The taste of copper was the first thing I noticed when I woke up. It wasn't the metallic tang of a bloody lip or the sharp zip of an accidental cut; it was a physical invasion. It stayed on my tongue like a rusted penny, thick and bitter, as if I had spent the night licking the walls of an ancient foundry. My mouth felt parched, yet heavy with the grit of a thousand years of decay.
I sat up on my cot, and the movement caused my joints to pop with a sound that was far too loud for a man of twenty—a series of sharp, dry cracks that echoed in the stillness of the hut like snapping kindling. I sat there for a moment, my head swimming, staring at my hands.
I looked at my reflection in the dented washbasin by the bed. My name is Vane, and for the first time in my life, I looked like I was carved from the very mountain we lived upon. My skin had gone a pale, chalky grey overnight—not the grey of sickness, but the grey of stone. It was the color you see on a tombstone before the moss takes over, a flat, lifeless hue that seemed to absorb the dim light of the morning.
With a trembling hand, I reached out and touched my cheek. The skin didn't yield. It felt cool, inelastic, and dangerously smooth. I wasn't just ill; I was turning into an object.
I stepped outside my hut, and the world was wrong.
Oakhaven had always been a place of vibrant, if rugged, beauty. The valley used to smell like pine needles, wet earth, and the sweet woodsmoke of breakfast fires. Now, it just smelled like a blacksmith's shop after a long day of grinding steel. The "Silver Rust"—that shimmering, suffocating fog—was hanging lower than yesterday. It didn't drift with the wind like natural mist; it pulsed. A slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction, as if the air itself were a lung struggling to breathe through a throat full of needles.
I felt a cold shiver crawl down my spine, but it wasn't the wind. There was no wind. The world was held in a terrifying, metallic stasis.
The Sight of the Fallen
I walked toward the Great Square, my boots dragging in the grey dust. Every step felt like lifting a lead weight. My muscles were stiffening, the "Curse of the Mountain" claiming my sinews one by one. I saw Old Man Harlon sitting on his porch, his rocking chair stationary for the first time in decades.
He didn't wave. He couldn't.
From the waist down, Harlon's legs had turned into solid, unmoving iron. The transformation was jagged and brutal, his trousers shredded where the metal had erupted through his skin, fusing his shins directly into the floorboards of his porch. He sat there with his favorite pipe frozen in his hand, his eyes wide and terrified, trapped in a body that was slowly becoming a statue. He was alive—I could see the frantic, shallow rise and fall of his chest—but he was no longer a man. He was an anchor.
"Vane..." he croaked, his voice sounding like gravel rubbing together in a dry creek bed. "The chime. Did you hear it? It's under us. It's coming from the roots."
I didn't answer. I couldn't find the words to comfort a man who was half-way to being a garden ornament. I looked past him, toward the center of our village, and my heart stopped.
The Obelisk.
It had been there for a thousand years, a jagged hunk of black rock that stood ten feet tall in the center of the square. We used to dry our laundry on it; children used it to hide behind during games of tag. It was just a rock. But today, the rock had split open like a ripening fruit.
The interior wasn't stone. Inside the vertical crack, things were spinning—gears made of condensed, indigo light, shifting and clicking in a sequence so complex it made my head throb. This wasn't a natural disaster. It was a machine. A machine that had been sleeping beneath our feet while we lived our small, ignorant lives, and now it was waking up hungry.
The Weight in My Pocket
I felt a sudden, searing heat against my thigh. I reached into my pocket and felt the weight of the "Inheritance."
Every first-born in our clan carries one—a small, dull metal sphere we are told never to lose, a "lucky charm" passed from father to son for ten generations. My father had died with it in his hand, his last words a frantic mumble about "keeping the heart beating." I had always thought it was a piece of junk. A rounded bit of lead.
Now, it was burning.
I pulled it out, and I nearly dropped it. The sphere was unfolding. It hissed, venting a tiny cloud of blue steam as small, delicate silver pins slid out of its surface, reaching toward the Obelisk like a compass needle finding north. The grey tint of the curse had climbed up to my elbow now, the skin there so hard I could no longer pinch it.
I felt a sudden, sharp tug. The sphere wasn't just pointing; it was pulling me. My feet moved before I told them to. I was being dragged toward the split rock, toward the sound of that rhythmic, haunting ticking coming from the abyss beneath the square.
"Vane! Stop! Don't go near that thing!"
It was my sister's voice. Mara was running from the infirmary, her face pale, her hands stained with the juices of the medicinal herbs she had been using to try—and fail—to treat the Rusted. She skidded to a halt a few yards away, her eyes fixed on the glowing blue gears within the rock.
"It's eating the air, Vane!" she cried, her voice trembling. "The people in the infirmary... they started turning faster the moment that rock split. Whatever that thing is, it's not our savior. It's the source!"
I looked at my hand—the one holding the sphere. The grey stone-skin had reached my bicep. The sphere was vibrating so hard it was drawing blood from my palm, the red liquid being sucked into the silver pins like fuel.
I looked at the Obelisk. It wasn't just a monument. It was a lock. And the ticking… it wasn't just a sound. It was a countdown.
The Choice of the First-Born
The magnetism was absolute now. I was standing right in front of the shifting gears, the heat of the indigo light blistering my face. The sphere in my hand was screaming, a high-pitched mechanical wail that synchronized with the thumping in my chest.
"Vane, please!" Mara shouted, her voice breaking. "Grandfather's journals... he muttered about a hidden sequence! He said the machine needs a 'sacrifice of will,' not just a key! Look at the base!"
I looked down. Beneath the dust of a thousand years, the base of the Obelisk was etched with glowing inscriptions. They weren't letters; they were diagrams of a hand, a sphere, and a specific alignment of the inner gears.
The Silver Rust was rolling in faster now, a thick wall of shimmering grey needles that threatened to swallow the square. I could see the fog touching the edges of the infirmary. If I didn't act, the "lungs" of Oakhaven would be petrified within the hour.
The sphere was hovering inches from a circular void in the center of the whirring mechanism. It wanted to go home. It wanted to plug into the mountain.
But the diagrams at the base suggested something else. They showed a man placing his hand into the gears before the sphere. A terrifying prospect that looked like it would shear my arm off at the shoulder.
"Vane! Harlon is turning to ash!" Mara screamed.
I looked back. The Old Man's iron legs were starting to crack, a sickly yellow light leaking from the fissures. He wasn't just turning to metal; he was becoming a bomb of corrupted energy.
I had two paths.
I could trust the magnetic pull and slot the sphere into the void, hoping the machine knew what it was doing. Or I could fight the pull for a few more seconds, study the ancient inscriptions, and try to perform the "Manual Sequence" my grandfather had hinted at in his madness.
My hand was shaking. My skin was turning to stone. The world was holding its breath.
The Decision
The choice was a weight heavier than the iron in my pocket. If I slotted the sphere blindly, I might save the village but lose my humanity to the machine's cold logic. If I waited to read the runes, the Silver Rust might claim my sister before I could turn the key.
I felt the indigo light of the Obelisk reflect in my eyes. The ticking reached a crescendo.
"I'm sorry, Mara," I whispered, my voice sounding more like the machine than a man.
I didn't back away. I leaned in.
I didn't slot the sphere. Instead, I grabbed the spinning gears with my bare, stone-grey hand. The sound of flesh meeting shifting brass was a wet, horrific crunch, but I didn't feel the pain. My arm was already too far gone. I forced the gears to slow, my muscles bulging against the hydraulic power of the mountain.
I wasn't just a smith anymore. I was a mechanic of the soul.
With a roar of effort, I aligned the three inner rings by hand, following the glowing diagram at my feet. The indigo light flared, turning from a violent purple to a calm, steady azure. The sphere in my palm didn't just slot in; it was accepted. It melted into the mechanism, and for a second, the entire world went white.
When the light faded, the Silver Rust was gone. The air smelled of ozone and fresh rain.
But I didn't move. I couldn't. My right arm was gone. In its place was a limb of gleaming bronze and humming blue fire, fused permanently to the Obelisk.
"Vane?" Mara's voice was a whisper in the new silence.
I looked at my new hand. The talons of the machine were part of me now. I looked at the mountain peaks, where 339 other lights were beginning to blink in the darkness.
"The First Node is active," I said, my voice resonating with the power of a thousand gears. "And the mountain is just getting started."