The air that left the ancient sanctum was stale and dead; the air I breathed upon my return was charged with purpose. Below, in the lightless heart of the mountain, I had not found answers. I had found the correct questions, and in their geometry, the shape of my destiny was finally rendered clear. The iron mask, once a symbol of my humiliation, now felt like a conduit. It was cold against my scarred flesh, but a faint, residual thrum of arcane energy warmed it from within, a secret only I could feel.
As I walked the main artery of the mine, my footsteps echoed with a new finality. The others, my followers, the beaten and the desperate who saw in me a spark they'd lost, parted before me. They did not bow—Karath's whip had broken that instinct in them—but they averted their eyes. They sensed the change. I returned to the surface a law unto myself. I said nothing of the machine, of the forgotten science and forbidden sorcery intertwined in its core. Not yet. Knowledge is power, and power, hoarded, is a weapon.
My first objective required not a weapon, but a creator of them. It required a man who had been unmade.
In the choking haze of the camp's far corner, where the heat of the forge fought a losing battle with the mountain's eternal chill, was the domain of Old Bran. He was a ruin of a man, a walking testament to the price of failed rebellion. One leg was a twisted thing, improperly set after being shattered by a guard's maul years ago, forcing him to lean on the anvil like a lover. One eye was a milky, sightless orb, the skin around it a puckered roadmap of an old burn. I knew his story. Everyone did. Bran had been a free man once, a master smith whose name carried weight. He had dared to raise a hammer against the first of Karath's legionaries. For his defiance, he lost his forge, his family, and his pride. Karath, in a stroke of cruel genius, had not killed him. He had broken him and left him here to serve as a living warning. Now, his once-famed hands, which had forged the swords of Latverian honor guards, were tasked with repairing the shackles that bound his countrymen and sharpening the picks that scraped away their lives. The children feared his explosive temper, born of impotent rage. The men pitied his hollowed spirit. He was a ghost haunting the embers of his own life.
He was perfect.
That night, I moved after the curfew bell had tolled its iron dirge. The guards were a predictable system of patrol routes and blind spots, their efficiency a weakness I had long ago mapped. I understood the workings of this prison better than its architects. The hissing of a steam conduit, the rhythmic clank of a distant pump—they were the ticks of a clock by which I measured my stealth. I slipped into the forge's oppressive heat, a shadow detaching itself from other shadows.
The reaction was instinctual. A shape lunged from the darkness, and the air split with the whistle of a heavy hammer. I moved with a precision born of brutal necessity, the hammerhead grazing my shoulder as I pivoted. It struck the stone wall behind me, sending a shower of sparks into the gloom.
Bran stood panting, the hammer held low, his one good eye wide with feral readiness. He thought I was a guard, come to mete out some late-night punishment.
I stepped forward, letting the forge's sullen orange glow catch the contours of my mask. "Bran," I said. My voice, filtered through the metal, was flat and devoid of emotion.
The blacksmith froze. The aggression drained from him, replaced by a primal dread. He recoiled as if the firelight had revealed not a man, but a demon summoned from the mountain's depths. The hammer slipped from his grip, clattering on the stone floor.
I ignored it. "I come to build."
His good eye, a chip of hard, weary slate, narrowed. "Build?" he rasped, the sound like grinding stone. "Here, we only break. Ourselves. Each other. The mountain. Get out." He turned away, his ruined leg dragging, a motion of profound finality.
"I will not," I stated. It was not a request.
"Then the guards will find you, and I will watch them beat you to death." He spat into the coals. "I want no part of another fool's crusade. I have paid the price for hope before. Never again."
I did not threaten him. I did not plead. I simply began to speak, my voice a clinical scalpel dissecting the wreck of his life. "The left leg, shattered tibia and fibula. The break was clean, but the camp surgeon was drunk. Now you favor it, causing atrophy in the right gluteus and a permanent curvature of the spine. The right eye, third-degree burns from spilled slag when a guard shoved you. The resulting blindness has compromised your depth perception, forcing you to gauge distances with your hands, a constant humiliation for a master smith."
He stopped, his back rigid.
"They took your wife and daughter in the first purge," I continued, each word a precisely placed weight. "You were made to watch. Afterward, you were assigned to repair the very shackles they were taken away in. The guards mock you, calling you 'Sparky' when they think you cannot hear. You drink fermented fungus mash to sleep, but you still see the fire." I paused. "Your spirit has been systematically dismantled. You are already dead, Bran. I offer you resurrection."
A tremor ran through his broad shoulders. He turned slowly, and the firelight caught the glistening track of a single tear carving a path through the soot on his cheek. The façade of bitter resignation, the armor he had worn for a decade, cracked into a thousand pieces.
"What… what do you want to build?" he whispered, his voice broken.
I knelt, the metal of my greaves scraping on the stone. Using my finger, I began to draw in the layer of soot and ash covering the floor of the forge. The lines were sharp, exact, a schematic born of genius and desperation.
"Gauntlets," I said.
Bran squinted, leaning closer. At first, he saw only armored gloves. But as I added details—articulated joints of an impossible complexity, notations for layered plating, chambers where no muscle or bone should be—he understood.
"This is madness," he breathed. "The weight, the articulation… a man couldn't move his fingers in such a contraption."
"A man will not be powering them alone," I explained, drawing a circle over the back of the hand. "Here, a pressure capacitor, charged by kinetic movement. Here, along the fingers, channels for impact-conduction runes." I sketched a series of jagged, alien symbols. "And here," I tapped a spot on the inner wrist, "a resonance plate, forged with a sliver of the material I recovered from below. It will harmonize with the user's bio-signature and the mountain's own energy." I added a final detail: a small, hidden compartment in the palm. "For future modifications."
Bran did not understand the arcane script. He did not need to. He was a master of form and function, of stress points and leverage. He saw an engine for the hand, a masterpiece of mechanical engineering that defied all known principles. His craftsman's soul, so long dormant, stirred.
He reached out a trembling, calloused finger, tracing the design in the ash. "The force amplification… by the old gods, these could shatter stone…"
I looked up, my gaze meeting his through the cold iron of my mask. "These will shatter an empire."
For a long moment, the only sound was the crackle of the dying fire. Bran looked from the drawing on the floor to the unreadable mask of my face. He saw the abyss of another failed rebellion, another mountain of bodies. But he also saw a glimmer of something else: a plan forged not in desperate hope, but in cold, calculating intellect.
"I will do it," he said, his voice regaining a sliver of its old, iron resolve. "But you will swear an oath. Not for vengeance. Not for freedom. That is your path. But you will swear this to me: If you rise… you lift the others with you."
I hesitated. My vision was singular, my path a straight, brutal line to the throne of this broken land. Conquest was my goal, not charity. The masses were a tool, a stepping stone. But I saw the conviction in his one good eye. This was his price. And the machine he would build was priceless.
"You have the word of Victor," I said. The promise was an equation, cold and precise. An unbreakable, logical binding.
We sealed it in the old Latverian way, a pact as ancient as the mountain itself. We each clasped the other's forearm, holding them over the glowing heart of the forge until the heat was unbearable, searing the oath into our flesh. A bond of fire and iron.
Our work began that night, a conspiracy conducted in whispers and muffled hammer blows. By day, Bran was the broken smith, repairing tools for Karath's war machine. By night, he was my architect. He smuggled scraps of high-grade steel, skimming from shipments meant for siege engines. I, in turn, would descend into the sanctum, returning with thin, resonant plates of the unknown metal, scavenged from the dormant machine.
We worked in a strange, silent synchronization. His sweat dripped onto the steel I held steady. My precise calculations guided his powerful, practiced hands. It was craft and science, sorcery and sweat. In the rhythmic clang of his hammer, I heard the future pulse of a new world order. I saw his hands, once palsied with despair, grow steady and sure. My own hands never tired, never faltered. The forge became our sanctuary.
After weeks of clandestine labor, the right gauntlet was complete. It was a marvel of dark iron and alien alloy, its surface etched with runes that seemed to drink the firelight. I slid my hand inside. The fit was perfect, a second skin of steel.
And then I felt it. A low hum vibrated up my arm, a caged storm coiling into existence. Faint green light pulsed from the runes, tracing lines of power across the metal. I flexed my fingers. The movement was fluid, effortless, yet I could feel a vast, waiting power thrumming just beneath the surface.
I lifted my arm, my gaze falling upon a discarded iron shackle on the workbench. I closed my fist.
The crunch was not loud, but it was absolute. The shackle, thick enough to hold a bear, did not bend or warp. It shattered, crumbling into metallic dust and twisted fragments like brittle clay.
Bran stumbled backward, his one good eye wide with a mixture of terror and awe. He stared at the gauntlet, then at the dust on the bench.
"This…" he stammered, his voice a hoarse whisper. "This is not a weapon."
I lowered my arm, the green light fading, the hum receding into a watchful silence. I could feel the power still coiled within, awaiting my command. Through the mask, my eyes gleamed.
"No," I said. "It is a beginning."
Word did not spread of a weapon, or of a coming revolt. Such talk was swiftly punished. But something else trickled through the barracks and tunnels. A change in the air. The slaves noticed that Old Bran's fire no longer died down at night. They saw the grim set of his jaw had been replaced by a focused intensity. They felt a shift, a change in pressure, as if the entire mountain was holding its breath. Hope was too dangerous a word, but a current was building in the deep.
I gathered my closest acolytes, the few I trusted with a fraction of the truth. "The first piece is forged," I told them in the darkness. "But when the true forging begins, the world must not hear the hammer. Not yet."
Later, I stood alone in the abandoned tunnels of the ancient complex, the gauntlet a heavy, living weight on my hand. I faced a pillar of solid rock, a support that had held the mountain's weight for centuries. I drew my arm back and punched.
The impact was a dull, echoing thud. Spiderweb cracks raced across the stone. The green energy in the gauntlet flared, pulsing across the metal like awakening veins. The power I had used was a fraction of what it held.
I looked at the fractured pillar, then at the instrument of its ruin on my hand.
"One gauntlet for liberation," I whispered into the resonant silence. "The next for dominion."
Far below, from the sanctum's core, the ancient machinery answered with a low, tremoring hum, as if the mountain itself was stirring from a long slumber, ready to bow to its new master.