The forges sang.
Not with music, but with the rhythm of creation and ruin , hammers colliding with iron, sparks carving brief constellations across the darkness. The heat was suffocating, even for one born of it.
Varok stood at the balcony of the Black Citadel and watched his empire breathe.
Below him stretched the heart of the Iron Dominion, a city without sunrise. Towering furnaces glowed like captive suns, and the air shimmered with steam, smoke, and the faint shimmer of chained lightning. Every machine was alive. Every wall hummed with the faint pulse of storm energy drawn from the sky itself.
He did not call it power. He called it memory.
The storm was not a weapon to him. It was an inheritance.
From his vantage, he could see the endless rows of storm conduits , spires rising into the ash-thick sky, tethered to orbs that glowed with bound energy. The enslaved tempests roared within them, coiled and screaming, begging to be released. Their cries were beautiful. To others, it would have sounded like thunder. To Varok, it sounded like devotion.
A voice cut through the low hum of the forges.
"My Prince," a soldier said, kneeling near the entrance. His armor was etched with veins of molten metal, his voice thick with static from the storms they had captured. "The reports have come from the south."
Varok turned slowly, his armor shifting like a living organism. Every movement of his body echoed with the resonance of steel against flesh. His eyes , molten gold with faint rings of silver , settled on the soldier.
"Speak," he said.
The soldier bowed lower. "The quarry has fallen. Drokmar of the Old Blood is gone."
Silence.
Even the forges seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat.
Varok looked back toward the horizon, his expression unreadable. The light from the molten rivers below painted his features in fire and shadow.
"Gone," he repeated, not as a question, but as a weighing of the word.
"Yes, my Prince. He fell defending the Ash Vault. The storm-bearer lives."
For the first time in what felt like centuries, Varok smiled , a faint, deliberate curve of the lips that held neither warmth nor joy.
"Of course he does," he said softly. "The storm would not choose lightly."
The soldier hesitated, uncertain whether to interpret that as approval or wrath. Varok spared him a glance , brief, precise, enough to silence further questions.
"Tell me," Varok said, his tone level, "what color was the sky when Drokmar fell?"
The soldier blinked. "The sky, my Prince?"
"Yes. The sky."
The man swallowed. "Red, my Prince. The clouds were red with lightning."
Varok's smile deepened, faint but satisfied. "Good. The storm remembers its grief."
He turned away again, descending the black stairs that led deeper into the citadel's core. His footsteps rang like measured bells. The air grew denser, thick with the scent of oil, molten ore, and old power.
At the base of the hall waited his Council , silhouettes of iron and flesh. Some still bore human forms, though none could be called men anymore. They were the Forged, his chosen. Once kings, once priests, once soldiers, now all bound to his will through metal and storm.
"My liege," one of them spoke , a tall woman, her left arm replaced with a blade of crimson alloy that pulsed faintly with runes. "The southern front collapses. The resistance grows bold. Shall we crush them?"
Varok paused at the head of the table. The room glowed faintly from the molten channels running through its walls. He studied the faces of his lieutenants , their devotion, their fear, their hunger.
"No," he said. "Let them grow bold. Let them believe the gods favor them. Let them speak of hope until their voices crack. Hope softens the spirit. Fear strengthens it. We will need strong souls when the dawn returns."
The council exchanged uneasy glances. They had served him long enough to know better than to question his meaning, yet every word carried a weight that demanded thought.
"The dawn?" one of them dared to ask. "You speak as if it can return."
Varok's eyes glimmered. "It can. It must. The world has forgotten its true shape. Men kneel to dead gods and call it faith. But I remember what it was to command the storm, to shape worlds, to be divine."
He raised his right hand , a gauntlet that pulsed faintly with captured lightning , and the air trembled. The forge fires bent toward him, drawn by unseen force. "Divinity was not stolen by gods. It was surrendered by men too weak to carry it."
He lowered his hand. "I mean to take it back."
Silence answered him, reverent and cold.
Another voice broke it. "My Prince, if I may, Drokmar's fall may unbalance the Stormbearer. The others , the strategist, the shadow-born , they will rally around him. The prophecy may, "
Varok turned his gaze upon the speaker. The man's sentence disintegrated into silence. The Iron Prince did not raise his hand or move his lips; he simply looked. The metal veins along the man's armor began to glow faintly red, as if the very iron in his blood had begun to boil.
"Do not speak to me of prophecy," Varok said quietly. "Prophecies are cages built by the fearful. I broke mine long ago."
The air cooled again. The lieutenant gasped for breath, alive but shaking. Varok turned away as if nothing had happened.
He walked toward the far wall, where an enormous mural of black metal stretched from floor to ceiling. It depicted the Age Before the Seals , a time when titans and men walked the same path, when storm and soul were indistinguishable. The mural was alive, runes pulsing faintly beneath its surface like a sleeping heart.
Varok placed his hand upon it. The runes flared, and for a moment, his reflection split , man and god, mortal and immortal, two faces of the same defiance.
Once, he had been mortal.
A soldier in the War of Fractures. A name buried under centuries of dust and forgotten records. He had watched gods fall from the heavens and shatter like glass upon the earth. He had seen what power did to those who pretended to deserve it.
And in the aftermath, when every other being begged for mercy or meaning, he did neither.
He simply refused to die.
"I was there when they sealed the heavens," he murmured. "I remember their screams. I remember what they feared most , not death, but replacement."
He turned to his council. "Tell me, do you know what gods envy most?"
None answered.
"Memory," Varok said. "They envy memory. They envy that we can forget and forgive. They cannot. They are trapped in remembrance, in repetition. That is their curse. But we , we can learn, adapt, rebuild."
He gestured toward the forges below, where enslaved storms churned in molten cages. "We can evolve."
He paused, letting the silence settle again.
"Drokmar's fall is not a loss," he said at last. "It is the first ripple. The Stormbearer will rise because he must. And when he does, he will come to me. He will think himself chosen. He will think destiny favors him."
Varok's voice softened, almost thoughtful. "But destiny does not favor anyone. It simply waits for someone strong enough to claim it."
He turned to one of his lieutenants , a smaller figure, robed in black metal. "Send word to the northern legions. Begin the march. Leave no city unburned along the Frost Path. Let them know the Iron Prince moves again."
The lieutenant bowed deeply. "At once, my Prince."
Varok stepped once more toward the balcony, watching the furnaces flare brighter as alarms and signals rippled through the city. Great chains began to rise from the depths, lifting colossal engines of war , iron beasts, storm-powered constructs older than nations. The sky above churned with caged thunder.
He raised his gaze to that sky, where faint cracks of light still lingered like scars across the heavens.
"Let the storm find me ready," he said.
And the storm, far away but listening, answered.
A single lightning bolt tore through the clouds, striking the tallest forge spire, illuminating the entire city in white flame. The metal walls sang like a choir of giants.
Varok closed his eyes.
He could feel the world beginning to turn again.
Far to the south, beneath a bruised sky, Kael woke to the sound of thunder that was not his own.
The air trembled, the storm around him twitching like a beast sensing its master's call.
Lightning crawled through the clouds in spirals, unnatural and deliberate , as if answering a command from somewhere deep within the world's bones.
He rose slowly, heart beating in time with the thunder.
Something vast had shifted.
The storm no longer whispered of beginnings.
It warned of return.