Chapter 125 - The Star-Iron Heart

The Royal Southern Foundry was a cathedral of industry, a cavernous space of soot-stained brick and roaring bellows that dwarfed the workshops of Valmere. At the mountain, we had been forced to innovate with scrap and bone; here, the resources of a kingdom were laid out in organized racks of shimmering alloys and pressurized mana-vials. But despite the opulence, the Foundry felt stagnant. The Master Smiths moved with a rigid, ceremonial grace, more concerned with the aesthetics of their craft than the structural integrity of their work.