The morning air tasted of rust and resignation. It always did. But today, something else clung to the dust motes dancing in the shafts of weak sunlight piercing our barracks: whispers. The night before, I had made a small thing, a creature of gears and wire, scuttle across the dirt floor. A joke, a trifle, a desperate act of creation in a world of endless destruction. It had been seen. Now, the whispers called me the "Iron Sorcerer."
They watched me differently in the food line. Before, I was just Victor, the witch's son, another gaunt frame with haunted eyes. Now, those eyes held a new light. Some stared with a primitive reverence, as if I could conjure bread from stone. Others, with a raw, desperate expectation, shuffling closer to me as if my proximity were a shield. A young boy, barely ten, pressed a bent nail into my palm as I passed, his gaze wide and pleading. He thought I could reshape it into a key, a weapon, a miracle. I saw the fragile hope in his face and felt only a cold, corrosive pity. Hope was a fool's luxury.
But hope, like a plague, is infectious. And rumors, in a place like this, have no walls to contain them.
I saw the moment the infection spread beyond the penned. A guard, his face a mask of bored cruelty, leaned against a post, scratching his armpit. His eyes were half-lidded until a phrase drifted from a nearby huddle. "…the witch's son… iron that moves…"
His posture changed. The boredom evaporated, replaced by a raptor's stillness. His gaze found me across the yard, and in it, I saw not curiosity, but a familiar, curdled hatred. The kind of hatred that doesn't need a reason, only an excuse. He pushed himself off the post and marched toward the Overseer's blockhouse. For me, the morning was over. The reckoning had begun.
Overseer Dragos was a monument to humanity's basest instincts. A thick, bull-necked man whose cruelty was as artless as it was absolute. I knew he remembered my mother. He had been a junior officer under General Karath then, one of the many who stood by and watched her burn. He'd watched her die for the sin of knowing which herbs could soothe a fever and which could ease a difficult birth. He called it witchcraft. To him, knowledge in the hands of the powerless was the ultimate rebellion. The idea that her son—her blood—was now crafting "unnatural things" was not just a breach of rules; it was a personal affront, a ghost spitting on his authority.
The barracks door slammed open with a sound like a thunderclap. Dragos stood framed in the doorway, flanked by four soldiers, their iron-tipped spears glinting. His face was a thundercloud of pure rage.
"On your feet, scum!" he bellowed, his voice scraping like slag dragged over rock.
The raid was chaos poured into a confined space. They were not searching; they were destroying. Cots were overturned, thin blankets ripped, meager possessions scattered and trampled. The sounds were a symphony of our misery: the splintering of wood, the dull thud of a rifle butt against a man's ribs, the whimpers of those too slow or too defiant. Dragos moved through it all like a storm's eye, his gaze fixed on me. He was making his way to my corner, prolonging the terror, making me watch as he dismantled the lives of others on his way to mine.
My heart was a cold stone in my chest. I had hidden the spider in a hollowed-out block of wood beneath my cot, a secret sanctum in a world that owned my every breath. It was all I had left of myself.
Dragos reached my corner. He kicked aside my blanket, his eyes scanning the dirt floor. Then his heavy, iron-nailed boot came down on the wooden block.
There was a sharp, sickening snap. A sound only I could truly comprehend. Not just of wood, but of tiny, intricate gears crushing, of fine wires twisting and breaking. The sound of my soul being stepped on.
My stomach plummeted, leaving a hollow void. Dragos bent down, picked up the splintered pieces of wood, and let the mangled corpse of my creation spill from his hand. The tiny, crushed legs, the delicate escapement gears, the fine copper wiring—all of it lay ruined in the dust. A masterpiece of miniature mechanics, reduced to refuse.
He held up the largest piece, a section of the thorax with a gear still half-embedded in it, for all to see. The silence in the barracks was absolute, thick with the stench of fear.
"Witchcraft," he snarled, the word a venomous spit. He looked directly at me, a triumphant, hateful sneer twisting his lips. "Just like your mother."
No one moved. No one spoke. The men who had shuffled closer to me in the food line now stared at the floor, their faces pale. The boy who had given me the nail shrank back into the shadows. In their silence, I was utterly, irrevocably alone.
They dragged me from the relative cool of the barracks into the searing, white-hot glare of the smelting yard. The air shimmered with heat, thick with the acrid smell of burning coal and molten iron. The entire mine's population had been herded into the yard, a silent, captive audience for my humiliation. Ladles of glowing, liquid metal were being poured into molds, casting the very bars of our prison. Today, they would serve another purpose.
Dragos climbed onto a crate, his shadow falling long and monstrous over the assembled slaves. "That which is born of a witch must bear her mark!" he roared, his voice echoing off the quarry walls. The words were a deliberate, cruel mockery. The same charge, the same verdict, a generation later. History, I thought with a terrifying clarity, was not a river. It was a cage.
A standard branding was on the arm or back—a mark of ownership. But Dragos's cruelty demanded a more personal stage. He barked an order. A soldier took a encasing with holes that resembling a face and thrust it into a bed of glowing coals. They weren't making a symbol. They were making a mask.
Two guards seized me, forcing me to my knees in the dirt. I did not struggle. My body was their property, they could do with it as they wished. But my mind, my will—that was still mine. I locked my eyes on Dragos, pouring every ounce of my being into that stare. I would not give him the satisfaction of my fear.
The iron sheet began to glow, first a dull red, then a furious orange, and finally, a blinding, malevolent white. They pulled it from the coals with a long pair of tongs. The heat washed over my face from feet away, a promise of the agony to come.
I did not scream. Not at first.
They pinned my head back. I saw the white-hot plate descending, the air around it wobbling. Then it touched my face.
Pain.
It was not a word sufficient for the experience. It was an annihilation of self. A supernova erupting from a single point on my face. The sound was a deafening sizzle, the smell a nauseating mix of burning hair and my own flesh charring, fusing, melting. It was a fire that didn't just burn the surface but plunged deep, searing nerve and muscle and bone. My world dissolved into a universe of pure, white agony.
"Hold him!" Dragos bellowed. He took the tongs himself and forced the plate harder against my skin, shaping the molten ruin of my face with a craftsman's deliberate cruelty. He was not just marking me; he was sculpting me in his own image of damnation. The first, warped, brutal imprint of a mask I had not chosen.
Through the haze of torment, I saw the faces in the crowd. Some looked away, their hands over their mouths. Some wept silently. But a few—the ones who had whispered "Iron Sorcerer" with awe in their voices—watched with a new kind of horror. A dawning belief that no ordinary man could endure this. That perhaps the whispers were true.
My body convulsed, every muscle screaming for release, but my mind had found a sanctuary. A dark, cold place where the pain could not extinguish the fire within. As the searing agony threatened to swallow my consciousness, I clung to the one thing I had left. Not life. Not hope.
Hatred.
A pure, diamond-hard hatred for General Karath, the architect of my family's ruin. A white-hot, liquid hatred for Dragos, the craven instrument of my torture. A vast, cosmic hatred for a world that demanded I accept my suffering in silence.
The pain became fuel. My mind, a forge of its own, began to recite a mantra, hammering it into the core of my being with every agonizing heartbeat.
Pain is temporary. The throne is eternal.
Pain is temporary. The throne is eternal.
The world finally bled to black. I collapsed into the dirt, the smoking metal still fused to my face, a permanent part of me. Consciousness fled, but my mind did not find peace. It plunged into a fever-dream, a vision forged in fire.
I saw a man, Elias, standing not at a common forge, but at an altar of creation, shaping starlight with his hammer. The vision shifted. I stood on a balcony overlooking a kingdom of soaring iron towers and humming, intricate machines, a city that pulsed with energy I commanded. Below me was a throne, not of gold or stone, but of gleaming, living metal that shifted and reformed at my slightest whim.
Elias turned to me, his eyes not filled with pity, but with a terrible, demanding fire. His voice was the tolling of a great iron bell.
"Rise, Victor. Rise… or be nothing."
I woke in darkness. The pain was a dull, throbbing sun on the side of my face. I could feel coarse linen stuck to the wound with dried blood. A cup of water was pressed to my lips. I drank, the liquid a cool balm in my scorched throat. Opening my one good eye, I saw the silhouettes of two figures. Mila, a woman whose kindness had always been a quiet rebellion, holding the cup. Kael, a broad-shouldered man I'd seen fight two guards at once, stood watch at the barracks door.
They were not just helping a fellow slave. They were tending to their nascent god, their Iron Sorcerer. Their belief was a palpable thing in the dark.
I tried to speak. My throat was raw, my jaw stiff with agony. The word came out as a ragged, rasping whisper, barely audible.
"Bring… me… scrap."
Mila paused, her hand trembling. She had expected a request for more water, for rest, for some small comfort. She had not expected this. Not a plea for survival, but a demand for materials. A command to resume the work.
The pain had not broken me. It had clarified me. It had burned away everything that was not essential, leaving only the adamantium core of my will. It had defined me.
Later, when they were gone, I sat alone in the suffocating dark. My hand, trembling slightly, rose to my face. My fingers traced the metal that now encased my face. They brushed against the rough, cool, unyielding surface of the iron, now permanently fused to my flesh and bone.
I did not see disfigurement. I saw a foundation. I saw the beginning of an identity that would one day command fear not just in a mining camp, but across nations. My enemy had given me a mark of shame. I would reforge it into a crown of terror.
A single tear traced a path down through the hole for my eye. It was not a tear of weakness, or of pain, but of pure, undiluted fury. Fury at being scarred by another's hand, at having my face, my very identity, dictated by the whim of a lesser man.
Softly, my voice a blade being sharpened in the night, I made a vow to the darkness, to my mother's ghost, to the uncaring gods of iron and fire.
"One day… the world will wear my mark."