Book 4 - Chapter 131 (Patreon)

A creature hiding in plain sight, that was him. Through the deep tunnels of the mountain, the train rumbled, carrying the soldiers of a lost war back to their home. But one of them was not like they seemed. Kiprian Kolotov, his pass said where it lay in his lap. A photograph within showed a man not unlike the man who now held it, but if one looked closely, something was deeply wrong.

A mole by the cheek was missing, the ears angled slightly too wide apart, the mouth too wide and thin.

In passing, no one would see the difference, or so he presumed.

But he was not Kiprian Kolotov. He was Wretch, a prophet of vermin, an omen of misfortune, a creature that had climbed up the flame's ascension through blood and blistered skin. Along the way, he changed skin more times than he could recall, and through all of it, this one was undoubtedly his least favorite.

But to get what he wanted, he would endure worse things than some blurry eyesight and fragile fingernails. He was searching for a Pyre, someone who stood at the fourth step of ascension. One step above a Blaze like himself.

A death sentence to even try, most would say, and perhaps they were right. Such things didn’t bother a creature who resided in stolen skin. What did bother him, however, was idle conversation.

“Imagine some cold-cream pie! These rations put us Gulschaks to shame. My father was a cook, you know!” said the thin soldier next to him on the vibrating train. The interior consisted only of a metal tube without windows, cushions, or tables. Within, soldiers nestled in rows from back to front. The man beside him had been fast asleep until fifteen minutes ago, and he had made sure Wretch knew that. “What do your parents do? Up in the mines is my guess?” the man continued.

Wretch glanced at the picture of Kiprian on his lap, then slowly turned his head towards his co-passenger. “I am Kiprian Kolotov. I only have my old gran Baba,” Wretch said, regurgitating the few bits he knew about the man in the picture. “I like money, women, and power?”

The soldier looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Alright?”

Wretch nodded in what he thought was an appropriately human gesture. “Yes.”

The soldier looked to his left, at another man who seemed so distraught with the outcome of the war that he simply stared with wide eyes down at the floor.

“By the Father, you gloomy bunch. We came further than we ever have this time. In the war of the next generation, we’ll surely beat on the gate of Nov Yanosk itself. We even hold Sternthal, imagine the things that could grow there.”

A low caw came from the backpack tucked between Wretch’s legs. Wretch sent a mental threat to the bird tucked in his belongings.

“What the hell was that?” asked the soldier.

“Ummh,” Wretch began as he readied to make up an answer. But the gloomy soldier beat him to it.

“It’s the call for death. All we’ve lost, why should we return when all those of our kin have died.”

The uniformed man in the middle glanced between them, then sighed and leaned back with eyes closed. “Just wake me up when we get home. Sweet, sweet Furnace, how I miss you.”

Wretch breathed a sigh of relief. He planned to infiltrate, but if that didn’t work, well. He could turn into a monster and slaughter the unblessed in this carriage in a handful of seconds.

His was the power over flesh and vermin, and many were bound to him, each creature sharing their senses. If he concentrated, he could see the different visions like a broken mirror. Most were rats, spread from here to Nov Yanosk, each with a goal in mind. One was human, a strange creature called Fingers who, at this precise moment, seemed to be in the middle of a burglary. Lastly, there was Buttons, his pet bird. He’d brought it with him without thought, and he didn’t regret it. He enjoyed the bird's antics, though perhaps not now.

Quiet or I chuck you out the door, he thought, sending the emotion through their shared connection.

He breathed in and, with an exhale he focused. All around him they moved, his bound vermin. Others within two hundred yards he could command, but the rats were scarce on this train. Only his chosen spies crawled beneath the seats, sharing visions of boots and ventilation filters.

A sudden click from some kind of sound-producing funnel and a voice blasted through the space. “We’re approaching a surface stretch. A blizzard has been reported. Be advised and gear up.”

As if the men and women were used to the command, they began pulling clothing from their packs. Woolen shirts and caps marked with the cog of the Gulschaks. His enemies.

“You don’t have any clothing, ohh friend. It’s going to be a cold welcome to the Furnace,” said his cabin-mate with a smirk.

Wretch returned a shrug and a friendly smile. Or at least he thought it was. “I lost it.”

A minute later, a cold wind crept in through the bolted sheets of metal. The train shuddered from forces beyond the iron shell. Wretch’s breath turned to mist, and the soldiers held their arms close.

Cold, even for him. His skin wasn’t ordinary and his flesh that of a Blaze, no matter how mundane he looked. No regular cold could hurt him, but this was something else. The storm beyond the train wracked the transport in fury and ice. His cabin-mate shivered, lips turning blue. “Damn, it is good to be home,” shuddered the soldier over the rumbling of strained steel and winds.

A moment later, it all grew quiet. The train had entered some kind of tunnel to shield them from the environment. The soldiers sighed in unison, removing their protective gear.

It took another hour before the train slowed. By then, many in the cabin were blue from the cold, and most of his rats had frozen to death. A select few he’d guided up his trousers for protection. Whatever place the Gulschak called home, it was no place for the ordinary, nor would escaping be easy. But what did such things matter.

The train gradually came to a halt, pistons screaming as metal ground against metal to slow a massive weight. Men and women stood up with expressions that changed between dread and elation.

“Let’s go, Buttons,” Wretch whispered and did as the others.

An instant congestion, loud shouts and hollers from outside.

The soldiers burst out of the train like an erupting sewer blockage. Wretch was among them, following the stream, acting as ordinary as he could.

The outside however, was a spectacle: a massive hall made from metal, large portable furnaces blasting heat, and a thousand civilians jumping with nervous excitement. Banners wrapped around pillars and colorful ribbons waved back and forth.

Many of the soldiers burst into tears at the mere sight of the civilians in their thick clothing, red cheeks, and twinkling eyes.

A chorus of voices all celebrating reunion. Words of love spoken with breaths that steamed in the cold. Some fell to their knees before their kin, but the joy was not shared with everyone. Many groups stood at a distance, eyes darting between the bleak faces of the soldiers. Then realization. Their son or daughter would not return in anything but memory. Such was war.

Wretch slithered between the bodies of the joyful and mourning on light feet—making for the exit in the distance. He passed the gloomy soldier, standing strangely straight with glassy eyes. A woman his age had her arms wrapped around him, but the youngling seemed as missing as those who hadn’t returned at all. Beside him, a soldier on a crutch let his only hand brush against the face of a child that carried his features. Some, it seemed, also came back in pieces.

Looking at the mix of grief and merriment, the true elation of returning to those you cared for, it was hard to see them as his enemies. Weeks earlier, Wretch and the soldiers around him would have been more than willing to kill and maim one another. Perhaps these unblessed were just collateral in a bigger game. Ammunition to be spent and then appeased by colorful banderoles and fanfare.

He pushed it aside. He was not here to kill those untouched by the flame. They’d stepped into his land and raised their weapons. And they’d paid the price, but he held nothing against their existence, lest they'd try that again.

One particular civilian, struck by a celebratory mood, raised a contraption above his head. With a twist, a poof of smoke, and ribbons blasted outwards.

Those who had returned all jolted in unison. All but one.

Wretch stepped towards a metal gate, manned by what he guessed were guards. Dressed in long coats that almost reached the floor and caps that covered their ears. The dark uniform marked by the Gulschak cog.

A line had already formed. One last check before freedom, and a duo of rats scurried down his leg in preparation.

A minute later, he revealed his pass to the guard. A glance at his face. “Welcome home, Kiprian Kolotov. You are going to catch a cold dressed like that. Have none come to meet you?”

Wretch shook his head.

The guard shrugged his shoulders. “Let me just take a look in your pack, and I’ll send you through.”

A pack Wretch knew was stuffed with a living bird and two Blessed blades wrapped in cloth. But he wasn’t nervous.

A dozen paces to the side, a man yelped in terror, twisting around in panic and pulling at his cloak. The guards all turned, and Wretch calmly snatched the pass back and strolled through the last checkpoint, sending the rat in the unfortunate soldier’s cloak to flee down the open leg of the pants the same way it had come.

Wretch took a turn through a circular metal pathway, the Gulschak love for steel more than apparent. Another turn and he melded in with the civilians, following a stream towards some destination he did not know.

It was freezing. His clothing would warm any man during winter down in Nov Yanosk, but here the cold was low enough to disgruntle even him.

A few minutes later the space opened up, a wide road curving both left and right. Along the road, machines pulled cargo without horses while belching smoke into the air. Wretch pushed past a pedestrian and made for the railing. His naked hands hurt as he placed them on the freezing metal.

And there it was. The Furnace. The Gulschak city hidden in the mountains.

A three-tiered pit under a metal lid.

A metal roof held up by uncountable metal beams around the rim and beneath it, a cone of emptiness. He stood at the uppermost section stretching ten miles across the perfectly circular abyss. Along the rim nestled entire neighbourhoods, and Wretch guessed more infrastructure hid further within the horizontal tunnels.

Deeper in the pit, layers of net stretched between the sections of the city, each one smaller and more compact as the cone-like city decreased in radius. Machines and tubing fought for space with no room left for design or sympathy.

Further still, several miles down at the very bottom of the city, an engine hummed. The contraption was the size of several city blocks and the design so intricate and convoluted it looked impossible to understand. The metal glowed a deep red to illuminate the city above.

The Furnace, a fitting name. To think this place is so freezing even with that thing running, Wretch thought.

He let his eyes wander over the unending jumble of machinery. Turning cogs the size of men, rattling chains, and steam-powered vehicles. This place was no decrepit exhibition of technology lost to time like his own home city. It was clear to anyone that here reigned ingenuity, carving a space in this freezing hell for humans to, if not flourish, at least endure. If Nov Yanosk held the might of an aged giant, this place held the potential of a child with the gift of genius.

Wretch tapped his fingers on the railing. Somewhere down there in the glowing heart of the city walked his target.

A series of clicks broke him out of his rumination. Along the sidewalk through the flow of pedestrians, something walked. A human figure, at least at a glance. Unlike the other pedestrians dressed for the biting cold, this one was almost naked. Wretch almost raised an eyebrow.

A man infested with machinery. A glowing engine nestled in the chest and ticking gears protruding from the skull. The fingertips were exchanged for round metal tips, and the thing walked on naked feet. The eyes were hollow, the jaw hanging slack. The people around him walked past the creature without the slightest hesitation or fear. Yet Wretch felt something from the metal-infused human. A presence from below.

Dangerous, Wretch thought and nonchalantly turned around with a whistle. He walked with hands in his pockets and the pack on his back, letting the flow of pedestrians take him away.

Well then, seems we need to find a place to stay, doesn’t it, Kiprian?

It took him four hours of continuous walking and directions to reach Coal Circle Seven. A neighbourhood away from the central chasm of the Furnace marked by simple and unadorned metal apartments. Now Wretch stood before one marked “1638 B”.

He knocked without delay, cracking his neck as he waited. A noise of dragging feet slowly approached the door, and a tiny hatch opened. A dimmed eye looked at him before shooting wide.

“Gran? It’s me, Kiprian,” Wretch said with a tilt of his head and a smile.

The door ripped open, and a metal pan flew towards his face.