Episode 3.a
>Vulcan's Forge, mythic time, after the Titanomachy<
The fire is in your hands now. Prometheus has his portion, taken from Vesta's hearth one way or another, and behind you the round room is mending itself: the flame standing straighter, the stone settling, the wrongness draining out of the air as the moment closes. But the small flame, the piece Vesta gave you to carry, will not settle. It leans. It pulls forward and down, toward something deeper and older than the hearth you just left; the break runs further back than you thought.
You follow it down. The trail opens onto a cavern of red light, and the forge fills it: three anvils, each taller than a man, ranged around a fire pit wide enough to swallow a house. Three brothers stand at the anvils, enormous and one-eyed, hammers raised. None of them is striking. They are looking at someone slumped on a stool in the corner, the hammer that should be in his hand lying on the ground beside him.
He is hard to see. He is thin, worn faint, half rubbed out, as though the world had begun to forget him. He does not look up when you come in.
The smallest brother, the one with the brightest eye, turns toward you. "He won't work," he says, "he's forgotten what he was making."
Quintus stops at the cavern mouth and lets out a slow breath. "Oh," he says. "Oh, that's not good." He studies the fading figure for a long moment. "The hearth was the fresh break. This is older. Whatever Prometheus did, it's pulling the ground out from under people who came before him." He glances at the flame in your hand. "Look at that, though. It wants to be here."
The flame is brighter than it was on the trail. It strains toward the man on the stool.
Prompt: The smith-god is fading, and his three workers cannot begin without him. You are carrying a piece of Vesta's living fire, and it is reaching toward him. Decide together how you bring the flame to him: what do you do, and what do you say to him? The Cyclopes know him best. They may help you, if you ask.
