"The floorboards are vibrating," Rhovan hissed, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the edge of the mildewed cot, his injured leg stretched out at an unnatural, agonizing angle. "That’s not tavern patrons walking overhead. That’s iron-shod boots. Koss’s inquisitors."Kaedron dropped to one knee beside the heavy burlap-wrapped bundle containing Jarev’s whispering sword, his fingers hovering over the coarse fabric as a faint, metallic hum vibrated up through the packed dirt floor. "The blade is waking up. It knows they're close.""Shut it up, Kaedron!" Lira slammed her leather-bound ledger shut, grabbed her ink-stained satchel, and rushed toward a low, rusted iron grate tucked away in the dampest corner of the cellar behind a stack of rotting ale casks. "If that sword starts singing now, Koss won’t even need hounds to find us. He’ll hear it through the stones!""I can’t just silence it by wishing it quiet," Kaedron muttered, his breath catching in his throat as the metallic hum rose in

"Hold him down before he wrenches his shoulder completely out of its socket," Kaedron snapped, dropping to his knees beside the makeshift pallet of straw and damp woolen blankets.Jarev thrashed violently against the rough bedding, his breath coming in shallow, frantic wheezes that rattled deep inside his chest. The heavy wool tunic had been torn away from his right side, revealing a horrifying anatomical progression. From the fingertips up to the midpoint of his bicep, Jarev’s flesh had completely surrendered to a dense, mirror-bright alloy. The transition was not a clean line of amputation; instead, grey metal veins spiderwebbed outward beneath his skin, pulsing with a slow, sickening rhythm that matched the erratic beat of his heart."I can't hold him, Kaedron!" Lira cried out, her small frame straining as she pressed her weight against Jarev’s left shoulder while the mercenary snarled in delirium. "His grip is like a vice! If I push any harder, I'll dislocate his collarbone!""Let

"Keep your voices down," Rhovan muttered, pressing his broad back against the rough bark of an ancient oak as he scanned the tree line. His bad leg throbbed beneath a thick wrapping of soiled linen, but his eyes were sharp, missing none of the sparse, grey-brown canopy of the northern hills. "If they've picked up our trail at the river bend, we won't have fifteen minutes before their scouts are swarming this ridge.""Let them swarm," Jarev rasped from his pallet of damp wool, his right arm—heavy, gleaming, and utterly rigid—resting across his chest like a cast of solid lead. The metal had crept another half-inch toward his shoulder since yesterday, crawling upward through the muscle with a slow, agonizing hum that only he seemed able to hear. "I've still got a few inches of edge left that haven't turned. I can buy us enough time to scatter.""You couldn't cut your way through a sack of wet flour in your current state, Jarev, so save the heroics," Kaedron snapped, not looking up from t

"Put that out!" Kaedron hissed, his hand shooting across the makeshift camp to brutally cuff the top of a small tallow candle before its meager flame could cast a betraying glow against the canvas of their low-slung lean-to."It's barely smoking," Lira whispered back defensively, her fingers clutching a bundle of ink-stained tallow notes against her chest as total darkness swallowed the interior of the shelter. "I can't read the supply manifests by the light of your sheer stubbornness, Kaedron.""If you catch a glint of light off that glass inkwell, you won't need to read manifests anymore because you'll be dodging imperial crossbow bolts," Rhovan muttered from the mouth of the lean-to, his broad shoulders pressed flat against the damp earth. His hand rested heavily on the crossguard of his iron-hilted shortsword, his knuckles white with strain. "And trust me, my knee isn't in any condition for a midnight footrace through a field of toxic slag.""We've been stationary for three hours,

"Keep your head down," Kaedron hissed, gripping the slick stone edge of the ridge as a cold gust of wind swept up from the canyon floor. "If General Kald’s scouts spot us silhouetted against this skyline, we won't even live long enough to find out which wagon they put Rhovan in."Lira pressed herself flat against the damp earth beside him, her fingers clutching a brass-tubed spyglass so tightly her knuckles had turned completely white. "I can see the picket lines," she whispered, her voice tight with suppressed panic as she adjusted the focus. "Hundreds of them. Not just soldiers—smiths, apprentices, porters. It’s an entire movable foundry operating right in the middle of the badlands.""And every single one of those forges is burning tainted ore," Jarev added from a few paces back, his metallic arm clanking against a jagged boulder with a dull, heavy thud that sounded entirely too loud in the night air. He didn't bother trying to muffle the noise anymore; the steel had crept past his