I. The Furnace Below Emberhold
Emberhold had changed.
Smoke now curled from not one but seven chimneys. The mountain beneath the fortress groaned with the strain of forges that never slept. Magnus's private workshops had expanded into a subterranean complex—his black citadel of innovation.
Within those shadowed halls, amid clanking gears and scalding steam, the first warriors of the Iron Vanguard were born.
They were not knights. Nor were they peasants in armor.
They were something new.
Each wore steel-plated suits reinforced with Magnus's latest invention—pneumatic servobraces, which allowed a man to lift thrice his weight and absorb the kick of early steam-cannons mounted to shoulder rigs.
Gone were the swords and pikes.
In their place: bolt rifles, powered by miniature boiler cores. Rifles that hissed steam when fired and tore through plate armor like parchment.
And at the heart of it all—
—Magnus himself, hammering at blueprints, redrawing schematics, and turning men into monsters.
II. The Induction
Tobias stood at the gates of Emberhold's Iron Yard, watching as the first recruits filed in.
They were mercenaries, bounty hunters, debt-ridden farmers. Some were criminals Magnus had liberated from prison wagons.
All had one thing in common: nothing to lose.
A voice echoed over the yard as Magnus emerged onto a raised platform, clad in an engineer's coat that gleamed with brass fittings.
"You stand before the future," he said. "A kingdom of steel. A world not ruled by bloodline or birthright—but by progress."
The men exchanged uncertain looks.
"Serve me," Magnus continued, "and you will never go hungry again. You will wear the strongest armor, wield the deadliest weapons. You will not be soldiers—you will be Vanguard."
A pause.
Then he smiled, slow and cold.
"And when I march into the heart of this cursed kingdom, it will be your boots they hear first."
The crowd erupted into cheers. Not out of loyalty.
But out of desperation.
It was enough.
III. Steel Before Soil
The first march was not grand. There were no banners, no trumpets.
Just fifty men in iron rigs, steam puffing from shoulder valves, moving like armored golems through the hills toward the minor Barony of Reeve—a stone fort ruled by an aging noble with eighty guards and a cannon that hadn't fired in twenty years.
The Baron refused Magnus's emissary.
Magnus didn't respond with messengers.
He responded with Thunderhead.
A mobile siege cannon mounted on steam-treads, pulled by four automaton oxen.
At dawn, Thunderhead fired once.
The gate of Reeve shattered like glass.
By sunset, the barony was under Iron Vanguard control. The Baron's signet ring was melted and recast into Magnus's collection of trophies.
"Make it an outpost," he told Tobias, drawing a red line across the map.
"One down," Tobias muttered, looking grim.
"Sixty-eight to go," Magnus said, his voice like steel.
IV. Gears and Gold
With Reeve under his control, Magnus began to implement the second phase of his plan: extraction and fabrication.
His engineers—those who had once worked for Duke Albrecht but had defected to Magnus for better pay and no rules—began erecting new factories on Reeve soil. The villagers were conscripted into labor guilds. Children sorted bolts. Women wound copper coils. Men dug iron ore.
Magnus paid them—not in coin, but in script: tokens redeemable only at Iron Vanguard stores.
Within a week, Reeve was no longer a barony.
It was a military production node.
Even Tobias was impressed.
"You're turning farmland into furnaces," he said.
"Better yield," Magnus replied, eyes gleaming. "Wheat feeds the stomach. Steel feeds power."
V. Whisper and Flame
News traveled fast.
To the north, a coalition of three minor lords met in secret, unnerved by Reeve's fall.
"He's a madman," one declared.
"He's a visionary," said another, quieter. "And worse—he's winning."
They agreed on one thing: Magnus must be stopped before his machines reached the capital roads.
A letter was dispatched to King Thorne II.
But Magnus already knew.
His spies—some mechanical, some flesh—watched every border. He intercepted the message and sent it back to the King, enclosed with a gear etched with the Phoenix Eye.
And a note:
The old ways are dying.
Forge or be forgotten.