On the morning of Sunny's sixteenth birthday, Anvil came to the east wing and told him it was time.
There was no ceremony. There was no speech, no final lesson, no parting gift. Anvil stood in the doorway of the room where Sunny had slept for eight years and said, "We leave today," and that was enough, because between the two of them, economy of language had always been a form of respect.
Sunny packed his things. This took less than a minute, because he owned almost nothing. A change of clothes. The pouch of soul shards from his creature kills, which he still couldn't use. The small metal coin Anvil had tossed to him in the alley, which he'd kept for eight years without understanding why.
He left the knife. Anvil had given it to him, and anything Anvil had given him would connect him to Clan Valor. Everything from his life in Bastion had to stay in Bastion. When he walked into the waking world, he needed to be carrying nothing that contradicted the story of a boy who had grown up with nothing.
Lira met them at the gate of the east wing. She looked at Sunny the way she always looked at him, with that careful blankness that revealed nothing, and then she did something she had never done before. She reached out and adjusted the collar of his shirt, smoothing a fold that had been sitting wrong.
It lasted two seconds. Her hand withdrew, her expression didn't change, and she turned and walked back into the east wing without a word.
Sunny watched her go and felt something shift in his chest, a small rearrangement of weight, like a stone settling into a new position. In eight years, it was the closest thing to affection anyone in Bastion had ever shown him.
They descended through the rings of the city. Sunny had walked these streets hundreds of times during his surveillance exercises, always at off-hours, always with Lira, always as a ghost passing through a world that didn't know he existed. Now, in the early morning light, the streets were busy. Awakened soldiers drilled on the training grounds of the second ring. Merchants haggled over monster meat in the markets of the first. Children ran between the stalls, laughing, and the sound of their laughter echoed off the white stone walls of the citadel in a way that made Bastion feel, for one disorienting moment, like a place where people actually lived rather than a machine designed to process them.
Sunny had never paid attention to the children before. He'd seen them during his excursions, registered them as environmental details, and moved on. But today, walking through the market for the last time, he watched a boy of about eight years old steal a strip of dried meat from an unattended stall and vanish into the crowd with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing it his whole life.
The boy was thin and quick and entirely unremarkable, and Sunny felt the outskirts boy inside him stir, because eight years ago, he had been that child. Before Anvil. Before the forge.
He looked away.
They crossed the lake in silence. The ferry moved through water so still that the reflection of Bastion looked more real than the castle itself, a perfect inverted city hanging in the depths of the lake. Sunny gripped the railing and watched it pass beneath him, and for reasons he couldn't fully articulate, he committed the image to memory with the same precision he used for patrol routes and kill angles.
He wouldn't see Bastion again for a long time. Maybe never.
The Gateway was housed in a structure near the lakeshore, guarded by Awakened soldiers who straightened when Anvil approached and didn't look at Sunny at all. The rift looked the same as it had eight years ago: stable, contained, precise. Through it, Sunny could see the artificial light of the underground facility on the other side, harsh and sterile after years of the Dream Realm's natural warmth.
Anvil stopped at the threshold and turned to face him.
"Once you cross," he said, "the Spell will begin to take hold. You will have days, perhaps a week, before you fall asleep. During that time, you will be transported to the nearest processing facility and placed under observation."
Sunny nodded. He knew the procedure. Every Aspirant went through it.
"My people will ensure that you are processed as an unaffiliated orphan from the eastern outskirts. Your records have been prepared. Birth certificate, welfare bureau file, school transcripts. Everything is consistent with the story."
Sunny nodded again.
"After you complete your First Nightmare, you will be assigned to the Awakened Academy for four weeks of preparation before entering the Dream Realm as a Sleeper. The girl will be in your year. I've made arrangements."
He paused, as though considering whether the next piece of information was worth delivering or whether Sunny would figure it out on his own.
"You will not be alone at the Academy. One of my operatives is already in place. His name is Caster. He entered the Academy cycle before yours and will remain as part of your year's cohort. His cover is solid. He knows about you and about the mission, and his role is to support yours. If you need a distraction, a corroborating witness, or a second blade, he will provide it. He answers to you."
Sunny absorbed this. A support operative meant Anvil considered the mission complex enough to require redundancy, which was either a compliment to the difficulty of the target or an acknowledgment that Sunny alone might not be enough. Knowing Anvil, it was both.
"Has he been briefed on my cover?" Sunny asked.
"He knows what he needs to know. You will make contact after orientation. The details of coordination are yours to manage."
The girl. Anvil still hadn't told him her name.
In eight years of preparation, across hundreds of hours of instruction on the Immortal Flame's history, their rise and fall, the political dynamics that made the last heir a target worth killing, Anvil had never once spoken the name of the person Sunny was being sent to destroy.
The omission had been deliberate. Sunny was certain of that. Names created connections, and connections created hesitation, and hesitation was the one thing an assassin could not afford. By keeping the target nameless, Anvil had kept her abstract, a shape without a face, a problem to be solved rather than a person to be confronted.
It was, Sunny recognized, an elegant piece of psychological engineering. And it would have worked perfectly on a weapon that had no curiosity.
But Sunny was not a weapon that had no curiosity. He was a weapon that had been trained to gather information, and the absence of information was itself a data point, and the data point told him something important: Anvil was afraid that knowing the girl's name would change something.
Which meant there was something to change.
Sunny filed this observation in the same place he filed all the things he noticed but couldn't afford to act on. The file was getting crowded.
"Do you have questions?" Anvil asked.
Sunny had dozens. He had questions about the mission and questions about the target and questions about what would happen after the target was dead, whether he'd return to Bastion or disappear into the waking world or simply stop being useful and be discarded the way you discard any tool that has served its purpose.
He asked none of them, because the answers wouldn't change what he had to do, and because he'd learned a long time ago that asking Anvil questions was the same as showing Anvil the shape of your uncertainty, and uncertainty was a flaw, and Anvil hated flaws.
"No," Sunny said.
Anvil regarded him for a long moment. The grey eyes moved in their familiar pattern: feet, knees, hips, shoulders, hands, eyes. The same appraisal he'd performed in the alley eight years ago, when Sunny had been a starving child on a fire escape. The same systematic evaluation, conducted with the same detached precision.
But something was different this time. The appraisal lingered a fraction of a second longer than usual, and at the end of it, Anvil's gaze settled on Sunny's face rather than moving on to the next data point. It was the closest thing to hesitation Sunny had ever seen from the patriarch of Clan Valor.
"You are among finest works I have ever produced," Anvil said.
His voice was flat. His expression was neutral. The words carried no more emotional weight than a measurement or a temperature reading.
But he said them, and he had never said anything like them before, and the fact that he said them now, at the threshold of the Gateway, at the moment of departure, told Sunny something that all of Anvil's lessons on the mechanics of human psychology had not.
Sunny looked at the man who had fed him and sheltered him and taught him to kill, the man who had never once called him "son" or "student" or anything other than "Sunless," and he felt the outskirts boy stir one final time, pressing against the walls of the person Sunny had become, looking out through his eyes at the grey-eyed patriarch and seeing him clearly for the first time.
Not a father. Not a mentor. A forger, standing at the edge of his workshop, watching his finest blade walk out the door and knowing, with the certainty of a man whose life had been defined by loss, that it would not come back the same way it left.
"Thank you," Sunny said, and meant it, and hated that he meant it, because gratitude toward the man who had made you into a weapon was its own kind of cage, and Sunny had spent his whole life in cages of one kind or another.
Anvil nodded once.
Sunny turned and stepped through the Gateway.
The waking world hit him like a wall of noise and grime and stale, filtered air. After eight years of the Dream Realm's pristine atmosphere, the recycled oxygen of the underground facility felt like inhaling through a dirty rag. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, harsh and colorless, and the walls were bare concrete instead of white stone.
Everything was smaller. Uglier. More real.
He walked through the facility without looking back. Anvil's people were waiting, dressed in government uniforms, holding paperwork that would transform him from a ghost of Bastion's east wing into Sunless, orphan of the eastern outskirts, unaffiliated carrier of the Nightmare Spell.
They processed him quickly and efficiently. A car took him to the police station nearest to his old neighborhood, and the officers there accepted his story without suspicion, because why would they question it? He was pale and thin and looked exactly like what his paperwork said he was: another outskirts kid chosen by the Spell, another life that was probably about to end.
They put him in the reinforced room. They strapped him into the medical chair. An officer with a tired face briefed him on the procedure, and Sunny listened with polite attentiveness, absorbing the same information the old policeman had given him eight years ago in a version of this room that existed in canon, in a life he'd never lived.
He already knew everything the officer was telling him. He knew about the First Nightmare, the trials, the Aspects and Attributes and Memories. He knew what he would face and how to survive it. He had been trained for this moment the way a blade is trained by the forge: through heat and pressure and relentless, methodical shaping.
The sleepiness came faster than he expected. It rolled over him in waves, each one deeper than the last, pulling him toward a darkness that was warm and vast and had been waiting for him since the day the Spell first touched his blood.
He thought about Bastion. About the east wing, and the enchanted lanterns, and the food that arrived three times a day with mechanical regularity.
He thought about Anvil standing at the Gateway, grey eyes holding something that an eight-year-old would have missed but a sixteen-year-old could not.
He thought about a girl whose name he didn't know, whose face he had never seen, whose death he had been designed to deliver.
Then the darkness took him, and the Spell spoke, and the First Nightmare began.