Chapter 11: The Scar That Teaches
Wyrmfreeze Perspective
Instructor Vo didn't wait for me to recover.
He grabbed my Claw joint the one still numb from Haishi's venom and pressed his thumb into the pulse point. A spike of fire Qi burned through the paralysis like a brand pressed to ice.
"Pain is a lesson," he said. "Fail to learn it, and it becomes a funeral."
I hissed as feeling returned in jagged waves, each nerve ending sparking back to life with vicious clarity. My fingers twitched, the muscles remembering their purpose through a haze of lingering stiffness. Haishi was already gone, vanished back into the Maw's shadowed veins like smoke through cracked stone. Only her venom remained, a fading ghost in my veins, whispering secrets my body wasn't meant to know.
Vo tossed me a rusted iron token. It struck my palm with unnatural weight, its surface etched with coiling serpent patterns that seemed to shift when I blinked. The metal stung—not with heat, but with a cold that bit deeper than Frostbear's worst blizzards.
I clenched the token. The metal whined under my grip, protesting like a living thing.
"And if I refuse the class?"
Vo smiled—an expression like a knife sliding from its sheath. "Then you're unclassified again. And the next Phantom won't leave you breathing."
The threat hung between us, heavier than the token in my hand. I slipped the iron disc into the hidden pocket sewn into my inner robe, where it settled against my chest like a second, slower heartbeat
The moment the token touched my skin, I felt the Iron Monastery's claim sink into my bones.
It wasn't just metal—it was *alive*. The coiled serpent patterns slithered against my palm, their etched ridges flexing like scales under my fingertips. When I blinked, the markings had rearranged themselves, forming new shapes that made my eyes water if I stared too long. A name surfaced from the depths of my Frostbear training: *Binding Iron*. Soulforged metal that remembered the flesh it touched.
Vo watched me with his one good eye, the red glow pulsing in time with my quickening breath. "It'll fuse to your sternum by midnight," he said casually, as if discussing the weather. "Try to remove it before then, and it'll take your skin with it."
I turned the token over. On the reverse side, barely visible beneath the patina of age, someone had scratched a single character in jagged strokes: Hunger.
The Wyrmforged Barracks
They didn't house us with the other initiates.
Our quarters lay deep in the Maw's underbelly, carved into the living rock where the mountain's heat kept the stones fever-warm. The chamber resembled a cross between an armory and a surgical theater—racks of bladed weapons lined one wall, while the opposite side held tables cluttered with vials of mercury-like fluid and bone saws with serrated edges.
Jiro, the half-melted initiate, lounged on a bench sharpening a dagger made from what looked like a human femur. "Welcome to the butcher's shop," he croaked, his voice bubbling with fluid. "Where we're both the meat and the cleaver."
I counted twelve bunks. Only four showed signs of recent use.
"Where are the—"
"Gone." Jiro tapped his ruined cheek. "Fifth forge-cycle ate Liao. Ninth took Naran. Tenth..." He nodded toward a cot piled with strange trophies—a fingerbone necklace, a set of teeth wired together, a single glass eye that tracked my movement. "Let's just say Shen stopped being human around the eighth."
A metallic taste flooded my mouth The token at my chest pulsed warmly
The Maw's bell tolled—a sound like a dying glacier calving into the sea. It wasn't a call one answered voluntarily.
You are summoned,"
hissed the lead Scribe, his jaw unhinging to vomit forth a key made of frozen blood**. It melted the moment it touched the floor. "By the Twelfth Law of the Molten Canon All that resists shaping must be rendered malleable."
The Chain-Scribes found us in our cells, their parchment skin unspooling to reveal our names etched in burning script. Without a word, they seized us by our frost-rimed wrists - my thick polar bear hide offering no protection against their ink-stained fingers - and dragged us toward the forges.
The manacles around our ankles slithered like living things, their teeth sinking deeper with every step we resisted.
Jiro limped beside me, his half-melted face dripping onto the chains binding his wrists. "They don't send you," he coughed. "The iron craves, and the Monastery obeys."
By the time we reached the forge chamber, even the air resisted being breathed—each inhalation filled our lungs with needle-fine metal shavings.
The Forge Master stood waiting, his crucible eyes reflecting not our bodies, but the hollow spaces where the iron would soon reside.
They stripped us naked and chained us to the ceiling by our ice-thickened wrists, the manacles biting deep into fur that had once weathered Frostbear's endless blizzards.
The Iron Monastery cared nothing for natural armor. Its crucible burned away all protections, even those bred into bone and blood over generations.
The forge-master—a mountain of scar tissue and grafted metal plates—circled with a bucket of liquid fire, his breath steaming in the unnatural cold radiating from my body.
"The iron must enter through wounds," he growled, "but frost-touched flesh resists opening." His gaze lingered on the old Frostbear ritual scars along my forearms, the patterns that once let me walk unburnt across glacial fire-vents. "We'll have to be... inventive."
The lash came down without warning.
It wasn't leather—it was a length of braided spirit-wire, each strand singing as it split my hide. Where a human's skin would have parted like parchment, my pelt resisted, forcing the wires to saw through guard hairs matted with generations of ancestral ice-magic. The pain was different here, hotter and deeper than any Frostbear flogging. This wasn't punishment—it was translation, rewriting my body's language from winter's resilience to metal's hunger.
By the third strike, my blue-white blood ran silver.
"Good," the forge-master grunted. "The iron tastes your lineage." He upended the bucket over my lacerated back.
The liquid fire should have killed me. Any normal polar bear's flesh would have sloughed off in steaming sheets. But Frostbear's children are not normal. My subdermal frost-seals activated instinctively, the ancient tattoos along my spine flaring cobalt as they fought to neutralize the heat. For three agonizing heartbeats, the conflicting energies warred—until, with a sound like cracking glaciers, my body compromised.
The spirit-iron crystallized as it touched my blood, forming jagged metallic rime instead of smooth veins. Where human initiates developed flowing mercury channels, my pathways looked like frozen lightning—fractal and sharp-edged, the same way hoarfrost branches on a dead tree.
Vo materialized from the smoke, his red eye gleaming. "Interesting," he murmured, dragging a claw along my transformed flank. "The iron usually burns away the old self. But yours..." He licked frozen metal flakes from his fingers. "...yours negotiates."
The forge-master swung his lash again, this time aiming deliberately for my frost-cloak gland the organ behind my neck that once secreted blizzard-summoning oils. The spirit-wire pierced it cleanly.
As the gland's contents mingled with molten iron, the entire chamber exploded into a localized snowstorm, the howling wind somehow carrying the screams of every Wyrmforged who'd died here. The other initiates stared as my body became a battleground of contradictions—steam rising from ice, metal blooming like frost flowers, my very cells rewriting themselves into something neither bear nor machine.
When they finally unchained me, my paws left perfectly geometric ice prints on the scorched stone—each one rimmed with delicate iron filigree that evaporated seconds later.
Jiro stared at the fading patterns, his half-melted face twitching. "They say the tenth forge-cycle kills you," he rasped. "But you? I think it'll just make you becoming more bear-like."
Vo's laughter echoed off the soul glass walls as my new, hybrid blood sang in my veins—a hymn of claws and gears, blizzards and forge-fires, and the terrible understanding that whatever emerged from this process wouldn't be purely any of those things.