The Death of Grace
Eliana Rooin Valerius—once daughter of nobility, once draped in silks spun finer than moonlight—was dead. Or perhaps worse than dead. What stirred now in her place was something small, something broken, something that scuttled through the slime-coated veins of a world that had forgotten the sun. She no longer walked through marble halls; she crawled through corridors of rotting stone.
When she was human, she had never lifted a hand in toil. She had eaten meals on golden platters, listened to harp songs echo through colonnades. She had lived a life where pain was poetic and distant—some abstract thing whispered about in stories of peasantry and war. Now, pain was breath. It was heartbeat. It was the only constant, thrumming in her bones like a funeral drum.
What had she done to deserve this? That question haunted her like a parasite chewing through her sanity.
The goblin kingdom was no kingdom—it was a festering abyss. A labyrinth of madness carved deep into the underbelly of the world, where stone wept and shadows bled. The tunnels pulsed like intestines, slick with fungal mucus, crawling with blind vermin and worse. The air was warm and wet, like a rotting tongue brushing against her skin. Every breath she took was a gamble: would it be laced with mold spores or the acidic tang of forge smoke?
The tunnels lived. They squirmed with movement—goblins, insects, beasts without names. They choked on their own filth, their civilization built on bones and bile. It was a nightmare not dreamt but lived, every hour a fresh horror, every step a risk.
She was not alone in her suffering. Around her toiled countless others—broken goblins, most barely more than children. Their eyes were voids, long stripped of hope or light. They moved like ghosts wearing meat, their limbs trained only to swing hammers, push carts, or beg for mercy that never came. But Eliana... she wasn't like them.
She still remembered. And that, perhaps, was her greatest curse.
She remembered warmth. Books. Tea. The feeling of silk gloves sliding over soft fingers. Her hands were claws now—jagged, swollen things wrapped in sores and calluses. The nails curved like hooks. Her skin was not skin anymore, but a patchwork of scales and rot. She smelled of blood, of iron, of ash. Her spine had twisted grotesquely, curling her into a permanent stoop. Her once-elegant gait had become a hunched shuffle.
And her face—she dared not think of her face. The goblins had no mirrors. Even if they did, she wasn't sure she'd want to look.
The place she labored in was worse than any oubliette. It was a forge, but not one of artistry—one of war. Black smoke choked the air, spilling from chimney-like vents that led deeper into the bowels of the mountain. Fires roared constantly, casting flickering, demon-shaped silhouettes onto the walls. Metal shrieked as it was hammered into crude spears and jagged blades. The clang of work was unending, echoing like screams in a catacomb.
The overseers were goblins bigger than the rest—hulking brutes with bones jutting from their skin like armor, their teeth filed to fangs. They carried whips of barbed sinew and metal. Eliana had already felt them dozens of times across her back. The first time, she had screamed. Now, she just shuddered.
"Worm," they called her. "Runt. Meat." Names were for the powerful. Here, identity was stripped away like skin from a carcass.
There were rules—unwritten, cruel rules:If you faltered, you were beaten.If you collapsed, you were left to rot.If you begged, they laughed as they carved pieces from you for the stew.
The food, if it could be called that, was slop—grey, wriggling paste served in cracked bowls. Sometimes it moved. Sometimes it screamed. It never filled her. Hunger gnawed at her stomach until she dreamed of eating rocks just to feel full.
And yet, she endured.
Not because she wanted to. Not because she was strong.
Because she hated.
Deep within her chest, nestled in a heart once soft and warm, now blackened with wrath, was a single, blazing ember. Vengeance. It was the only thing that hadn't been stripped from her.
Theron.
His name alone was enough to quiet the screams in her head. It was the mantra she whispered in the dark. The prayer she offered to no god. The curse she muttered while her hands blistered from heat.
She would survive this hell—not as a goblin. Not as a slave.
But as something worse.
Something they should fear.
The tunnels could crush her body. The forge could burn her skin. The hunger could tear at her soul. But the woman who had once stood in sunlight and sipped jasmine tea... she was still there. Watching. Waiting. Learning.
And the day would come when Eliana Rooin Valerius—beast or not—would rise.
And when she did, the goblin kingdom would bleed.
The Forge of Flesh and Bone
Eliana dreamed because reality was too cruel to bear.
But even her dreams were infected.
In them, she was Eliana Rooin Valerius again—First Daughter of House Valerius, heir to lands that sprawled like a silken tapestry across the sun-washed hills of the north. Her bare feet padded gently across polished marble warmed by morning sun. Lavender perfumed the air, and the faint trickle of a fountain sang beneath the songbirds nesting in the atrium's ivy-draped columns. She would see her mother there—Lady Virella, dressed in cascading white silks, snipping fresh sprigs of lavender with silver shears.
Always lavender. Always light. Always warmth.
But the warmth would shift.
The stone would grow slick under her soles, the smell souring into mold and blood. The garden would blacken, flowers curling into rot. Her mother's eyes would glaze over, and the silver shears would drip red. The birds became rats, gnawing at corpses strung up from ivy like ornaments.
And then—
The clang.The screams.The stench.
Reality, always crueler than dreams, always dragged her back.
The reeking forge halls of the goblin underworld awaited her, glowing like an open wound in the belly of the world.
She'd awaken with her face pressed to wet stone, breathing in rot and sweat, ears filled with the hollow echoes of picks against ore, of iron hammered against bone. Her limbs ached. Her hands twitched from phantom spasms. Her breath wheezed through cracked lips and a throat blackened by smoke.
Eliana Rooin Valerius—the name alone felt like blasphemy now. She dared not say it aloud. It was a curse, a secret, a shard of light she kept buried deep in the pit of her chest where even this place couldn't reach. It was the only piece of her that hadn't been burned or beaten into oblivion.
The forge had taken everything else.
She had been thrown into its depths on her second week.
No explanation. No warning.
She'd simply been seized by two rotting brutes, their breath rank with rotgut and mushrooms, and dragged to the bleeding heart of the goblin kingdom. There were no shifts here. No rotations. You worked until your limbs gave out. And then you worked more.
The forge was a cathedral of torment—its ceilings high and choked with smoke, stalactites hung like teeth above roaring flames. Iron flowed like blood, channeled through crudely carved canals that glowed molten orange. Black shadows danced across every wall, twisting and contorting into beasts too wild to name. Screams echoed without end—not just from pain, but from despair, exhaustion, and the realization that death wasn't mercy here. It was often delayed… on purpose.
The heat blistered flesh and peeled skin like fruit. The floor sizzled when sweat hit it. Tools were rusted and jagged, made to tear more than carve. The anvils were cracked and pitted with blood. Even the air was violence—each breath scraped her lungs with ash, a slow drowning in smoke.
The other goblins were barely better off. Most were hunched like her, their skin blotched and peeling. They coughed until blood splattered the ground. Their fingers were missing tips, their eyes clouded, their backs permanently bent. But unlike her, they had nothing else to remember. No image of a palace, no echo of fine music. No concept of dignity.
They were born to this.
She had fallen into it.
And that made every moment twice as cruel.
The forge's overseer was a monster even among monsters. His name, if he had one, was never spoken. He was just "The Jaw." A towering goblin whose lower mandible hung in ruin, shredded and bound with black iron wire. One eye was sewn shut with rusted staples. His back bulged with muscle, his skin blackened by heat and covered in tattoos that shifted with the firelight like crawling ink. His whip was made of thorned wire and bone, soaked in mushroom venom. It hissed when it struck.
"Lift, rat," he snarled the first time she collapsed beneath a stone anvil. "Or I'll carve your spine into bellows string."
She lifted. She screamed, but she lifted.
The pain was unimaginable. The rock scraped her claws to the root, tore muscles too small to bear the weight. She thought her arm had dislocated. Maybe it had. It didn't matter. She moved it anyway.
That night, she didn't sleep.
She curled in a corner near the wall, her bones pressed so tight against the stone she felt like part of it. Her back throbbed with whip welts. Pus leaked down her spine. Her claws trembled. Her throat was scorched dry.
And yet… she didn't cry.
She hadn't cried since the first night. That had been a mistake—tears made you a target. Tears meant weakness. Weakness meant death.
The goblin children learned that lesson early.
She watched one cry over his broken leg once. The others had swarmed him like rats to a corpse, laughing and biting and clawing. They tore him apart before the overseers even noticed. By then, it didn't matter.
The dogs got what was left.
Eliana had not made that mistake twice.
The forge burned her. It bent her. But it did not break her.
Because she still remembered.
She remembered holding a rapier in the training yard, the hiss of steel sliding from its scabbard. She remembered long nights poring over strategy maps in her father's war chamber, tracing routes through enemy territory while her tutors quizzed her on political alliances and siege mechanics.
She remembered standing in judgment over commoners—her word law, her presence holy.
She remembered power.
And now she was the lowest of the low.
A runt. A worm. A goblin.
But that knowledge—that awareness of how far she had fallen—that was her blade now.
Because what the others didn't understand was that only the fallen truly know the height of the peak. And only those who've touched the summit can dream of climbing again.
Even in this pit, even in this hell, even with blistered feet and a back carved open by cruelty—Eliana had a purpose.
Vengeance.
Not rage. Not survival. Not even escape.
Vengeance.
It was the only word that mattered now. The only light in the dark.
Theron had cast her into the underworld, buried her in filth. But he had not erased her. He had merely buried a weapon—and weapons sharpen in fire.
So let them lash her.
Let them brand her.
Let them feed her spoiled meat and force her to kneel in sludge.
She would take it all. She would endure it.
Because in the forge of flesh and bone, something was being remade.
Not a goblin.
Not a slave.
Not a child of nobility.
Something worse.
Something colder.
Something hungry.
And one day, when the flames had tempered her suffering into steel… she would return.
And gods help Theron Valerius when she did.
The Furnace Below the World
The first thing she noticed wasn't the heat.It was the air.
It pressed against her lungs like wet stone—thick, toxic, wrong. Breathing was like drowning in a slow-moving fog. There was no wind. No breeze. No sky to give relief. Just weight, layered in soot and screams.
Then came the heat.
Not warmth. Not fire.
Oppression.
It bled from the walls, the ceiling, the very floor beneath her clawed, raw feet. It clung to her skin like invisible tar, soaked into her bones, filled her nostrils with the scent of burning oil, old blood, melted skin, and molten metal. Every breath scorched her throat like she was swallowing glass shards dipped in oil.
This was not a place meant for life.
This was the Black Forge.
No poetic phrase could soften it. No metaphor could cleanse it.
It was hell.
Hell carved not by gods, but by necessity. Goblin necessity.
A vast chamber dug into the guts of the mountain, lit only by flickering fires and the blood-red glow of molten steel. The ceiling disappeared into shadow. The walls wept soot. Chains dangled from iron rafters like the disemboweled intestines of dead titans. The very stone trembled beneath the hammers of the damned. There was no light here, only fire. And fire was never merciful.
Goblins screamed, sang, spat, and fought. Children no older than six pumped bellows, half-naked and coughing. Elders worked anvils with trembling hands, their skin melted to the bone. Overseers with spiked whips patrolled the walkways, grunting in their guttural, wet dialect. The slaves below—the ones who didn't collapse—were given more work. The ones who did were dragged away. No one returned.
Eliana was thrust into this crucible like discarded meat.
Her station: the bellows.
A grotesque machine of rusted iron, stitched hide, sinew, and bone. Tall as two goblins. Its leather grips were caked with dried blood. Her job was simple: pump the handle, drive air into the furnace, keep the flames alive so the smelters could boil their metal.
Pump.Breathe fire.Pump.Or die.
The handle was taller than she was.
Her goblin body—malnourished, bent, grotesquely proportioned—struggled to grasp the bar. Each movement was a punishment. Her arms burned. Her back screamed. Her hands cracked and bled. Sweat mixed with blood, pooling beneath her feet, stinging her blistered ankles.
She wanted to scream.But there was no space for screams in the Black Forge.
The air was already full of them.
The light came from one source—the flames—and one other:
Aethermoss.
She noticed it during her first break—if the three minutes of collapsing beside the slag pile could be called a break. The cavern wall in the far corner pulsed with a soft, blue glow. It wasn't bright. In fact, it barely registered against the overwhelming red of the forge. But it was gentle. The light didn't burn. It breathed.
Thin strands of blue moss clung to the cracks and crevices in the stone. The glow pulsed slowly, like the rise and fall of sleeping lungs. It coated the rocks in fragile webs, trailing like veins.
Eliana inched closer when no one watched.
It felt... clean.
When she lay near it, just for a moment, her lungs loosened. Her throat opened. The suffocating stench of the forge seemed to retreat—just a little. She didn't understand why. Not at first. But something in her old, noble memory stirred.
Aethermoss.
She remembered it from ancient scrolls—a forbidden alchemical text in her father's library. "Breath of the Deep," the scribe had called it. A magical organism that absorbed toxic air and released oxygen. Sacred to the underground races. Life-giver. Purifier.
In this pit of torment, it was the only thing that didn't hurt.
She made a silent vow that night—if she were to survive, even a day longer, she'd survive near the moss.
But the forge wasn't just a workplace. It was a weapon.And pain was its favorite tool.
On her third day, Eliana faltered at the bellows. Her fingers couldn't grip. Her knees buckled. Her face hit the iron frame. Blood dripped into the coals.
The overseer said nothing. He simply shoved her.
She stumbled sideways—into the furnace wall.
The skin on her calf bubbled.
The hiss of flesh on metal rang out, and she screamed—a sound that tore through the smog like thunder. She collapsed, convulsing, vision white with pain. The goblins laughed. Even the other slaves turned away, uninterested.
She lay there for minutes, shaking. No one helped. No one looked.
Because here, suffering wasn't a byproduct. It was the currency.
The forge was alive. It fed on agony. And it was always hungry.
At night, when the hammers finally fell silent and the overseers retreated to their upper halls to gorge themselves on meat and rot-liquor, the workers crawled into pits like dying rats.
Eliana's pit was a cracked hole beneath a collapsed beam, just wide enough to curl into. The ground was wet with some kind of viscous black sludge. She didn't care. Her body throbbed. Her leg blistered and oozing. Her throat raw.
She stared at the wall where aethermoss pulsed, and whispered through bloodied teeth:
"Heat is pain. Pain is memory. Memory is truth. And truth... is power."
She repeated it. Over and over.Until the words no longer meant anything.Until they meant everything.
Then came the lesson.
A day like any other—if hell had routine.
Eliana's limbs were shaking. Her eyes were sunken, mouth dry as sand. But she pumped the bellows. She kept her head down. She moved like a puppet strung together with pain.
And then, without warning, a rotted crust of bread was thrown at her feet.
A reward. Her first food in two days.
She blinked.
Reached.
And a shadow loomed.
A goblin—massive, scarred, with tusks filed to jagged points—stepped into her view. He reeked of rot and meat. His eyes were yellow. Cruel.
He didn't speak.
He kicked her in the ribs.
The sound was wet. Bones shifted.
Eliana collapsed, mouth open in a silent gasp. He kicked again. Laughed. Picked up the crust. Ate it in front of her. Crumbs fell on her bloodstained cheek.
"Runt eats last," he grunted, tearing off another bite. "If she eats at all."
He turned away.
And something inside her snapped.
It wasn't anger. It wasn't pride.
It was acceptance.
Eliana Rooin Valerius, noblewoman, daughter of House Valerius, beloved of the court, was dead.
There was no dignity here. No law. No order. No name.
Only the bite.
She bit into his leg.
Sank her teeth into his flesh until blood flooded her mouth. He howled. Spun. Slammed her into the wall. She clawed his face. Raked her nails into his eyes. He screamed again. Hit her. Hard.
The world spun.
Then the guards came.
She was dragged by her hair into the slag pit. Beaten. Burned. Thrown back into her hole.
But when she awoke, lips split, skin flayed open—
She smiled.
Because the others looked at her differently now.
Not with pity.
With caution.
Fear.
She was no longer prey.
She was something else.
That night, she whispered again. Not in pain. In promise.
"Eliana Rooin Valerius is dead."
She wiped the blood from her face and licked it from her fingers.
"I am goblin now."
"And goblins fight back."
The forge had failed to break her.
All it had done...
Was forge her anew.
The Whip and the Wound
What Fire Cannot Kill
One mistake.
That's all it took in the Black Forge.
One moment of weakness, one failure to uphold the endless cycle of punishment and labor—and the machine responded with blood.
Eliana dropped the slag-hammer mid-swing.
It wasn't a dramatic fall. It simply slipped. Her fingers, cracked open from days of relentless use, offered no resistance. The handle, slick with grease, grime, and her own dried blood, slid from her grasp like a corpse falling into a river.
It hit the forge floor with a metallic clang that echoed like a funeral bell.
Time stopped.
The constant thunder of hammers paused. Goblins twisted their heads. Their eyes—beady, yellow, soulless—narrowed. Some sneered, lips pulling back over needle teeth. Others grinned wide, waiting. Hungry. Watching.
In the Black Forge, suffering was entertainment. Failure was a feast.
Eliana's breath caught in her throat.
She tried to reach for the hammer again, as if she could undo the moment by sheer will. But it was already too late. The silence had already called him.
Krung the Ironback.
The Forge Master.
He didn't need to be summoned. He felt mistakes. He smelled hesitation. Like a beast drawn to blood, he appeared—lumbering out from the smog and smoke with the slow inevitability of a guillotine.
He was monstrous, even by goblin standards.
Towering and hunchbacked, Krung's silhouette was distorted by years of brutal labor and too many victories. His skin looked like tarred leather, mottled by heat scars and ritual carvings. One eye was white and blind. The other glowed faintly orange—lit not with magic, but the heat of madness.
He wore no armor. Only soot-stained leather straps and molten metal plates fused to his skin from past battles. A cruel trophy.
But it was the whip that spoke first.
Long. Black. Barbed.
A nightmare stitched from metal, sinew, and hatred.
He didn't yell. He didn't ask questions.
He cracked the whip once in warning. The sound split the air like lightning. The second time, it struck her back with the precision of a butcher carving meat.
The pain didn't hit all at once.
It bloomed.
A slow, spreading wildfire of agony, tearing through nerves, ripping through sinew, clawing up her spine. Her knees folded. The floor rushed up. She gasped—but no breath came. Just the searing heat of tears she refused to shed.
The forge was still silent. Watching.
Krung's voice, when it came, was like coal ground between stones.
"Useless. Weak. Waste of skin."
He grabbed her by the throat—faster than something that size should move—and lifted her.
Her feet dangled in the ash. Her fingers twitched, reaching for anything. Her vision blurred. His face was inches from hers. The stench of alcohol, smoke, and rot made her gag. His tusks were cracked from past fights. His breath was the furnace itself.
"Break again, and you'll feed the fire."
He dragged her like a doll, her back trailing blood in thin lines. Goblins scattered to make room. Her heels scraped over stone. Sparks hissed underfoot.
He brought her to the edge of the molten pit—a seething mouth of red-gold fury, endlessly bubbling and hungry. It roared with an animal sound. A heat that blistered skin just by being near it.
Krung leaned in. Pressed her face closer.
"Want to see what failure looks like? That's failure."
Her skin began to cook. She could hear the sizzle. Her face pulled tight. The smell of her own burning flesh clawed into her brain.
She did not scream.
Somewhere deep inside her, something refused to die.
A voice rose.
Not from outside.
From within.
It was not human. Not goblin. Not sane.
It was memory sharpened into a blade.
She remembered hands holding hers—her mother's, warm and perfumed with lavender. She remembered her father's voice, strict but proud. She remembered books. Fireplaces. The crest of House Valerius.
She remembered betrayal.
Steel in her back.
Blood in her mouth.
A voice whispering, "You were always too proud."
Something twisted in her.
Not like a scream. Like the coiling of a serpent beneath her ribs.
Krung threw her down.
She hit the stone hard, vision exploding into white. Laughter rang around her. The jeers of monsters. A thousand little deaths in every voice.
But her hand found the hammer again.
Not because she wanted to.
Because she had to.
The weight returned. Familiar now. Like a burden she could finally carry.
Her back screamed. Her hands bled. But she rose.
Every bone in her body wanted to break. Her legs shook like brittle twigs. Her vision swam. But she stood.
And lifted the hammer.
No scream. No fury. Just… movement.
And she brought it down.
CLANG.
The echo shattered the silence. Louder than before. Louder than the whip.
The goblins froze.
Krung froze.
She didn't fall.
She remained.
Blood painted her back. Her breath came like fire drawn through broken glass. But she looked forward—through the haze, through the pain—with eyes that no longer belonged to a victim.
Golden eyes.
Not goblin. Not human.
Something in between. Something becoming.
Krung stared.
The whip twitched.
But he didn't swing.
He turned. Snarled.
And walked away.
The forge resumed.
Noise returned.
But something had changed.
Not in the world. Not in the forge.
In her.
What Fire Cannot Kill
The goblin children were wolves in smaller skin.
Not innocent. Not kind.
Kindness in the Black Forge was a death sentence. A mercy meant for the grave. They were raised on blood and bile, suckled on the teat of cruelty.
One child—twisted, hunched, with a clubfoot and a nose bitten off long ago—ripped a rat apart with his teeth for a crust of bread. The older ones cheered. The rat twitched once, then fell limp.
Eliana didn't flinch.
She watched.
Eyes open. Always watching.
She noticed which goblins got extra meat. Who got water instead of rotbrew. Who slipped into the overseer's tent and came out unharmed. She listened. Memorized. Studied the world like it was another court, another stage.
Only this time, the knives were visible.
The overseer, she noticed, had a limp.
His left leg—badly set from an old break—twitched whenever he yelled. His weight shifted when he was angry. His voice cracked when he lied.
She catalogued everything.
How the smart goblins didn't fight—but bargained. How the mushrooms in the far tunnel grew only near heat leaks. How the guards avoided a darkened shaft marked with sigils in dried black blood.
Even here, power moved in shadows.
Secrets were currency.
And Eliana was rich in silence.
She never begged again.
She didn't plead or weep. She endured. She adapted. She remembered how to move small. How to eat fast. How to sleep with one eye open.
A predator in hiding.
The body may have been goblin.
But the soul?
The soul was learning how to bite back.
Hunger Beneath the Stone
The Taste of Ashes
Hunger.
Not the kind she once knew. Not the gentle ache before a missed meal or the mild annoyance when servants brought the wrong wine.
No—this was different.
This was primal.
It lived beneath her skin, a snarling, hollow beast that chewed at her ribs, clawed through her belly, and filled her skull with a fog of madness. It didn't fade. It didn't pause. It only grew sharper, more insistent with each hour spent under the molten breath of the forge.
And worst of all—it was winning.
The food—if it could even be called that—was an insult to suffering.
They brought it in cracked clay bowls that smelled like rot and ash. A gruel of gray slop, flecked with bone chips and fragments of insect shells. Sometimes it moved. Maggots, half-cooked. Sometimes it didn't. Cold, greasy globs that sat on the tongue like tar and burned the throat like bile.
It smelled like decay.
It tasted like hell.
But you ate it, or you died.
And some days... dying felt like mercy.
Eliana remembered food. Real food. The kind that made rooms fall silent and candles seem brighter.
Seared venison with saffron glaze. Wine-soaked figs. Her mother's honeyed pears, dusted with cinnamon. Warm bread split open beside a fire, butter melting into the soft heart of it.
She remembered.
Which made everything worse.
Because the memory of beauty made the filth she now endured taste even more monstrous.
One day, the bowl they gave her was filled with something alive.
A twitching centipede, drowned in cold grease. Still moving. Still angry.
She stared at it.
Her gut clenched. Her body screamed in protest. Her soul recoiled.
But her hands—starved and trembling—moved anyway.
She bit down.
It popped.
A flood of bitter slime and grit poured into her mouth. The legs scraped against her tongue. The taste was wrong, something between rusted iron and moldy bread left to rot in a drowned cellar.
She gagged.
But she didn't spit it out.
Because even vomit was a luxury here.
Once, in a moment of utter madness, she'd tried to eat a strip of leather used to bind the forge tools. It had hung from the wall, cracked and black from age. She'd chewed it for hours, imagining it was beef, pretending it had flavor.
It didn't.
It tasted like oil, blood, and filth. Like something that had died long ago but hadn't stopped rotting.
She vomited it up within minutes—her body convulsing, her stomach twisting until only bile remained.
And yet… she felt worse for wasting it.
There were others who lost the war with hunger.
One night, a young goblin—barely more than a runt—snapped.
He crawled to a sleeping worker and bit into his arm, feral and shaking. The shriek woke half the forge.
By dawn, the others had torn him apart.
They ate him. Bone. Flesh. Teeth.
Eliana watched.
And for the first time, she understood what the bottom looked like.
She wouldn't fall that far.
Not yet.
So she stole.
Not like a thief in the light, but like a rat in the dark.
Crumbs from careless hands. Bones left unguarded. Fungus scraped from the forge walls—some glowing faintly green, others soft and slimy with rot. She found a crack in the stone one night where beetles nested, and spent hours picking them out with a sharpened nail.
She learned to eat everything.
Her gag reflex died. Her sense of pride withered. But her mind—her mind still burned.
And every time she forced another foul thing past her throat, every time her stomach turned against her, she whispered through cracked lips:
"Eliana Rooin Valerius."
Not to anyone.
Not for mercy.
But to remember.
Because that name—no matter how tattered, how far from the silks and banners of her old life—was all that separated her from the monsters.
It was the last flame. The final chain anchoring her to who she had been.
And if the forge couldn't kill it…
Then it would burn the world instead.
The Shadow Learns
They broke the body. But they left the mind.
They had shattered her hands. Torn her back open with whips. Let hunger gnaw her belly into a pit of acid and blood.
But they had not touched her mind.
And that… was a mistake.
Eliana no longer existed only as a slave in the Black Forge. She became something else—a presence, quiet and unblinking, buried beneath soot and broken skin.
A shadow with memory.
A weapon in the making.
She learned to watch.Not as prey watches a predator—but as a hunter maps the den of beasts.
She charted everything:The footfalls of the overseers—thick-legged, dull-eyed monsters of muscle and blind obedience.The rhythm of the bellows. The heartbeat of the forge. The rise and fall of heat. The momentary silences that passed through the tunnels when the chain gang was rotated.
There was a system to it all.
A machine.
And every machine had its weak points.
Bragg was the first one she studied.
A porcine-faced overseer with pitted skin and a gut like a hanging sack of wet bones. He liked his mushroom wine—thick, black, and rotting with fermentation. It made him sway on his feet and miss his strikes. Some nights he forgot where his keys were. One time, he pissed on a slag pile thinking it was a latrine.
Eliana never laughed.
She watched. Measured.
And she remembered the sour tang of that wine—the way the smell lingered, the way his hands trembled when he drank too deeply. She knew which shifts he took longer breaks during, and how his right leg dragged slightly when drunk.
She filed it all away.
The forge itself became her classroom.
The glow-cycle of the bioluminescent mushrooms—those sickly blue fungi that pulsed with life embedded in the stone—became her clock.
They faded every six hours. That was the shift change.
She began timing it down to the minute. She knew how long it took each overseer to move between posts. She tracked the exact seconds the slag dumps were unguarded, the blind corners that remained hidden from the elevated catwalks above. She even began keeping count of the chain-rat patrols—the squat goblins who ran between work zones, ferrying news, threats, and scraps of food.
Patterns.
Every system had them.
And Eliana saw what others did not.
She also studied the power behind the pain.
The overseers barked and whipped, but when a robed figure passed through the corridor, bearing the seven-fanged sigil burned into his cowl—everything stopped.
Even Bragg flinched. Even Krung the Ironback lowered his head.
That symbol… it was more than rank. It was religion.
Fear wrapped in thread.
The High Priests of the Deep Flame. They never shouted. Never beat anyone. They didn't have to.
Even the cruelest goblins obeyed their silence. Some even murmured dark prayers after they passed. Whispers about "the Deep Flame's eye" or "the Black Vein's patience."
Eliana began to listen at night—when the forge dimmed to embers and only the injured whimpered in their sleep.
And in that murk of sweat and bleeding dreams, she heard truths twisted into myth:
"The mountain remembers…""There's something beneath the sealed gate—something that eats the light.""The Deep Flame can make you strong, if you feed it right.""Magic old as blood… buried in chains, bound in prayers no one understands anymore.""They say the first goblin came from that fire. Crawled from it with a scream and a name."
Eliana didn't know if any of it was real.
But she remembered something her mother once said on a cold night, when the fire burned low:
"Even the worst lies wear the clothes of truth, child. You can smell the bones under the meat, if you look close enough."
So she listened harder.
Pain stopped being pain.It became education.
She learned which guards liked to hit for pleasure—and which ones hit because they were told to.
She learned who was broken, and who was just pretending not to be.
She learned which wounds scarred quickest, and how to grit her teeth just enough to fool her body into silence.
She learned how to wear her wounds like armor.How to bleed without screaming.How to carry more than her frame could bear, just to be overlooked as weak.
She didn't waste her suffering. She absorbed it. Folded it into herself like heat into metal.
One night, while dragging a slag cart down the twisting path toward the dump, she was stopped.
A guard—ugly as rot.Flat-nosed. Lips split from cold and fungus.Too many teeth, filed into tiny knives, like he wanted to chew through the world.
He leaned in close. His breath was wet with fermented fungus and bad meat.
"Still limping, little palace worm?""Still think yourself better than goblin shit?""Tell me—how's that pretty noble mouth taste when you eat bugs?"
Eliana didn't blink.
She turned to him—slowly.Eyes ringed in soot, gold irises shining like venom under the torchlight.She said nothing.
But then… she smiled.
It wasn't defiance.It wasn't madness.
It was knowledge.
A smile carved out of shadow and flame.
The guard's expression faltered. He stepped back.
Not because she'd spoken. Not because she'd fought.
But because she hadn't.
Because that smile said something deeper:
You're already dead. You just haven't heard the scream yet.
She turned, dragging the slag behind her once more.
Her limp was still there.But now—it looked rehearsed. Controlled.Like a tool she had chosen, not a wound inflicted.
The guards didn't know it yet.
But Eliana was no longer part of the forge's machinery.
She was a crack in its foundation.
A shadow hiding in plain sight.
And when the time came to break the system—It wouldn't see her coming.
The Spark in the Ashes
Vengeance is not a scream. It is a breath held in the dark.
There came a night in the forge when the flames whispered instead of roared.
The chains were still. The screams had faded into memory. Even the overseer's whip—crusted with dried blood, leaning on its iron hook—slept.
It was in that silence, deep and foul, that Eliana broke.
Not with a cry. Not with rage. Not with fists.
But with tears. Silent. Bitter. Dry as dust.
Her body had long since stopped producing wet ones. Her ducts had dried like old wells, drained by smoke and suffering. Her sobs were only twitches of the lungs now—phantom echoes of what humanity once felt like.
She curled into the deepest shadow of the forge, where light never reached, and the stink of rotting mushrooms could almost be ignored. Her bones ached. Her hands bled. Her ribs were visible through her too-thin skin. She had eaten only a handful of cave lichen and a burnt rat tail in three days.
And yet, through all of it, she had not wept.
Until now.
Until her body remembered what it meant to mourn.
Then came the sound.
Not the clang of a dropped tool. Not the heavy thud of a goblin's boot.
It was something… softer.A scrape. A shiver. Like fingers brushing across stone.
A breath that didn't belong.
Eliana froze.
Her senses, dulled by exhaustion, now flared awake. Her breath hitched. She did not dare move. Did not dare look.
But she felt it. Eyes.
Watching her.
Drawing closer.
She turned her head—just slightly—and saw the figure.
Not a goblin. Not one of the drunk, hulking guards.No. This one was different.
He was robed.Tattered cloth hung like smoke from his hunched frame. His face was obscured by a stitched veil, and behind the narrow slits of fabric—eyes glowed. Not with fire. Not with hate. But with something worse.
Purpose.
He stood at the edge of the dark, where torchlight dared not reach.
And he stared.
Unmoving.Unbreathing.
Eliana met his gaze. Something deep in her—older than memory, colder than fear—curled up tight.
He raised a hand.
Not a warning. Not a threat.
Just a single, silent nod.
And then he was gone.
No sound. No whisper.Just… absence.
She sat there long after, too afraid to move.Too hopeful to dismiss it.
Her mind whispered lies. You imagined it.But her gut—her raw, starved, sharpened gut—told her something else.
It had been real.
And it meant something.
That night, the embers in her chest stirred.
Not warmth. Not life.Something darker.
Something hotter.
Vengeance.
Not the wild, flailing kind. Not a scream in the dark.
But a seed.
A spark smoldering beneath layers of ash.
She lay in her corner and whispered her name—what was left of it.
Eliana Rooin Valerius.
A name so long, so noble, so unspeakably distant from what she had become.
She mouthed it silently while others slept. While slaves bled in their dreams. While bones snapped and forged metal cooled. She clung to the syllables like prayer beads.
She whispered it when she shaped tools—crude, ugly things forced from misshapen iron. Her fingers trembled. Her palms cracked open. But she whispered that name over every strike.
Every scar on her back became a ledger.A memory of what had been stolen.A tally of what would be taken back.
Her nobility wasn't in her blood anymore. That had been fouled.Not in her appearance—twisted, malformed, green-skinned and broken.
No.It lived in her fury.
In her refusal to forget.
In her hatred that burned cleaner than any forge fire.
She remembered Theron's face.The false smile. The dagger in the dark.His voice whispering, "Forgive me, Eliana."As if he believed his betrayal was mercy.
She would make him eat those words with his last, choking breath.
But she wouldn't rush it.
Vengeance was not a blade.It was heat.
It crept. It consumed. Slowly. Patiently.
She would stay quiet.
She would stay beaten.She would wear the chains like bracelets and let the overseers think she was broken.
She would be the dog that licked boots.Until her teeth were sharp enough to tear out a throat.
The goblins had given her a new body.
They had fed her to filth, let her rot, stripped her of everything—her title, her pride, her name.
But they made a mistake.
They let her live.
And worse—They let her learn.
Now, in the silent dark where hope should have died, something else stirred.
Not hope.
A storm.
And one day, when it rose—
It would not weep.It would not scream.It would burn.