"From the shadows of the forge interior, leaning heavily on a staff forged from raw, unpolished slag-iron, Aerovan stepped into the pale, soot-filtered light," Drovic muttered, finishing the sentence as he finally snapped the rusted bolt of the drainage grate with a sickening crunch. He spat a glob of grey phlegm onto the cobblestones. "Look who decided to crawl out of the crypt. Thought the old man finally rusted solid."Aerovan’s joints popped with a dry, rhythmic clicking like a sack of dry twigs snapping underfoot. His stark white hair fell in lank, greasy strands across a forehead deeply mapped with veins that throbbed with a sickly, bruised blue hue. He did not look like a forge-master; he looked like a corpse that had simply forgotten to lie down, resurrected solely by sheer, bloody-minded spite. He leaned his entire, trembling weight onto the slag-iron staff, the point biting deep into the cracked mortar between the paving stones."I am quit

"An outrage," Aerovan wheezed, his voice scraping against his throat like a rusted file on raw iron. He didn't even look up from the heavy steel housing clamped to his wooden worktable, his fingers—knotted, swollen, and stained black with machine grease—fumbling with a set of micro-calipers. "Do you hear that, Drovic? The noblewoman finds the end of the world inconvenient to her hemline.""Oh, shut up, old man," Drovic snapped, wiping his forehead with a filthy forearm, leaving a wide streak of soot across his brow. He was crouched over a shattered Iron Duchy golem core that had been dragged out of the southern barricades the previous night. The thing was roughly the size of a beer keg, leaking a pale, acrid vapor that made everyone’s eyes water. "If you had to haul this five hundred paces through mortar fire with half your fingers missing, you’d be complaining about your skirts too.""My skirts," Lysenne said coldly, stepping between them with

"My ego isn't the thing about to explode and take half the East District with it," Drovic growled, jabbing the tip of a grease-stained pry bar toward the hissing, pale-vented core on the workbench. "That heap of Duchy scrap-iron is. And if you don't shut those valves down right now, old man, we won't even need the Iron Duchy's artillery to finish us."Aerovan didn't flinch, his cloudy eyes locked onto the glowing thermal filaments as he twisted a brass adjustment screw by a fraction of a millimeter. "It is not going to explode, you paranoid fool, because I am regulating the pneumatic pressure manually. Which is entirely impossible if you keep vibrating the floorboards with your incessant bickering.""Manual regulation?" Lysenne stepped closer, her nose wrinkling at the sharp, sulfurous tang leaking from the core. She ignored the mud drying stiffly across her shoulders and leaned over the workbench, her sharp royal gaze tracking the delicate network of copper conduits feeding into the

"I didn't come here to argue about masonry, Aerovan!" Maren snapped, slamming the iron-shod base of his pickaxe against the flagstone floor with a sharp, echoing crack that rattled the tools on the nearby rack. "The lower drainage grates in Sector Four are singing. You know what that means. The vibration of the Duchy's siege engines overhead has driven the sump-crawlers completely rabid. They’re chewing through the old lead-lined valves right now."Lysenne straightened up instantly, her hand dropping instinctively to the hilt of the short sword slung across her mud-stained tunic. "How many grates?""All three on the lower municipal line," Maren spat, his face pale beneath a thick mask of coal dust. "If they pop those bulkheads, the sewage and half the abyssal fauna from the southern sinkholes will flood straight up into the cellar networks beneath our lines. We’ll be fighting blind in knee-deep filth while the Duchy pounds us from above."Drovic curs

The heavy oak reinforcement of the East District’s primary barricade shuddered as a wet, muffled thud echoed from the dark stairwell behind them, a grim reminder of the mutilated hand wrapped in stained linen inside Drovic’s coat.Drovic didn’t wince, though the jagged stump of his fingers throbbed in time with his heartbeat. He leaned his shoulder against the frost-rimed stone of the checkpoint, his single good hand resting casually on the grip of a grease-stained trench-shotgun."Keep your voices down," Drovic muttered to the two nervous militiamen flanking him, their knuckles white around the shafts of their short spears. "If the Duchy scouts out there think we’re whispering prayers instead of loading canister shot, they’ll start the mortar fire an hour early.""They aren't praying, Drovic," a crisp, iron-laced voice cut through the damp chill of the morning air.Queen Lysenne stepped past the stack of sandbags, her boots sinking slightly into the slush and coal dust of the courtya