Amanda left the warehouse behind, the lingering scent of dust and the faint shudder of two scorched souls fading in her wake. But inside her burned something else entirely: an icy fire of impatience that seared from within. An iron band seemed to tighten around her ribs. Failure is not an option.
She was almost running toward Torglin’s cabin. The night air of the city was bitter cold, yet clammy beads of sweat clung to her skin beneath her cloak. Enough time had passed. If the dwarf had botched it… her magnificent, diabolical design would crumble to ash before it could crystallize into a legend of death.
---
The Forge.
The door did not creak open as usual. It opened with a dull, muffled suction, as though a vacuum had formed on the other side. The air inside was not merely thick; it was saturated, oppressive. It didn’t just smell of hot metal. It smelled of reality itself superheated, of ozone after lightning, and something else… bitter, like the ash of burned-out stars.
Torglin stood at the anvil, but was not working. He was frozen, a statue, staring at the workbench. At something hidden beneath a piece of rough, undyed burlap. His posture spoke not of a genius’s fatigue. It screamed of the reverent terror of a creator who has peered into the abyss.
Amanda stepped inside. Words died in her throat.
Togrin did not turn. Did not nod. Slowly, with the solemnity of a priest unveiling an altar, he yanked the cloth away.
And Amanda froze. The air left her lungs in a silent, soundless gasp. Her heart skipped.
On the table lay something. Not armor.
An Incarnation of Silence. An absolute denial of presence.
It was not plate. It was second skin woven from darkness and forgotten dreams. Countless perfectly fitted scales interlocked into an exoskeleton reminiscent of some fantastical insect or a relic from an inhuman arsenal. The surface was not smooth. It was matte, abyssal, swallowing not only light but the very act of looking. The color was a deep, almost black pearlescent void, within which flickered a ghostly, corpse-pale shimmer, like moonlight remembered at the bottom of an endless well.
An alloy. Mithril, orichalcum… and something else, the thought flashed through Amanda’s mind.
The construction was a masterpiece of madness and genius.
- Torso: Skin-tight, anatomical, overlapping scales promising serpentine flexibility. Not a single unnecessary rivet, not one protrusion a blade or an eye could catch on.
- Helm: Narrow, streamlined, utterly blind. No slits, no visor. Just a smooth, featureless mask; a cold oval of nothingness.
- Gauntlets and greaves: Segmented, lethally elegant, with barely perceptible reinforcements over knuckles and soles; for silent killing and soundless steps.
But the true essence was not the shape. It was the property.
“Show me,” Amanda’s voice came out hoarse, almost a whisper.
Without a word Torglin picked up a lit candle from the bench. He brought the flame to the breastplate.
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The flame did not reflect. It drowned. The light was simply absorbed by the matte surface, leaving no hint of gleam. Then he moved the candle to the helm.
A chill crawled up Amanda’s spine like frozen spiders.
Against the rough stone wall behind it, the armor’s outline wavering. Blurred. It did not turn transparent. It became… uninteresting to perception. The eye slid off it; the brain refused to register it as an object, preferring to see only wall, only emptiness.
“In direct sunlight the effect is stronger,” Torglin finally rasped, his voice thick with superstitious dread. “And in total darkness… it becomes nothing. It doesn’t hide. It refuses to be seen. The mind… it simply doesn’t want to acknowledge it. This thing is like a stone no one looks at; except that stone can slit your throat while you stare right through it.”
Amanda reached out slowly, as if afraid to dispel an illusion. Her fingertips brushed the pauldron.
The metal was warm. And impossibly light; lighter than silk, heavier than air.
“I… added dust of moonstone,” Torglin muttered, unable to tear his gaze from his creation. “Shards that fell from the sky in the Lunar Mountains… They distort. Not light itself. The very intention of light to touch the surface. This isn’t camouflage. This is heresy against reality.”
In Amanda’s mind, visions that had lived only in fantasy suddenly gained flesh.
Herself in this armor. The throne room. Enemies see only the fragile girl-advisor. Three steps away, like twin clots of displaced shadow, stand her wraiths. The enemy mage sweeps his gaze; and it slides past, never lingering. She raises a hand; and the captain of the guard’s sword arm drops to the carpet. She glances at the standard-bearer; and the pole bearing the empire’s crest is severed with a soft, wet crunch. On their faces; not comprehension. Pure, animal terror. Before them is no foe. Before them is an impossible phenomenon, a walking violation of the world’s laws.
Amanda let her cloak fall to the floor.
“Help me put it on.”
Donning it took only minutes. The plates closed around her with quiet, satisfied clicks, as though the carapace of a living creature had finally found its host. Last came the helm. The outside world did not vanish; it became hyper-real. From within, the mask projected a perfectly sharp, slightly enhanced view, like looking through flawless crystal. She could see the world.
The world could no longer see her.
She walked to the dusty mirror in the corner.
And saw.
In the mirror was a hole. A distorted, smeared silhouette; a ghost, a smudge on the eye. A pulsing black void in the shape of a person. Only two points of reference remained; her own eyes glowing from within with ruby embers, twin coals in the ash of an extinguished pyre.
She turned her head. The reflection melted, dissolved into blur, merged with the background.
“Perfect,” her voice, muffled by the helm, sounded like sand hissing across a tomb floor.
The Rubicon is crossed.
This was no longer Amanda. No longer advisor. No longer warrior.
This was that which is whispered of in the dark when the last light dies. That which has no name. The living embodiment of paranoia and dread.
She removed the helm. In the dim light of the forge her real face looked unbearably fragile, exposed, almost indecent in its humanity.
“Make two more,” she told Torglin, her tone suddenly mundane, almost domestic. “And not a word to anyone.”
Torglrin only nodded silently, unable to look away from the empty space in front of the mirror where, a heartbeat ago, nothing had breathed.
---
Amanda stepped back into the night, carrying beneath her cloak a bundle of impossible weight.
She left the dwarf alone with his blasphemous labor and his own fear. In her hands now rested the absolute weapon of illusion.
All that remained was to find those capable of bearing it. Those who would not lose their minds becoming part of this “nothing.” Those who would not forget themselves inside that faceless darkness.
Just find them. And forge them.
But time… Time slipped through her fingers like frozen mercury, silent and relentless. The ticking of unseen clocks pounded in her temples like a death knell.
The game had begun. There was no way back.