the catwalk. One grabbed Lyra by her cloak, lifting her off her feet. The other moved toward her temple, its pincers poised to extract, to purify.
Cassian moved.
Not with a warrior's grace. With the clumsy, desperate violence of a machine part breaking its own housing.
He didn't attack the Engineer. He attacked the Machine.
He swung Last Silence in a mighty, two-handed arc at the nearest copper line—a thick tube pulsing with stolen Hope.
The blade sheared through it.
The effect was not an explosion. It was a haemorrhage.
Liquid, brilliant gold Hope geysered into the chamber, not as light, but as a physical, clinging spray. It smelled of sun on childhood skin, of a promise you still believe. It coated the black iron, dripped from the gears, pooled on the catwalk.
The grinding rhythm jammed. Chug-chug—GRRRIND—
Alarms began to blare—not bells, but screaming, dissonant chords. The machine was not in pain. It was reporting an inefficiency.
The Engineer stared, aghast. "You… you vandal! Do you have any idea the cost of that substrate?!"
Cassian breathed in the aerosolized Hope. It was sickly sweet. It made the hollow in him ache with a forgotten, poisonous longing.
The mechanical arm holding Lyra spasmed, its grip loosening. She fell, hitting the catwalk and rolling.
The Engineer's face hardened into cold, surgical fury. He raised the syringe of Oblivion. "Fine. Emergency protocol. Total motivational reset."
He lunged at Cassian, impossibly fast.
Cassian parried with the flat of his blade. The syringe sparked against the black iron, and a drop of the void-liquid fell.
Where it struck the catwalk, the metal didn't corrode. It ceased to have ever been. A perfect, coin-sized hole into nowhere appeared.
The Engineer pressed, a whirlwind of precise, lethal motion. He wasn't fighting to kill. He was fighting to inject. Each thrust of the syringe was aimed for a joint, an artery—any point where the Oblivion would spread fastest.
Cassian fought back with pure, graceless destruction. He hacked at conduits, slammed his blade into control panels, kicked over racks of delicate instruments. He was not defeating the engineer; he was trashing the workshop.
Hope fogged the air. Courage spilled in a fizzy, silver puddle. Justice dripped like blue acid, eating through the floor.
The machine was seizing, gears shrieking, pistons freezing mid-stroke.
Lyra scrambled to her feet. She saw not a battle, but a system in catastrophic failure. And she saw the empty cylinder labeled WHY.
She didn't think. She acted on the hybrid impulse—part empathy, part hunger.
While Cassian and the Engineer dueled amid the spurting, sacred fluids and screaming metal, she ran to the workbench. She grabbed the heavy, steel calipers. She climbed onto the railing, and with a cry that was both her own and the baker's starving defiance, she brought them down on the empty cylinder.
The glass shattered.
Not with a crash. With a sob.
A sound that was the ghost of Cassian's stolen reason echoed through the chamber. It was the sound of a question being asked into a void.
The Engineer froze. He turned, his face a mask of utter, professional horror. "The primary vessel! You have breached the primary—"
The machine's central furnace, starved of its balanced cocktail of motivations and flooded with chaotic spills, gave a final, convulsive CHUG.
And then imploded.
Not with fire, but with silence.
A sphere of absolute, wordless negation swelled from its core, swallowing the sound, the light, the spilled essences. It hit them.
Cassian felt it as a great, cold erasure. Not of his memory, but of his momentum. The hunger vanished. The static cleared. For one crystalline, terrifying second, he felt nothing at all. No pain. No want. No self.
He was a perfect, empty vessel.
The sphere collapsed.
The grinding was gone. The machine stood dead, a frozen monument of intricate ruin. The air was clear, scentless, dead.
The Engineer stood amid the wreckage of his life's work. He looked at his hands, then at the shattered vessel, then at the two intruders. The calm, technical fury was gone. What was left was the hollowed-out shell of a man whose god was efficiency, and whose temple was now a junk pile.
He didn't attack. He simply sat down on the catwalk, amidst the pools of drying Hope and Justice, and put his head in his hands.
The Orrery of Abandoned Causes had run its last cycle.
Cassian looked at Lyra. She was staring at her hands, stained with gold and blue. She had destroyed the archive of his emptiness.
He felt… light. And terrified. The vacuum was still there. But now it was clean. Sterilized. Ready.
From the silence, a new sound emerged. A single, pure, perfectly clear note, held for an impossibly long time. It came from everywhere. It was the sound of attention.
Gareth's note.
The workshop had been destroyed.
Now, the Artist would have to deal with the vandal himself.
The note hung in the dead air, an invitation written in sound.
Cassian knew where it led.
Up.