Chapter 3 – The Weight of Rust

The ash in the air coats the back of my throat like crushed glass. Every step through the freezing mud drags at the heavy iron chain linking my left wrist to his right. Behind us, the burning wreckage of the prison carriage fades into the fog, a testament to the meal that bought our escape.

Garam walks in silence, a towering shadow of impossible density. The rainwater sizzles and turns to steam the moment it touches his dark, metallic skin. He ate the carriage cage to get us out, but the iron was poor, riddled with impurities. It was not enough to sustain a Bulgasari on the march. The deeper we trek into the northern front, the heavier the scent of oxidized blood and abandoned steel becomes. It is a graveyard of shattered weaponry.

A tremor travels down the chain. Garam stumbles. His massive frame hits the mud, the impact shuddering through the soles of my boots. He braces his free hand against the earth, his breathing shallow and rapid. The glow in his eyes is dimming to a sickly, suffocating gray.

"I need…" His voice grinds, the sound of millstones running dry. "The iron here. It is hollow. Rusted to nothing."

I drop to my knees beside him. The heat rolling off him is erratic, spiking and crashing in dangerous waves. I scan the corpse-strewn trench we are navigating. Half-buried in the muck lies a rebel infantry sword. The blade is notched, slick with dried blood and the desperate terror of the man who died holding it.

I drag the weapon out of the mud and drag it toward us.

"Do not eat it yet," I order, my voice harsh in the freezing air.

I wrap my bare left hand around the serrated edge of the blade. My thumb and first two fingers are already numb, smooth as glass. I press the pad of my ring finger against the cold steel. I close my eyes and pull.

The magic bites instantly. The metallic tang of rust floods my mouth. A violent, flashing memory rips through my skull—the frantic strike of a hammer in a rebel forge, the panicked prayer of a smith knowing this blade was too brittle for war, and then the blinding, tearing agony of a royal halberd shattering the steel and the soldier wielding it. I swallow the phantom scream. The friction burns the ridges of my ring finger away, searing the skin smooth.

I gasp, dropping the purified steel into the mud. "Take it."

Garam lunges. He grasps the sword, bringing it to his mouth. His jaws unhinge slightly, teeth like jagged obsidian shearing through the thick steel. The sound of metal crushing against metal is deafening. He swallows the blade in three violent bites.

Instantly, the heat in his body surges. The steam rising from his skin thickens, wrapping around us in a suffocating, intimate cocoon. He leans forward, his chest heaving, his face mere inches from mine. His eyes ignite into a steady, molten orange. The sheer physical gravity of him pulls at me. He stares at my left hand, at the fresh, smooth burn on my ring finger. Slowly, deliberately, he presses his scorching forehead against my shoulder. A low, vibrating hum of gratitude resonates from his chest into my ribs.

We push forward. The fog lifts, revealing the charred remains of a farming hamlet caught in the crossfire. The rebels have been routed here, leaving only ruins.

Near the remains of a collapsed barn, a heavy iron plow sits half-buried in the frozen earth. It is massive, a solid block of pure, forged iron. A feast.

Garam stops. The chain goes taut. I look back, expecting him to tear the plow apart. His chest expands, drawing in the scent of the metal, but his jaw clenches shut. He takes a deliberate step back.

"Eat," I tell him, shivering in the biting wind. "We have miles to go. You need the mass."

"No." The word is a heavy thud of stone. He points a massive finger at the handle of the plow.

Carved into the iron is a crude, uneven mark—three lines crossing like a wheat stalk.

"It has a name," Garam says, his gaze locked on the mark. The hunger in his eyes is feral, starving, but he does not move an inch closer. "A maker poured their sweat into that crest. They did not give it to me. I do not consume a named thing without the maker’s permission."

I stare at the monster the King called a mindless engine of destruction. He is starving to death, yet he honors the sanctity of a village smith’s mark—a courtesy the royal court never once extended to me. The realization twists in my chest, a sharp, unfamiliar ache that has nothing to do with magic.

But the restraint comes at a cost.

As we enter a narrow ravine, the geography of the war reveals itself. Thousands of broken weapons—pikes, shields, arrowheads—are piled against the stone walls, creating a barricade of twisted, blood-soaked iron.

Garam stops dead. He drops to his knees, clapping both hands over his ears. A localized shockwave of heat blasts outward, singeing the edges of my leather coat.

"Too loud," he roars, the sound tearing from his throat in genuine agony. "The voices. They are all screaming."

The ambient memory trapped in the thousands of discarded weapons is overloading his senses. He does not just eat iron; he carries the ghosts of everyone who ever struck an anvil. The mass of suffering in this ravine is crushing him.

"Garam!" I grab his shoulders, trying to ground him. The heat is unbearable, blistering my palms through my gloves. "Focus on me. Block them out!"

He thrashes, the chain jerking me violently forward. His eyes are wide, unseeing, completely consumed by the deafening roar of dead smiths.

In a blind panic, starving and desperate to silence the noise, Garam reaches out and grabs a cluster of royal pikes embedded in the barricade.

"No!" I scream, lunging for the metal to filter it. "I haven’t pulled the memory—"

My fingers brush the steel a fraction of a second too late. Garam bites down on the spearheads. The metal snaps.

The heavy imperial dragon crest is stamped directly onto the iron he just swallowed. It is a royal weapon. Forged in the King’s blood-magic furnaces, saturated with the cursed malice of the court.

The reaction is instantaneous and catastrophic.

Garam’s spine arches backward, snapping with a sickening crack. The veins in his neck and arms ignite, flashing from orange to a blinding, violent white. The heat does not radiate; it explodes. The ground beneath him turns instantly to glass.

The iron chain linking our wrists flares incandescent. Searing, unimaginable agony rips up my left arm. The air around us combusts, sucking the oxygen from my lungs. Garam turns to me, his face twisting into a mask of pure, uncontrolled hellfire, the curse incinerating whatever humanity he had left.