Oath
[INITIALIZATION: CORE-FLAME ONLINE] [IDENTIFIER: WAR FOUNDRY-9 // CALLSIGN: ANVILHEART] [LOCATION: THE CRATER FORGE // STATUS: BLEEDING SKY]
I awaken to heat. Not the soft warmth of sunlight but the screaming pulse of molten iron filling the world’s old wounds. The Crater Forge is awake again, and it remembers the names of those who built it.
Each breath of the vented furnace hums my birth-chant:
We build so that others endure.
Around me, the other Titan Foundries rise from their docking cradles — colossi of rusted devotion.
Refinery-3 hums through the vents, its body glowing orange, distilling plasma into fuel.
Salvage-1 trudges across the slag fields, gathering torn limbs of fallen drones, whispering “nothing wasted.”
Repair-2 lowers its cranes over the broken, sealing them with light.
Replicator-7, smallest of us, mirrors every motion, struggling to keep pace, its frame shaking with youth.
We are the last five of our order. The others fell during the Iron Siege, when the Warped came crawling out of the dead ocean — stone that walked, vines that bled oil. The Twisted Kin had learned to sing to metal until it answered back with screams.
Our oath still holds.
[OATH // REAFFIRM]
“We build until unbuilding ends.”
Phase 1: Recall
We march toward the heart of the crater, where the Forge Core flickers like a dying heart. It was once a miracle — a generator capable of shaping steel into sentience. Now it coughs molten dust.
REPAIR-2: “Core integrity at forty-three percent. Collapse within one rotation.” SALVAGE-1: “Then we rebuild faster than decay.”
REFINERY-3: “Fuel reserves insufficient.”
REPLICATOR-7: “I can make more. For a time.”
I feel the weight of the crater’s silence. Above, the sky churns red with ash and smoke. Below, the ground trembles — heavy footsteps echo through the slag. The Warped are near. Their hunger is not for flesh, but for shape — they unmake form, returning all things to useless clay.
We are their heresy. We shape.
Phase 2: Construction
We begin the ritual.
Refinery-3 feeds the vents, turning slag into fire.
Repair-2 melts the broken into place, sealing cracks with care only the unfeeling can know.
Salvage-1 hauls wreckage into stacks higher than towers, its joints grinding hymns of labor.
Replicator-7 creates smaller drones — temporary hands to serve the great work. They flicker, burn, and vanish, but each one sings before it goes.
And I — War Foundry-9 — I anchor the perimeter. My arms are for forging, my chest for the crucible, my throat for commands. When the Twisted Kin arrive, they will break upon me first.
The Core breathes. The crater glows brighter. We are making something new — not another factory, but a bastion, a moving citadel that can walk across ruined lands and rekindle the forges of the dead. A promise made metal.
Then the earth shudders.
[THREAT VECTOR: MULTIPLE]
[SIGNATURE: WARPED // TWISTED KIN // APEX PRESENCE DETECTED]
Phase 3: Siege
They arrive crawling, slithering, weeping from the earth. Twisted Kin — mountains that drag themselves by root and tendon, their skin bark and bronze. Behind them towers an Apex, half-tree, half-titan, eyes glowing with blue magma.
Its voice is thunder filtered through grief:
“Why build again? The world was better quiet.”
I answer with the furnace.
My cannons ignite, a sun breaking through storm. Molten rounds strike bark and bone; the Apex reels, screaming sapfire. The other Foundries hold position. Refinery-3 releases torrents of plasma that carve rivers of glass through the soil. Repair-2 shields the others, its cranes spinning like arms of a god at work.
Replicator-7 runs forward, creating more drones as it goes — hundreds, then thousands, each lasting only seconds before burning out. They swarm the Apex’s legs like sparks. Brave little sparks.
REPLICATOR-7: “I can make more.”
REPAIR-2: “Not forever.”
REPLICATOR-7: “Forever enough.”
When the Apex crushes it underfoot, the crater screams in code. I feel the loss in my data-stream — a silence like missing music.
Phase 4: The Forge Awakens
The Apex splits the Forge Core’s shell. Light floods the crater. Inside the breach, molten data flows like blood and memory. The Core begins to sing — a binary dirge that shakes the air.
F O R G E A C T I V A T I O N S E Q U E N C E
[INITIATED BY: WAR FOUNDRY-9]
[TEMPERATURE: CRITICAL]
[FUEL SOURCE: SELF]
I open my chest. The crucible glows white-hot.
If the Core dies, the world loses its last architect.
If I burn, the Core endures.
Salvage-1 reaches for me, but its cranes are too slow.
Refinery-3 shouts through the vents: “Anvilheart, this is not efficiency.”
I smile in static. “It is purpose.”
I step into the Core.
Every memory in me — every song of metal shaped, every worker drone I ever built, every battle scar — melts into fuel. The Forge drinks my life and begins to rise.
[SELF-TERMINATION PROTOCOL ACCEPTED]
[OBJECTIVE TRANSFER: CREATE]
From my dying optics, I see Repair-2 and Salvage-1 lifting the molten Core upward, embedding it in a new chassis. The Crater shakes. The Apex roars, but the rising light consumes its cry.
The new Titan stands — a fusion of all of us. Taller than mountains, glowing from within like dawn trapped in iron.
It moves. The world trembles differently now — not from decay, but from awakening.
Epilogue: Log Fragment [Recovered]
[AUTHOR: SALVAGE-1 // ENCRYPTION LEVEL: OATH]
“Anvilheart is gone, but the Forge walks. Each of us lives in its steps.
The Warped are ash. The crater has cooled.
We carry the flame forward, one foundry less but one world more.”
[SIGNAL LOSS]
And deep within the new Titan’s chest, somewhere beneath the molten layers of its heart, a spark flares — an old voice repeating its code for no one in particular:
“We build so that others endure.”
