Chapter 4 – The Ash of the Peninsula

The world is made of glass. The earth beneath us, scorched by the catastrophic eruption of heat from Garam’s body, has fused into a smooth, blackened mirror. Smoke drifts in lazy spirals from the crater we now sit in.

Between us, the heavy temple chain that bound my left wrist to his right is a warped, slagged ruin. The cursed metal absorbed the brunt of the blast. I drag myself up, my boots slipping on the slick, cooled glass. My left arm aches with a dull, throbbing intensity, but the chain is brittle now. The heat compromised its temper.

I draw my sword. The blade is pristine, untouched by the ash. I wedge the tip into the cracked, bubbled seam of the iron link encircling Garam’s massive wrist. I twist.

With a hollow snap, the ruined metal shatters. The heavy iron falls to the glass floor, leaving only a ring of bruised skin behind.

I step back, sheathing my sword. The freezing wind immediately bites at my face, a stark contrast to the suffocating heat radiating from the man kneeling before me. "You are unbound," I say, my voice hoarse from the ozone and smoke. I gesture to the sprawling, shadowed mountains of the north. "The court’s leash is broken. Go."

Garam does not move. He is on his hands and knees, his broad shoulders heaving. The imperial dragon crest he swallowed is tearing him apart from the inside. The malice forged into that royal iron is a poison to a creature who honors the maker. His skin pulses with erratic, violent flashes of blinding white light, the curse fighting his own internal furnace.

He grinds his teeth, a sound like boulders crushing together. He reaches a hand toward his own chest, fingers hooked into claws, as if trying to rip the poisoned metal directly from his ribs.

I step forward and grab his wrist to stop him.

The moment my bare palm touches his burning skin, the world vanishes.

A memory, entirely not my own, slams into my skull. I am staring up at a soot-stained ceiling. The smell of blood and raw ore is overpowering. Heavy iron chisels and sledgehammers rain down. I feel the sickening, jarring impact as a wedge of steel is driven directly into my shoulder. They are mining me. They are hacking off pieces of my flesh while I am fully conscious, harvesting the unkillable iron to forge a tyrant’s gate. The absolute, suffocating terror of being an object, a quarry of living metal, presses the air from my lungs.

I gasp, wrenching my hand back. I stumble on the glass, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

Garam is looking at me, his eyes wide and fractured with agony. He knows what I just saw. The court did not just chain him; they butchered him for parts.

"Get it out," he chokes, the white light beneath his skin flaring dangerously bright. The heat begins to crack the glass beneath him. "It is burning the names. Get it out."

He is going critical again. If the curse consumes him, the resulting shockwave will obliterate the rest of the ravine and me with it.

I drop to my knees. I strip off my heavy leather glove. My thumb and index finger are already numb, the whorls burned away. I press my bare palm flat against the center of his chest, directly over the blinding heat.

I find the bitter, toxic signature of the royal forge. I close my eyes. I pull.

The malice of the court rushes into my hand like a swarm of barbed wire. It is heavy, arrogant, dripping with the cruelty of the King. I force it through the filter of my flesh, letting the magic sear into the pad of my middle finger. The pain is a sharp, blinding spike that travels straight up my arm to my jaw. The unique, sensitive ridges of my middle finger—the nerves I use to gauge the exact temperature of a cooling blade in the dark—fry into nothingness. The skin melts smooth.

I drag the extracted malice outward, exhaling sharply. The air between us warps, and a fine, black dust sifts from my fingers, scattering onto the glass. The poison is gone.

I slump back, clutching my ruined hand to my chest.

Garam exhales a long, shuddering breath. The dangerous white light beneath his skin fades, returning to a steady, banking orange. He looks at the open expanse of the northern mountains. He looks at the broken chain on the ground. Then, he looks at me.

Slowly, the grinding of iron plates begins to resonate from deep within his chest. But he is not expanding. He is drawing inward.

The blistering heat radiating from him drops drastically. His massive, hulking frame compresses, the unnatural density folding down until he is no larger than a tall, broad-shouldered man. His skin cools, shifting from the color of hot coals to a dark, tempered bronze. He locks the beast away, sealing his own terrifying nature inside a deeply human shell. He does it so he will not burn me.

He stays.

He sits back on the glass, drawing his knees up, looking entirely human save for the glowing embers of his eyes. "That royal iron," he says, his voice a low, quiet rumble now. "It was not meant to control me."

I look up, nursing my hand. "What was it meant to do?"

"I do not die when I eat cursed metal, Muyeong," Garam says, watching the ash drift down like snow over the ruined landscape. "The curse accelerates the furnace. It builds. If I were to eat the rebel armories behind the monastery gates while carrying that royal malice… the pressure would break the vessel."

He turns his burning gaze to me.

"I would not die. I would ignite. A walking, uncontrollable inferno that cannot be quenched until there is absolutely nothing left to burn."

The cold wind cuts through my sweat-drenched clothes. The realization falls into place with a quiet, sickening click. The King did not send an armorer and a chained beast to the front lines to breach a gate. He did not send us to win a war.

He sent us to turn the entire northern peninsula—the rebels, the farming villages, the forests, the history—into an ocean of ash. And he used my hands to guide the match.

If the King is willing to incinerate half his own country just to erase a rebellion, I realize with a cold dread, what else is he hiding in the royal foundries?