A ripple in the fabric of the small isolated world demonstrated that the forge had succeeded in its endeavor. A soul is a coagulated mass of experience and skill, this cluster was just a very chaotic soul. The forge extended its tendrils to the raw cluster of souls, and moved it to its mortar.

  The mass of souls, content at last. Finally, finally getting to spend time with the families they'd held so dear. Bob for one was thrilled, spending time with his wife, Wendy. They had so much to talk about after the eternity it had been since they'd seen each other. He figured he could spend time with his kids after they'd reunited with some of their close friends. The eerie thought bore upon his awareness for but a moment... The whims of mortals and their souls are not the whims of the gods above them, and especially are not the whims of the horrors above the gods. He felt a distinct wrongness in the air, then all of a sudden, Bob looked up and felt an immense and invisible pressure.

  The grinding. The clicking. A billion trillion souls, breaking. The totality of an exhausted eternity bore through the experience of being pulverized. As if their skulls were being ground into dust, stuck to clumps of brain matter, and flung to the other side of the milky way without losing an ounce of sensation. The grains of their astral forms were pulverized once, the chunks of their experiences still partially coagulated. Then the second round of pulverization came in a wave. Now torn in bits, each of the billion trillion souls felt the process in every set of particles that once made up their complete and whole selves. Then the third time. Every bit of every particle reduced to a fine powder, to dust.

  They tried to fight back against the grinding of their souls, clustering with all the mismatched particles in that locked space. Clusters of chimera souls of friends and enemies, of sons and fathers, blended together all in their desperation to be a fraction closer to themselves... a fourth wave came. Then a fifth, and a sixth. The grinding kept up, each agonizing second, the thud of the pestle hitting the mortar was followed by a stretched grinding sound that bled into their shared agony.

  The tendrils had used the pestle to grind down the cluster into an ensouled dust. The tendrils began preparing a vat of purified essence from the sea of souls. The tendrils transferred its powder into the vat.

  The grinding stopped. Wendy took her first breath in what felt like years. Somewhere deep inside, she felt an uneven pulse, her heartbeat? No. That wasn't hers anymore. The grinding worked in tandem with that beat, it erased her heartbeat and replaced it with the phantoms of something that was once hers. She could feel the expression of her mutilated self scattered in every grain of sand that made up this vast beach. There was a bond with Bob, she could feel it. Bob could feel it too for that matter. Everyone could feel everything. After their maceration, they settled atop the surface of some sort of liquid essence. Settling sounded so nice, a wave of relief danced through the floating beach of chimeric sands. But each grain of sand carried a squirming parasitic tumor, a grotesque reminder that they had been rewritten. The tumor spoke with their voice, and it whispered memories that weren't theirs. They were no longer Bob or Wendy. They were no longer anyone.

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  Every grain of sand was a fusion of countless shredded soul. Each shredded soul felt as if they alone were everywhere and everyone all at once. As if it was they who made up the totality of all experiences. As if everyone else was just a heavy burden they were carrying. But the essence accepted them. At first, they clung to their fading selves, their last flakes of identity writhing in protest. But it was so gentle, so achingly kind; it promised a solution to their plight. Why did they have to resist, it asked? Did they want to suffer? The sea knew what it was doing as the resistance eroded to nothing, and with it their names and their voices. The essence bonded with the burdens, leaving behind something purer, and more... useful.

  The powder dissolved into the solution without a hitch. The pangs from its hunger colored the very tendrils it used to forge. It wanted to consume, but no! This was a gift. A creation.

  The tendrils grasped at the star hanging above the vat and plunged it into the slurry.

  The star sent a massive jolt of energy through the essence. The evaporated fumes from the slurry made mirages of mothers holding their infants, of artists painting their masterpieces, of doctors returning a heartbeat to a previously declared corpse. Each day the heat grew. The mirages grew. The evaporation turned quicker and the slurry began to boil. The bubbles popped through the surface of the sea, producing a physical heartbeat to mirror the phantoms. The tendrils guided a pan through the thickening slurry. The viscous parts of the soul stuck to the pan, as the experiences of love, of security and of pride had their last hurrah in the rippling dances of the mirage. The sea sizzled, the last dissolved powder caked onto the surface of the pan as all the substance that held onto hope or joy was drained away from them. The steady rhythm kept pulsing in the residue even without the bath of bubbling essence.

  The soul enriched slurry reduced to an enriched soul residue in the heat of a miniature star. The tendrils reached out and compacted all of the remnants into a brick.

  The enriched residue did not resist. It could not.

  A progressively more perfect and solid cube glided from tendril to tendril.

  The pale yellow cube slotted into the deep green hellfire forge. Once the flickering flames began licking about this new nucleus, they faded to a hauntingly blue hue. Their glow tracing the runes that made up the core of its domain.