The war council met in Lethane's command tent at dusk, which in the Sunderlands meant the twilight darkened from grey to charcoal without ever achieving true night. The tent's interior was lit by channelled fire — small, controlled flames that the attending priests maintained in iron braziers, their light warmer and steadier than any torch but carrying the ozone tang of divine energy that made Ren's sinuses ache. He stood at the back of the tent beside Fossick, who had positioned himself near the supply manifests with the instinct of a man who understood that wars were won on logistics before they were won on battlefields.
The tent held a dozen people, and the silence among them was the specific silence of professionals who had watched a plan fail and had no replacement ready. Ren read the room the way Tik had taught him — not the words people said but the spaces between the words, the postures, the hands. The branded commanders stood rigid, their enhanced composure a mask over what might have been shame or might have been nothing at all — the brands didn't discriminate between the emotions they suppressed. The Pale Duke, Lord Vasserine, sat in a folding campaign chair with his legs crossed and his expression arranged into the careful neutrality of a man calculating costs. His officers flanked him — secular soldiers in practical armour that bore no brands and no prayers, their allegiance measured in coin and territory rather than faith.
Callum stood near the map table, his priest's robes stained with blood from the field hospital where he'd spent the afternoon stitching wounds and murmuring prayers that served as much for his own composure as for the soldiers' comfort. He looked exhausted. His faith had never wavered in the years Ren had known him, but faith and energy were different currencies, and Callum had been spending the latter faster than the former.
Lethane stood at the map table's head. She had not sat down since the retreat. The aging that Ren had observed through his spyglass was worse at close range — new lines around her mouth, a hollowness in her cheeks that hadn't been there yesterday, the skin on her hands thinned to translucency over the veins beneath. She had spent years of her life on the morning's channelling, and the years showed in every crease and shadow. Her brands still glowed, but dimmer, like embers rather than flames, and the light they cast on the tent walls was unsteady.
"The frontal approach is untenable," she said. No preamble. No acknowledgment of the dead. The words were facts delivered with the precision of a surgeon's incision. "The Crucible's active defences exceed our projections. We cannot suppress the terrain manipulation quickly enough to advance without unacceptable losses."
The word "unacceptable" hung in the air. Three hundred and forty-seven dead was, apparently, the line.
"We could siege," the Pale Duke offered. His voice was mild, conversational — the tone of a man discussing trade routes over dinner. "Establish a perimeter. Starve them."
"The Crucible is not alive in the way a garrison is alive," Callum said quietly from his position near the map. "The demons don't eat. They don't sleep. They're sustained by the boneglass itself — the formation feeds them the way roots feed a tree. A siege would starve us before it touched them."
"And the Dimming advances," Lethane added. "Every day we camp here, the habitable zone contracts. The Sunderlands' western border has moved three leagues since our arrival. We have weeks, not months." She placed her hands flat on the map table. The gesture was deliberate — Ren recognised it as the same movement she made before pronouncing a sentence or giving an order that would cost lives. The table bore a map of the Crucible's exterior, now annotated with the morning's casualty positions in red ink that looked black in the channelled firelight. Each mark was a person. The map was crowded with them.
"A second assault with concentrated channelling support—" one of the branded commanders began.
"Will produce the same result with larger numbers," Lethane cut him off. "The Crucible adapts. A second assault teaches it our tactics. A third would be suicide."
Silence. The branded commanders stared at the map. Vasserine examined his fingernails. The priests maintained their braziers with small gestures of channelling that sent shadows flickering across the tent walls. Nobody had a plan. The absence of a plan filled the tent like smoke — invisible, suffocating, impossible to ignore.
Ren stepped forward.
The movement drew every eye in the tent. He was aware of the impression he made — young, unbranded, dressed in a scout's practical leathers that bore no insignia of rank beyond the informal badge of "heretic" that the soldiers had adopted as a mark of their own. He carried no divine authority, no secular title, no brands. What he carried was a map of the Crucible's northern face with a collapsed mine shaft marked in charcoal, and sixteen months of underground infiltrations that had killed two boneglass hearts and hundreds of demons.
"We go in from below," he said.
The words dropped into the silence like a stone into a well. He waited for the splash.
"Explain." Lethane's voice was flat. Not dismissive — she had learned, over the course of a continent-spanning war, that the thief's suggestions were worth hearing even when they sounded like lunacy. Especially when they sounded like lunacy.
Ren moved to the map table and laid his own map beside the command staff's version. His was smaller, rougher, annotated in the shorthand that Tik had taught him — symbols for exits, structural weaknesses, guard patterns, chokepoints. The language of a guild that no longer existed, applied to a mountain that had never been burgled before.
"The Pale Duke's sappers identified a collapsed mine shaft on the northern face," he said, tracing the route with his finger. "Pre-war. Someone was extracting boneglass from the earth before the demons established the Crucible as their primary nesting ground. The shaft goes deep — the sappers estimated at least two hundred paces below the surface before the collapse blocked further assessment."
"A collapsed shaft," Vasserine said. "You're proposing we dig our way in."
"I'm proposing the sappers widen what's already there. The collapse is rubble, not sealed stone. A team of sappers with the right tools could clear a passage in a day. Maybe less if the boneglass hasn't fused." Ren tapped the Crucible's interior on Lethane's map — a blank space, unmapped, unknown. The blankness was honest. Nobody knew what the Crucible looked like from within. "We go in through the shaft. We navigate to the heart. We destroy it from inside."
"The heart." Callum's voice carried a weight that the others in the tent didn't fully understand. Only Ren and Callum had been present when the boneglass hearts in the Fortress of Bone and the Cathedral Province had been destroyed. Only they had felt the grief that radiated from those dying organs — the vast, ancient sorrow of something that had been alive and aware and was being killed. Callum's hand went to the satchel at his side, where he kept his theological texts and the notes he'd compiled across three campaigns of watching the world's foundations crack.
"The hearts were smaller than a room," Lethane said. "Our intelligence suggests the Crucible's core is substantially larger. Possibly the size of this camp."
"Then we bring bigger charges." Ren kept his voice even. The thief's trick — never let them see you calculating the odds, because if they saw the odds, they'd never agree. Present the job. Sell the angle. Let the details worry about themselves until you were already committed. "I've done this twice before. The approach is the same. Find the structural weak points. Place alchemical charges at the load-bearing formations around the heart. Detonate. The structure collapses inward."
"You infiltrated a cathedral basement and a fortress drainage system," one of the branded commanders said. A Sword-Prior whose name Ren didn't know, his face seamed with brand scars that made his expression unreadable. "This is a living mountain. The terrain moves. The walls will be aware of you."
"The walls were aware of us on the surface too," Ren said. "Three hundred and forty-seven dead in four hours. I'm not proposing something safe. I'm proposing something different."
"Different how?" The Sword-Prior's voice carried the flat scepticism of a man whose brands had stripped him of diplomacy along with everything else. "Underground, you lose the cavalry, the channelling support, the numerical advantage. You'll be fighting in the dark with compounds and knives."
"Underground, the Crucible's terrain responses are constrained by the passages it's already built. It can't create kill zones the size of a battlefield. It can close passages, yes — but closing a passage is slower than erupting shards on an open slope, and a small team can move through gaps that a company can't." Ren pointed to the mine shaft entrance on his map. "Twelve people don't trigger the same response as three hundred. We proved that on every infiltration I've ever run. The mountain's defences are designed for armies. We send a lockpick, not a battering ram."
Lethane studied him. Her eyes — the only part of her face that the brands hadn't marked — held the same calculating intensity that Ren had learned to recognise as the moment before she made a decision that would reshape the campaign. She wasn't weighing the plan's merit against its risk. She was weighing it against the absence of alternatives.
"What do you need?" she asked.
The question was a doorway, and Ren walked through it.
"Twelve people. My best scouts, plus specialists. The mine shaft widened enough for single-file passage. Every alchemical compound I have, plus whatever the supply train can provide — flash powder, smoke compounds, boneglass proximity dust, and enough base material for fourteen demolition charges." He paused. "And a diversionary assault on the surface when we enter. The Crucible needs to be looking outward while we move inward."
"You're asking me to spend soldiers on a diversion," the Sword-Prior said.
"I'm asking you to keep the mountain's attention while twelve people walk into its heart. The diversion doesn't need to succeed. It needs to be loud."
"Twelve people against the Crucible's interior." Vasserine's tone was amused. Not cruel — the Pale Duke was too pragmatic for cruelty — but amused in the way of a man watching someone propose to pick a lock on a burning building. "I admire the ambition, if not the mathematics."
"Twelve is better than three hundred," Ren said. "Twelve people move through passages that close around formations. Twelve people can carry enough alchemical charges to collapse the structural supports I need. And twelve people can be lost without ending the campaign."
The last sentence dropped into the tent like the truth it was. Twelve people were expendable. The army was not. Ren had learned to say these things without flinching, and the learning had cost him something he couldn't name but could feel in the empty space where the flinch used to live.
Lethane raised one hand. The murmurs died. She looked at Ren with an expression that might have been respect or might have been the resigned calculation of a commander spending her last coin.
"I will commit sappers to widen the mine shaft," Vasserine said into the silence. The Pale Duke unfolded his legs and stood — a deliberate gesture that announced his participation as a decision, not a concession. "My engineers are practical men. They'll have your entrance ready by tomorrow evening."
"I'm going with him." Callum's voice was steady in the way that Ren had learned to associate with the moments when the priest's faith locked into something immovable — not rigid, not brittle, but set like stone that had been shaped by water over centuries. "If we're destroying the heart of the boneglass — if we're killing whatever lives inside that mountain — a theologian should witness it. This isn't just a military operation. This is the end of something that existed before our civilisation began."
Ren opened his mouth to argue. Callum met his eyes, and the argument died unspoken. The priest's expression held none of the doubt that had softened his early years with the army — no uncertainty, no equivocation, just the clear-eyed determination of a man who had spent three campaigns watching the world burn and had decided that bearing witness was not optional.
"Fine," Ren said. "You're on the team."
"And Thune." Lethane's voice was quiet. Not a suggestion.
The name landed in the tent like a dropped blade. Sword-Prior Maegor Thune — the most heavily branded soldier in the Army of the Immaculate. A man whose humanity had been stripped away in layers by dozens of sigils until what remained was a weapon in a body's shape, his speech clipped to inhuman precision, his emotions filed down to nothing by the accumulated weight of every brand he'd accepted. Ren had seen Thune fight in the eastern campaign — had watched him move through a demon pack with the mechanical devastation of a siege engine, his branded body absorbing impacts that would have killed an unbranded soldier twice over. The memory was not comfortable. Thune was not a person. Thune was what happened when you took a farmer and burned away everything except the capacity for violence.
"Thune is your heaviest asset," Ren said carefully. "You'll need him on the surface."
"I need the Crucible destroyed. Thune goes with you." Lethane's brands flickered. "He's the strongest fighter we have. Whatever you encounter inside the mountain, Thune gives you the best chance of surviving it."
Ren looked at the map. Twelve people inside a living mountain. Callum, who would bear witness. Thune, who had forgotten what it meant to be human. Sister Dael, who had survived one underground infiltration and volunteered for another. Eight of his scouts, who trusted him to bring them back alive. And Ren himself — a thief with a lockpick set and a satchel of volatile compounds, trying to crack the biggest vault in the world.
The plan was desperate. The plan was the only plan. And Ren had been living in the gap between desperate and dead for sixteen months.
"One condition," he said.
Lethane's eyes narrowed.
"When we find the heart and place the charges, we'll signal the surface. Sister Dael will channel a flare that your priests can target. You'll need to pour everything — every channeller, every ounce of Verada's fire — into the strike. The charges alone won't be enough. The hearts I've destroyed before needed divine fire to finish the job, and this heart will be orders of magnitude larger."
"I know what it will cost," Lethane said. The words were quiet and carried the weight of someone who had been spending herself for years and had calculated exactly how much was left. Her thinned hands rested on the map table, and the veins beneath the translucent skin pulsed with a faint amber light that was not entirely human.
"I know you do." Ren folded his map. "Tomorrow evening. The mine shaft. Twelve people and every volatile compound in the supply train."
The war council broke. The branded commanders filed out with mechanical precision, their footsteps synchronised in the unconscious rhythm that the brands imposed on their motor functions. Vasserine lingered to discuss sapper deployment with his officers, his mild voice carrying terms of excavation and structural reinforcement that sounded civilised against the backdrop of the war they were fighting. Callum caught Ren's arm at the tent's entrance.
"You know what we might find down there," Callum said. His grip was firmer than it should have been — the priest had always been stronger than he looked, a quality he shared with his faith.
"A boneglass heart. A big one."
"More than that." Callum's eyes held the same fervour that Ren had seen when the priest discovered the Other Gods' shrines, when he'd read forbidden texts by candlelight while the army slept, when he'd whispered theories about dying divine phenomena that made the church's theology look like a child's drawing of the ocean. "The Crucible is the primary formation. Whatever the boneglass truly is — whatever it was before the demons corrupted it — the answer is inside that mountain. We've been fighting the symptoms for sixteen months. The cause is down there."
"I'm not going in for answers, Callum. I'm going in to blow it up."
"I know. But the answers might matter for what comes after."
Ren looked east, toward the Crucible. The boneglass spires caught the Sunderlands' twilight and scattered it in patterns that looked, from this distance, almost like language — a crystalline script written in light and shadow across the mountain's broken face. The figurine pulsed against his chest — steady, warm, pulling him toward the mountain with the insistence of something that wanted to be found.
"What comes after is tomorrow's problem," Ren said. "Tonight's problem is making sure there is an after."
He left Callum at the tent entrance and walked toward the scout camp, where his people waited for the orders that would send a dozen of them into a living mountain. The twilight deepened toward the charcoal grey that passed for night in the Sunderlands. The Crucible pulsed on the horizon, its amber spires catching the last of the light and holding it like a lantern that the world's darkness couldn't quite extinguish. And somewhere inside the mountain, the wound that had spawned a plague and consumed a third of the world waited for the thief who had spent sixteen months learning how to break things that weren't supposed to break.
Join the Discussion