The Great Hall was, for the first time in a month, completely silent.
The Sun-Bricks in the hearth burned with their clean, white flame, but they offered no warmth against the chill that had just entered the room.
The large, silk-wrapped box sat on the oaken table. The head of the Southern knight was inside, its dead eyes staring at the ceiling.
Lord Valdemar was ashen. He had collapsed into his high-backed chair, his face the color of old parchment.
"Finished," he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. "We are finished. We survived the South, only to be murdered by the North."
Silas, the new Chief Overseer, was no better. He was trembling, his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles were white.
"He controls the mines, my Lord. He controls all of them. The Black Bear... Baron von Hess... he doesn't just own the iron; he is the iron. He'll cut us off. We can't make plows. We can't make weapons. We can't even make nails. He... he'll starve us out, just like the cold did."
"Worse," Valdemar said, his voice hollow.
"He'll send men like that, Herald. He'll kill us in our beds and call it a 'favor.' That man... that thing... he sent a message. He's watching. He knows. And he's just... toying with us."
The two men were trapped in a spiral of fear, their minds snapping under the pressure of a true Faction Rival.
They were mice realizing the cat had been letting them play all along.
In the midst of this suffocating panic, Fyrion was calm.
He was examining the head.
He wasn't looking at the dead eyes or the shocked expression. His alchemist's mind was analyzing the wound.
'A clean cut,' he thought, his fingers gently probing the severed neck tissue.
'No hesitation. A heavy, single-edged blade. Probably a Northern war-axe. The blood... it's clotted, but the tissue preservation is excellent. He used a salt-and-ash mix. Crude, but effective.'
He looked up from his "gift" and at the two broken men who were supposed to be running his house.
Pathetic.
They were still thinking like vassals, trapped in a one-resource economy. The Baron controlled iron, therefore the Baron controlled everything.
Their minds were small, their imaginations stunted. They couldn't see the solution that was sitting right in front of them, it was the same as the tallow-case, it was Grom then but now it was black bear at their throats.
"Silas," Fyrion said. His voice was so calm it was jarring.
Silas flinched, pulling his gaze from his lord's despair. "Y-yes, Master?"
"You're hyperventilating. You're fogging up the room. Stop it."
"But Master!" Silas cried, his voice cracking. "The iron! The Baron! We have no counter! He's the source!"
Fyrion finally closed the lid on the box, his movements precise, unhurried. "He's not the source, Silas. He's a supplier. And a lazy one at that."
He turned, his bruised, mouth earlier form the face off against shadow wolves still visible.
"He controls the iron from the earth. The mines. The ore."
Valdemar looked up, his eyes filled with a desperate, angry confusion. "What other iron is there, boy?! Do you plan to pluck it from the sky?"
Fyrion paused. A slow, cold smile touched his lips.
"Yes. As a matter of fact, I do."
Silas and Valdemar just stared, convinced their new master had finally, truly gone mad.
'In my past life,' Fyrion thought in his mind dropping into the familiar, confident tone of a Grandmaster lecturing his apprentices, 'the Imperial Alchemists spent a fortune trying to find a better, purer source of steel. They failed. Their minds were too rigid. They only looked in the mines.'
He tapped his own temple. 'But I was 'rubbish.' I had time. I didn't just read the approved texts. I read the 'useless' ones. The forbidden ones. The scrolls of the old Astromancers.'
He looked at his father. "The Baron controls iron ore. But he doesn't control starmetal."
"Starmetal?" Silas whispered. "You mean... the meteor protected by that beastly tribe?"
"A meteorite," Fyrion corrected. "A massive one. It fell in the high peaks of the Ironfang Mountains, three hundred years ago. The locals thought it was a curse from the gods and shunned the place. The Frost-blood guardians on the other hand protect it like it's their god."
"The Baron thinks it's just a worthless, poison-filled rock. But it's not. It's almost 99% pure, raw, uncorrupted iron, already forged by the heat of its descent. It doesn't need a blast furnace. It doesn't need to be separated from rock. It just needs...to be collected and made into weapons."
He was already moving, walking out of the house, his mind on the next phase.
"What if," he said, more to himself than to them, "we could make steel... without his iron? What if we could make better steel? Lighter. Stronger. Steel that can hold a magical edge."
He entered the training yard, where Gregor was drilling the new recruits. The 40 men—Grom's sons, the new young and talented recuirts and his father's old guards—were a single, cohesive unit now, their movements sharp, their eyes eager.
They snapped to attention as Fyrion entered.
"Gregor," Fyrion called out, not breaking stride.
The old soldier slammed a mailed fist to his chest. "My Lord."
"Gather your twenty best. The ones who can climb and march. Travel light. Bring ropes, heavy furs, and every mining pick we own."
Gregor's one good eye narrowed. The air was thick with the news of the Baron's "gift."
He could smell the fear in the castle. Now, this. A "light" march into the high peaks, in the dead of winter? It was a suicide run.
"A raid, my Lord?" Gregor asked, his voice a low rumble. "Are we... are we foolish enough to strike at the Baron's mines?"
The men tensed, their hands gripping their new steel-tipped spears. They were loyal, but they weren't fools. Attacking the Baron's home turf was a death sentence.
Fyrion stopped at the gate. He looked back at the old soldier, then up at the impossibly high, snow-covered, jagged peaks of the Ironfang Mountains, which stood like a wall against the world.
A dark, predatory smile played on his lips.
"No, Gregor. That's what a fool would do."
He turned, his fur-lined coat whipping in the wind.
"We're not going for his mines. We're going hunting. For a meteorite."