Inferno stood forty feet tall in the black valley, and the fire in its chest was dying. Coal dust ringed its heels. A single lump smoldered behind the iron grate of its ribs, no bigger than a fist. Every step the golem took shook loose more ash than heat. The small purple creature that had built Inferno drifted near its shoulder, tendrils twitching. The wisp had woken the golem three nights ago with one promise: feed the fire, grow taller than any peak on Htrae. Inferno wanted that. It wanted to look down on the clouds and feel them boil off its shoulders. But the coal seam lay half a mile away, and Inferno's hands were the size of wagons. Each trip, the golem could pinch up only what stuck between two fingers. It had walked the path twelve times since dawn. The fire in its chest had shrunk with every return. Inferno knelt at the seam and tried again. Its fingers cracked the wall and came away with a scatter of pebbles. Most fell through the gaps. The rest wouldn't feed the flame for an hour. The wisp circled, agitated, tendrils lashing the air. Then the wisp shot forward and wrapped its threads around a boulder of coal near the cliff base. The chunk was taller than a man, jagged, matte black, streaked with gold. The wisp strained. It could not lift it. It turned its glowing eye on Inferno and pulsed twice. Inferno understood. One rock like that was worth a hundred trips. But the golem's hands were too clumsy to carry it without crushing it to powder, and there were dozens more buried in the cliff. Carrying one at a time would still take days the fire didn't have. Inferno turned from the seam and looked across the valley. On the far ridge sat the thing the wisp had shown it on the first night: a machine of gears and glowing pink hearts, taller than a house, humming to itself in the dark. The wisp had called it a gift from something older. Inferno had ignored it. A machine could not make a golem strong. Only coal could. But the machine had a wide bed between its pillars, and rails leading down toward the seam. Inferno had seen rails before. Rails carried weight. The golem walked to the ridge. It set both hands under the machine's base and lifted. The gears shrieked and spun. Pink light flared through the heart-shaped panels. The bed unfolded on its own, sliding down the rails toward the coal wall like a tongue. Inferno fed it the giant boulder. The machine swallowed it whole and asked for more. By the time the sun dropped, the bed was piled high, and the golem hauled it back to the valley floor in a single trip. The fire in its chest roared up to its throat for the first time. The wisp spun in tight circles above the load. Then it froze. Down the rails, something else was coming to meet them.