The sky over Korth was never blue. It was a permanent, bruised shade of charcoal, choked by the soot of a thousand necromantic forges. In the Iron City, death was not an end; it was a career change.
Valerica stood over the operating table, her hands slick with a mixture of formaldehyde and black ichor. Before her lay what remained of Sergeant Hallow—a man who had died three times in the service of King Malakor. His chest was a cavern of shattered ribs, and his left arm was missing from the elbow down.
“More Soul-Iron wire,” Valerica commanded, her voice muffled by her leather mask.
Her assistant, a shambling husk with a brass plate bolted over its jaw, handed her a spool of glowing blue wire. Valerica worked with the precision of a clockmaker. She wasn’t just stitching flesh; she was weaving the “Aetheric Tether” that would pull Hallow’s soul back into his meat.
She threaded the wire through the Sergeant’s vocal cords and then down into his heart. With a sharp twist of a silver tuning fork, she struck the wire. A low, vibrating hum filled the room, and Hallow’s body arched off the table. His eyes—milky white and sunken—snapped open, igniting with a cold, ghostly blue fire.
“Status?” Valerica asked, her heart hammering.
Hallow’s jaw clicked, the Soul-Iron wire pulling his muscles into a grotesque approximation of speech. “Ready… to… serve… the… Crown.”
Valerica sighed, wiping her brow. She was only twenty-one, the youngest Senior Surgeon in the Ministry of Resurrection, but she felt a century old. She looked out the narrow window of her lab at the city below. Korth was a sprawling industrial nightmare. Giant cranes moved massive crates of “raw material”—the bodies of fallen enemies and loyal citizens alike—toward the processing plants.
The “Iron Guard” marched through the streets in perfect, rhythmic unison. They didn’t eat, they didn’t sleep, and they never disobeyed. They were the perfect army, and Malakor was their god.
“He’s calling for you, Mistress,” the assistant rasped.
“Who?” Valerica asked, though she already knew.
“The Iron Crown. The King is in the Harvest Spire.”
Valerica felt a chill that had nothing to do with the refrigerated air of the morgue. The Harvest Spire was the tallest building in Korth, a jagged needle of black iron that pierced the clouds. It was where the King spent most of his time, connected to the “Great Reservoir”—the collective pool of souls that powered the entire kingdom.
She gathered her tools and made her way through the city. Everywhere she looked, she saw the “Stitched.” A baker with an iron hand; a street-sweeper with a translucent, magically-sustained torso; children whose eyes glowed with that same, haunting blue light. It was a kingdom of the half-dead, held together by the will of one man.
As she entered the Spire, she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.
In the lower transition chambers, hundreds of living citizens were being lined up. They weren’t soldiers. They were families—shopkeepers, weavers, mothers. They were being fitted with “Soul-Plugs,” the heavy iron spikes that were usually only used on corpses to prepare them for resurrection.
“Why are they being fitted?” she whispered to a passing guard.
The guard, a high-ranking Revenant with a face made of etched silver, looked at her. “The King has declared the Grand Alignment. The harvest begins tonight. All will be made eternal.”
Valerica’s blood turned to ice. “Eternal” was the King’s word for death. He wasn’t just raising the fallen anymore. He was going to kill everyone in the city to fuel his own ascension.
