Chapter 1
My father’s study was always suffocatingly hot. Heat radiated from the braziers where some foul brew was forever bubbling, its stench soaking into everything: the curtains, the parchment, and my own skin.
Father sat at his desk, counting metal tokens. Souls were the only currency that mattered for transactions in the Underworld. He didn’t look up at me until he finished his count.
“The Lord is expanding the baggage train,” he said, neatly stacking the tokens into a leather pouch. “They need men who know their left from their right, men who can read an order without stuttering.”
“Into the Legion?” I tried to inject some steel into my voice.
“Yes. They’ll either make a man out of you there. Or meat. Either way, you’re just wasting paper and food here.” He finally raised his eyes—ordinary eyes, worn down by mundane, everyday problems. “A supply sergeant is coming at noon. They’re giving me heavy crossbows to guard the estate in exchange for you. It’s a fair trade.”
He slid a blank sheet of paper and a quill toward me.
“Fill out the form. Write: name, age, House.”
My neck ached. Yesterday, my stepmother had forced me to spend hours copying a tedious treatise on the anatomy of an incubus’s liver. My fingers were still stained with ink. I carefully traced the first letter, knowing full well that if I blotted the clean sheet, my father would backhand me across the face.
The ink was thick and expensive, binding readily to the coarse paper.
“Age: eighteen,” I muttered to myself as I wrote.
“Add this: ’Transferred to the engineering corps of the Eighth Legion in payment for three heavy crossbows,’” my father dictated. He set the tokens aside and stared at the page. “Write legibly. If the quartermaster can’t read your name, he’ll think I’m shortchanging him with illiterate meat. And I do not like my reputation being called into question.”
Every word felt like a nail driven into the paper. In payment. Three crossbows.
“Done,” I said, setting the quill down. Its nib finally split, leaving a tiny blot at the very end.
Father walked over, took the paper by the edge, and blew on the wet ink. The scent of his breath—bitter herbs and stale magic—flooded the room for a moment.
“Go pack your things. And don’t forget your mechanics notebooks. In the baggage train, they like those who understand why a wheel turns, rather than those who just howl in fear of it.”
At the door, I paused.
“Father?”
He was already reaching for his tokens again.
“Mmh?”
“Thank you for giving me a chance, and not sending me to the mines.”
He gave a dry, humorless chuckle without raising his head.
“Your value to me ended the exact second you failed initialization. The Legion simply paid more for you. Be off.”
The hallway was cooler, but the phantom ringing of coins still echoed in my ears. I looked down at my hands—the deep-set ink stains felt permanent, unwashable. The deal was done. I was no longer a son, but compared to the others, I was lucky. In the sulfur mines, overseers didn’t live much longer than the slaves.
I walked back to my cramped quarters, the sound of my own footsteps ringing hollow and foreign. The room reeked of dust and sour rags. I collapsed onto my filthy straw mattress and lay there motionless for hours, soaking in the fading scents of home, listening to the muffled bustle outside my small, translucent bladder-skin window. My mind went blank. Nothing but emptiness.
The overseer knocked on the door and rasped:
“Time’s up.”
I stood up, stuffed my meager belongings into a sack—a tunic, spare sandals, and a stack of scribbled notes—and walked with heavy steps out into the courtyard, toward the estate gates.
The sun—if you could call that dull, crimson haze hanging over the horizon a sun—stabbed at my eyes. Dust kicked up by hooves and wheels on the main road already choked the air.
I remember that moment at the gates vividly. A massive wagon stood there, hitched to a pair of heavy, wheezing beasts. Beside it stood my stepmother and the sergeant.
He looked nothing like those high-and-mighty, well-groomed demons I used to see visiting my father. He was... different. Scarred all over, wearing a leather cuirass slick with grease and soot.
My stepmother threw a bundle at my feet:
“Change out of those rags. The House of Black Flame will not have its name questioned, even when it’s throwing out its garbage.”
The demon eyed my sack and grunted, “So you’re the ‘literate meat’ the quartermaster traded our best crossbows for?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he simply pointed a thick finger at the back of the wagon.
“Get in. And remember, you’re number seventy-three on the manifest.”
The overseer closed the heavy gates. The dry click of the bolt echoed like a death knell.
We rattled along the rocky trail.
“Listen up, kid,” the sergeant rumbled. “In the Legion, you’re a part. If a part squeaks, it gets greased. If it breaks, it gets tossed. Got it?”
“Got it,” I replied. “But where do we get the grease?”
The sergeant pulled the reins, stopping the wagon to look back at me.
“You steal the grease, brat. Or you earn it. Smart guys like you trade it for calculations. Or for silence. The engineering corps isn’t for writing pretty poetry. Screw up your math there, and they’ll stuff you into the catapult basket instead of a boulder.”
He roared with laughter at his own joke, his breath reeking of garlic so violently it made my eyes water.
I looked back. My father’s estate had already vanished behind the bend. Strangely, I felt no resentment. Only cold indifference. A deal was a deal. Father got his three crossbows, and I... I got a fighting chance to live without a slave collar around my neck.
An hour later, we arrived at the portal staging area—the Legion’s assembly point. Among the sea of wagons and disassembled catapults, countless conscripts just like me were wandering aimlessly.
The sergeant led me to a long table where a sullen-faced imp sat reviewing manifests.
“Seventy-third. Siege park,” the sergeant barked.
“Show me your hands,” the imp commanded.
I held out my palms. The imp grabbed them, turning them over roughly.
“Quill calluses. Tsk. No matter, a month pulling an onager lever and your skin will be as tough as boot leather. Engineering corps, ballista crew.”
The imp dipped his quill into an inkwell, checked his ledger, and pointed a claw toward a cart loaded with heavy gates and winches.
“Seventy-third, your post is by that wagon. Stand there and keep your head down.”
I leaned against the heavy wooden wheel, trying to melt into the shadows, and stole a glance at the square. It looked like a gargantuan funnel carved out of solid black basalt. Tiered steps descended toward the very center, where the Portal quivered—a vertical rift bleeding a cold, white hum. Thousands of legionnaires clad in black steel, slaves, heavy baggage trains—the glowing void swallowed them all. The rhythm of the march—the thud of thousands of iron-shod boots—merged into a low-frequency vibration that made my teeth rattle. Directly above my head loomed the steel frame of an onager, looking like the skeletal claw of some ancient monster.
“Watch the sky, kid,” a dry voice rasped near me.
A gaunt incubus stepped out from the shadow of the wheel. He looked as though he were molded from the very dust and soot that coated the staging ground.
“The Master is coming out. Close your eyes or you’ll go blind. And don’t fall—you’ll snap your spine,” he cackled, mocking me.
In that exact instant, a massive shadow fell over the square. The sky turned dense, like cooling iron. The Fallen manifested in mid-air, tearing through the fabric of space by his mere presence. Armor forged from hardened oil absorbed the light. Thousands of soldiers slammed their spears against their shields; the explosive blast of sound nearly turned my stomach inside out. The Fallen pointed his greatsword toward the Portal, and the rift’s hum escalated into an unbearable shriek.
In the blinding dark, a lesser demon recruit, driven mad by adrenaline, tried to shove me off the platform under the rolling wheels of a wagon. My hand instinctively found a heavy lead counterweight resting on the catapult frame. With a short, brutal strike, I drove the lead chunk straight into the creature’s kneecap. The dry crunch of bone was swallowed by the roar of the crowd. The demon collapsed backward, and the incubus gave a brief, approving smirk.
“Welcome to the Eighth Legion, Seventy-third.”
The wagon jolted forward. We were sucked into the white maw of the Portal. A flash of agony hit me—a sensation like my skin being flayed off and sewn back on inside out—followed by the sharp taste of copper in my mouth.
A moment later, I was coughing up gray dust onto the stone ground. A crimson sky stretched above us. An ash-covered plain. The rear lines of Lord Gaap’s domain. The place where my life was now worth exactly what was written on the manifest.
The entire side of the wagon was coated in gray frost. Before my eyes, it melted into a slimy residue—the portal’s sludge. I tried to push myself up, but my fingers were completely numb. I began rubbing them together. The dry friction of skin against skin was the only living sound in the dead silence.
“Seventy-third!” The sergeant kicked me hard in the hip. “Look at the damn wheel.”
I forced my eyes to focus. The hub was intact, but one of the wooden spokes had completely disintegrated into gray powder. I touched the wood; it crumbled like ash from a dead campfire. The raw magic of the crossing had burned decades of time into the timber in a single second.
“Don’t just stand there like an idiot,” he grunted. “Grab a knife and get over to that scrap heap by the barracks wall. Look for oak. If you find anything usable, drag it back. If you don’t, you’re sleeping tied to the axle to hold it up.”
I trudged toward the salvage pile. A low-frequency ringing still hammered against my eardrums. I dug through rotting rags and shards of rusted iron until my fingers brushed against something smooth and freezing cold.
It was a bone. Massive, and choked with gray dust. I yanked it out from under a shattered axle. As I pulled, something else rolled out—a tiny wooden horse. Crude craftsmanship, with a broken tail. It smelled faintly of dry pine and an old carpenter’s workshop.
I quickly slipped the toy into my tunic, the rough wood scratching the skin of my chest.
“Found something!” I shouted, hoisting the bone.
I began scraping away the dried remnants of tendons from the joint with my knife, trying to shape it to fit the hub socket.
The sergeant walked over, snatched the bone from my hands, and weighed it in his palm.
“The femur of a marabut. Sturdy stuff.”
He tossed a darkened leather waterskin to me. It was warm and reeked of rancid fat.
“Here. These are boiled hound sinews. While they’re warm, they stretch. Once they cool, they’ll clamp down on that bone so hard you’ll never separate ’em.”
I pulled a long, yellowish strand out of the skin. It was slimy and scalded my fingertips.
“Let’s move, seventy-third. I hold the rim, you wrap. If the tension’s loose, that bone flies out at the first pothole.”
We wrestled with the wheel for two hours. I had to bind the sinews in a tight figure-eight, threading them through the splintered grooves of the hub and wrapping them flush against the bone. My fingers became coated in a sticky, rapidly hardening grease. My quill calluses split open, my fresh blood mixing with the yellow fat.
“Tighter!” the sergeant growled. “Pull, you worthless sack of shit!”
When the final loop was secured, the sergeant pulled an oak wedge wrapped in lead foil from the wagon—the only protection against portal decay. Smearing it with thick tar, he drove the wedge into the socket with a practiced blow, locking the bone permanently into the wheel.
“Done. Once it cures, it’s solid.”
I sat back on my haunches, wiping my grease-slicked fingers on the straw. The sinews tightened with a faint, taut creak as they dried. The bone sat perfectly flush, as though it had always been a part of the machine.
“Wrap a rag around it, don’t get dirt on the sinews,” he tossed over his shoulder, completely ignoring the raw, bleeding skin on my palms. He barked at the rest of the conscripts: “Form up on me!”
With that, he marched off toward the barracks.
He led us into a block where the sharp stench of stale sweat hit my nose.
“This is the main barracks. Recruits take the left wing.”
The hall was split right down the middle. The bunks of the veterans were cluttered with trophies: carpets plundered from human worlds, fur blankets, and engraved armor. My assignment was in the left wing—bare planks and a fresh straw mattress. Each man was allotted a heavy blanket and a personal footlocker with a thick iron latch.
The sergeant walked down the line, tossing gear packs left and right:
“Bowl, spoon, uniform. Standard issue. Lose it, I flay you. Sell it, I kill you. Dismissed.”
I was just starting to unpack my gear when a shadow fell across my bunk. A towering, veteran demon with a nasty scar running down his thigh loomed over me, blocking out the light from the oil lamps.
“Hey, fresh meat,” he growled. “You look soft, pampered. Hand over whatever stash you brought from home. If you want an easy life here, you gotta pay your dues.”
He shoved his shoulder into me roughly and reached out toward my footlocker. From a neighboring bunk, a one-armed veteran watched lazily.
“Drop it, Gimp,” the one-armed demon called out without moving. “The sergeant will have us all rotting on the drill square until midnight if there’s any trouble. Leave the kid alone before we all pay for it.”
Gimp flinched, his eyes flaring with anger.
“Shut your damn mouth!” he snapped back. “I know what I’m doing. Mind your own business before I break your face.”
He turned back to me deliberately and slid his thick fingers right under the heavy iron latch, preparing to yank the footlocker lid open.
I knew instantly: if I let this bastard dig his claws into my locker now, I’d be dead before I ever made it back to the portal. I couldn’t just let this slide.
The exact second Gimp threw his weight into lifting it, I threw my entire body weight down on the opposite end of the latch. The metal piece acted as a perfect, brutal lever. The sharp, clean crunch of shattering finger bones echoed into the farthest corner of the barracks.
Gimp let out a howl that made the tin mess bowls rattle. He collapsed to the floor, cradling his mangled, bloody hand against his chest.
The heavy doors flew open, and the sergeant stormed into the block.
“What’s all this racket? Goddammit, Gimp! What the hell happened?”
Whimpering and clutching his shattered fingers, Gimp pointed a trembling hand toward me.
“This little freak... this piece of shit broke my hand!”
The sergeant looked at the massive demon, then turned his gaze to me. His face contorted, and he erupted into a harsh, barking laugh.
“You got wrecked by a runt? That’s rich! You’re no warrior, Gimp, you’re a pathetic piece of garbage.”
The rest of the barracks immediately joined in, hooting and laughing.
“I know your game, you parasite,” the sergeant said, cutting the laughter dead. “Ten kitchen details. You’ll scrub cauldrons with the slaves. Let this be a warning to the rest of you: if anyone tries to rob the recruits, you’ll go straight to the alchemists for experimentation. They’re always starved for fresh meat. Gimp, get your ass to the mages for healing, then report to Sergeant Gys in the kitchens. The rest of you—fall in for mess.”
The mess hall of the siege park was relatively small. Technicians and engineers were valued much higher in the Legion than the simple cannon fodder of the line infantry, so the mess halls here weren’t nearly as cavernous or deafening as those of the vanguard or the blademasters. The air smelled not just of boiling food, but of rosin, sour metal, and smoke.
I received my ration and paused. Sitting in my bowl was a real cut of meat—tough and stringy, but thick with fat—alongside a mountain of steaming porridge. I ate hungrily, burning my tongue, but a strange bitterness welled up inside me. Back at the Black Flame estate, the tables were laden with fine wines and rare delicacies for guests, but as the ‘unprofitable son,’ I was always left with my stepmother’s scraps or a watery broth you wouldn’t feed to a hound. There, I was a liability. A drain on resources.
Here, inside this brutal, iron belly of a machine, they gave me calories because I was a resource. An instrument meant to function. And that stark realization—that the Legion valued me more than my own flesh and blood ever did—struck me harder than any liquor.
I lay back down on the straw, pulling the heavy blanket over myself. In the darkness of the barracks, an unfamiliar sense of calm washed over me. I was no longer the ‘unprofitable son.’ I was a cog in the great war machine of Gaap. Staring up at the dark ceiling, I made a silent vow: I would become the most indispensable part in this entire engine. So that no demon would ever dare try to break me again.
