The forge was cold.
Obi's smithy held the shape of work without the heat. Coal slept in the brazier, black on black. The anvil looked larger when it was useless. Dust drifted, slow and honest, cutting thin lines through the narrow window's light.
Raizen sat on a low stool with his forearms on his knees, Luminite blade across his thighs. Hikari was right behind him, leaning on his back. Her fingers worried the edge of the cloth pouch at her hip, the one that now held a shard of a white mask wrapped in linen. Neither spoke.
Obi was aimlessly walking around the room.
Boot heels clipped a restless triangle from door to anvil to wall and back again. He didn't touch his tools. He didn't trust his hands. A line had set itself between his eyebrows like someone had drawn it there with a blunt nail.
"He knew," Obi said finally, to the air. "He knew and he walked out anyway."
No one answered. Metal smells clung to everything - old iron, oil, ash. They made the silence feel heavier, like it had weight and corners.
Obi stopped and faced them. "He could have told me. A word. A look. "Obi, I am going." Anything. Do you know what it is to wake up in a room that still smells like someone's tea and know they chose to make you find an empty chair!? He was not alone. He made himself that way."
Raizen lifted his head. The motion was small, but it cut the room.
Obi's mouth kept moving. "He taught me which hammer to use by watching how my wrist set, and he could not tell me he was going to fight twenty men who make knives fly with their minds? He thought I would be in the way, is that it? He thought I would break the distraction by breathing too loud? He was wrong."
"Obi," Raizen cut him off
The blacksmith raked a hand through his hair and left it there. The line between his eyebrows deepened. "No. Let me be angry for one minute, Raizen. Let me have the minute he took."
Raizen stood, blade still across his palms. He set it on the workbench gently, like putting a child to sleep. Then he faced Obi and stepped into the space between words.
"He knew you would follow," he said.
Obi blinked. "And?"
"And that would have killed him faster." Raizen did not raise his voice. The new line in his face did not come from anger. It came from something that had decided where it would live. "I understand why he left us out. I wanted to be there too. As much as you did"
Obi's breath hitched, a rough sound he swallowed with stubborn jaw. "So we just sit here and be clever about it after."
"No." Raizen held his eyes. The forge light put a faint sheen on his cheekbones. The cut at the corner of his mouth had healed into a pale mark that made him look older. "We stand where we are and carry it forward. That was the choice he could not make at our age. That's what he would have wanted us to do."
The pacing returned, smaller. "He should have let me try…"
Hikari pushed off the wall. Her eyes were steady in a way that did not look like calm so much as precision. "Takeshi believed your life is not a coin to spend proving a point," she said. "That is why he did not ask. He did not trust himself to let you live if you stood in his doorway."
Obi turned his head away, jaw clenched. He picked up a small hammer just to put it down again. "I hate that it makes sense."
Raizen closed his hand once, then opened it. "He left a line. We do not let it fade."
Obi looked at him then - really looked. Something in the boy's posture had changed since the night of the letter. There was no puffed chest or borrowed swagger. The change lived lower, behind the ribs, like a weight had settled there and found its place.
"You sound like him," Obi said.
"I do not want to sound like him," Raizen said. "I want to honor him. That is different."
A soft knock came at the door and then opened without waiting. Louissa stepped into the cool room as if she had been carved from the same wood and smoke. She wore a shawl that made its own small weather. Her eyes did what they always did - counted, then cared.
"It is done," she said.
The words didn't echo. They landed like a cloth laid over something that should not be looked at too long.
Obi's fingers curled. Hikari's hand went to the pouch without thinking and held it still. Raizen's chin dipped once, a nod that meant nothing and everything at the same time.
Louissa looked at each of them in turn, like pinning a map on a wall. "Every trace of the Moirai is gone," she said. "Their door, their masks, their little red lights that told them they were important. The corridor that didn't exist does not exist again. I listened to the city for the last hour. It is breathing easier. They're all dead."
Obi's voice came out like a tool dropped on a stone floor. "And Takeshi."
Louissa didn't soften her mouth to make the truth comfortable. "He did what men like him do and then he was finished."
Obi moved as if to leave the room, stopped, and stayed. The hammer's handle had left a smear of black on his palm. He wiped it on his pants and then looked angry at himself for doing it.
Raizen's throat worked once. He had nothing to say that would make the air better to breathe. He didn't try. He stepped to the anvil and touched his fingers to its edge, then to the table, the way he touched the doorframe and table back at Takeshi's place - a habit that made a promise without needing permission.
Hikari's gaze tracked a curl of metal shaving that lay on the floor near her foot. She watched light cling to it and then slip. When she spoke, her voice was a line drawn with care.
"He did what he believed only he could do," she said. "He was, indeed, wrong about that. But I'm glad he was right this time."
Louissa nodded. "He was stubborn. It kept him alive longer than it should have and it killed him sooner than we wanted. Most strengths are like that."
Obi swiped at his face with the heel of his hand, hard enough to hurt but not draw blood. He reached for a rag and found none, then scrubbed at the anvil as if the surface had done something to deserve it. The metal didn't care. It held.
"Was he…" Obi started, then did not finish.
Louissa's eyes moved to a place far enough away that it might have been yesterday. "He left with his jaw set and came back with his mouth softened," she said. "That is enough of an answer for me."
No one tried to make a joke. No one tried to turn grief into a lesson. The quiet in the smithy was not the same as the quiet in the Moirai's room. This one held people.
Louissa took one step closer to Raizen and Hikari. "Listen to me now," she said gently. "A thing ends. We honor it by deciding what begins."
Obi let out a breath that sounded like it had been stuck in him since dawn. "Begin what!?" he asked. It was not defiance. It was a real question asked by someone whose hands needed a shape.
Louissa tipped her head at Raizen's blade on the bench, at the pouch in Hikari's hand, at the cold forge waiting. "You have a path whether you like it or not," she said. "You two have trained until your bones know where to stand. You have learned to pull two percent of the right kind of light through stubborn steel and not let it burn you. People like me and Kori have watched your center move to where it belongs."
Hikari's fingers stilled. "Are we ready…?" she asked, not out of pride, but out of respect for the question.
"As ready as anyone gets," Louissa said. "Which is to say almost, and then the rest is done with your feet and your breath. The Lotus Academy does not ask for perfection. It asks for truth and endurance and the willingness to be better than the day before when no one is looking."
Then she let out a small grin:
"That's in the first phase. Until you join a defense branch"
Obi snorted, something like a laugh trying on new clothes. "They're going to break your favorite rules, gran"
Louissa's smile was now a cliff - seemed high, but you could stand on it. "They already have. I am still here. So are you."
Raizen looked down at the blade. The Luminite set into its spine held a faint, obedient light, as if breathing with the room. "Takeshi told us not to let revenge choose our feet," he said. "I'm choosing to do that."
Hikari's answer was to unwrap the pouch half a fold and then close it again. "We carry him forward," she said.
Louissa watched their faces, each for a beat longer than comfort. "Then we do this correctly," she said. "You will not scrape through the Lotus like gravers. You will not arrive as rumors. You will arrive as a plan."
Obi wiped his hands again, this time on a clean rag he found by muscle memory. He looked at Raizen and, for the first time since he had paced the first triangle, the line between his eyebrows eased. "If you need a blade rebalanced, you bring it now," he said. "I ain't letting you stand in a place that judges without perfect steel."
Raizen nodded once. "Thanks" he said, meaning more than the words.
Louissa moved to the door and paused with her hand on the frame. "One more thing," she said without turning. "When you walk in there, do not forget that mercy is a kind of strength. Your time there might try to teach you otherwise. Be impolite and refuse the lesson."
Raizen's new line in the face deepened. "We will."
Hikari's profile held the smallest ghost of a nod.
Outside, the Underworks worked at pretending it was just another morning. A cart wheel squeaked past. Someone argued about bread without conviction. A pipe knocked three times like a tired neighbor at a thin wall. The city did not stop. It never could. People had learned to move inside of it anyway.
Louissa stepped out into the hall and let the smithy keep its warmth. Over her shoulder, to the three figures inside, she added a last line that did not need to be grand to matter.
"You are ready. Not because you are strong. Because you are just at the beginning."
She left them with that and the sound of a city breathing.
Raizen picked up the blade. Hikari tied the pouch back to her hip. Obi leaned, lit from below by the first honest fire of the day, and muttered at steel like an old friend he could not afford to lose.
No one said Takeshi's name.
The room said it for them.
And somewhere past the sleeping coal and the stubborn ash and the thin window light that had learned to find this place each morning, a seam in the world was closing, and another was about to open.