The impact against the heavy oak door made the shop’s wall clocks hum in sympathetic vibration.
Ethan Vance didn't hesitate. He caught the arbalest off its hooks with his left hand, grabbed a thick wool blanket from the side bench with his right, and kicked the release lever on the kinetic door mechanism, locking the broom's trip-sear open so the counterweight wouldn't launch whatever was lying on his porch into the next district.
"Toby," Ethan barked, his voice cutting through the rising storm. "Stay behind the counter. Light two lanterns and bring the kettle."
"Yes, sir!"
Ethan threw the heavy iron bolt and yanked the door inward.
A wall of sub-zero wind and blinding white snow screamed into the showroom, instantly fluttering the paper schematics on the drafting table.
Lying sprawled face-down across the snowy threshold was a mountain of dark, battered metal.
It was a warrior. A woman, judging by the narrow cut of the waist plate, but broad-shouldered and easily six feet tall. She was clad in full Imperial heavy plate—not the shiny, parade-ground steel of the capital's ceremonial guard, but the brutal, pitted, notched iron of a frontline trench veteran. Thick layers of road dirt, dried blood, and frozen slush clung to every crease of her joints. Her gray wool surcoat was shredded into tatters, stiffened with ice.
Clutched in her left iron gauntlet, even in unconsciousness, was a massive two-handed greatsword. The blade was nearly five and a half feet of dull, double-edged gray steel, wrapped at the ricasso with tarnished brass wire, its broad crossguard caked in ice and notched by dozens of blade-strikes.
Just down the steps, a massive bay warhorse stood shivering violently in the howling gale. The beast was built like an ox, its chest wrapped in cracked, studded leather barding, frost encrusting its flared nostrils. Its right hind leg was bleeding from a deep gash where an icy crust had lacerated the hock, and its ribs heaved with ragged, wheezing gasps as it lowered its heavy head, nudging the woman’s iron-clad boots with a low, desperate nicker.
Ethan dropped to one knee in the snow.
"Hey," he said, shaking the woman's left shoulder. "Can you hear me?"
No response.
Her right shoulder was the problem. Even through the freezing wind, Ethan caught the foul, chemical stench of decaying flesh mingled with the bitter, sharp ozone smell of an inverted etheric short-circuit.
Her right pauldron was massive, forged from heavy blackened steel, but it looked as if it had been half-melted from the inside out and then frozen solid. A crust of dark, iridescent blue rime—colder than natural ice—coated the entire shoulder plate, creeping down over her bicep and up into the neck gorget. Sluggish, black-blue fluid seeped from beneath the armor seam, freezing into dark crystals before it could hit the snow.
"Hold your fire!" a rough voice shouted through the blizzard.
Ethan snapped his arbalest up, aiming into the swirling whiteout.
Emerging from the darkness of the avenue, wrapped in a heavy wool watch-cloak with his iron halberd lowered, was Sergeant Gerrick. The watchman was puffing clouds of white steam, his face red from the wind.
"Hold your fire, Vance!" Gerrick wheezed, lunging onto the porch steps and dropping his weapon into the drift. "I heard the horse screaming from the south watchtower! What in the name of the High Hearth is—"
Gerrick stopped dead. His eyes dropped to the unconscious warrior on the stone. He saw the greatsword, then looked at the cracked insignia stamped into the breastplate: a three-pronged anchor wrapped in broken chains, beneath a faded Imperial crest.
The old sergeant’s breath hitched in his throat, his eyes widening in sheer disbelief.
"The Ironanchor..." Gerrick whispered, his knuckles whitening as he grabbed his cloak. "By the gods of the frontier... that’s Ira Ironanchor. The Butcher of the Third Vanguard."
"She’s freezing to death," Ethan said curtly. "Grab her legs. Toby, get out here and take the horse’s bridle! Lead it across the street into the cooper's shed—there's dry hay from the packing crates, shelter from the wind, and a bucket of water by the bench!"
"On it!" Toby bolted past them into the snow, his small boots churning through the drifts. The boy grabbed the heavy leather reins of the shivering warhorse, speaking softly to the terrified beast, patting its frozen muzzle, and coaxing it out of the gale and into the sheltered ruins of the shed across the avenue.
Ethan grabbed the warrior beneath her steel-plated armpits, while Gerrick took her heavy, iron-shod boots.
She was astonishingly heavy. Between her own dense, powerful frame and sixty pounds of trench armor, it was like hauling a lead statue across the threshold. They dragged her into the warm showroom, Ethan kicking the oak door shut with his heel and throwing the heavy iron bolt.
The roaring gale outside instantly dropped to a distant, muffled whistle.
The warmth of the shop struck them like a physical wave. The scent of sweet mint, hot goat's milk, and clean birch smoke enveloped the room.
They carried her into the back workshop, laying her out across Ethan's heavy oak worktable. The table groaned under the weight, the thick pine legs settling firmly against the stone floor.
Gerrick leaned against the wall, panting hard, wiping sweat and melted ice from his gray mustache. He looked down at the woman’s pale, bloodless face.
She looked to be in her late twenties. Her features were sharp, rugged, and handsome, framed by a short crop of shaggy, sweat-matted dark hair. A clean, pale scar ran from the edge of her left temple down to her jawline, but her skin had turned the sickly, translucent gray of skimmed milk. Her lips were cracked and tinged with cyanotic purple.
Even passed out, her jaw was clenched so hard the muscles knotted like iron cables, her brow furrowed in eternal, stubborn resistance.
"What is an Imperial Vanguard knight doing in Dawnstone?" Ethan asked, already reaching for his heavy leather tool roll and unbuckling his shop aprons. "The Third Legion is stationed four hundred miles south on the border fortresses."
"She was," Gerrick muttered grimly, keeping his voice down as if afraid the walls had ears. "Three years ago, during the Siege of the Black Marsh. She held a broken bridge alone for nine hours against two hundred barbarian skirmishers. But she took a cursed frost-lance through the right shoulder. When the army chirurgeons couldn't purge the ice poison, the high brass didn't want to waste healing draughts on a frontline captain. They stripped her commission, threw her twenty silver pensions, and discharged her."
Gerrick spat onto the sawdust on the floor, bitterness dripping from his words. "That's the Empire for you, Vance. You bleed for ten years in their mud, and the moment a contractor's cheap rivet gives out, they throw you into the snow like a broken wheelbarrow. She drifted north. Drank herself half to death in every border tavern from here to the coast. Took bounty contracts nobody else would touch. Last I heard, she was hunting snow-drakes in the high crevasses. What in the hell drove her to your porch?"
"The cold," Ethan said simply. "The same thing that drives everyone to a hearth when the frost gets deep enough."
The back door opened with a click, and Toby slipped back inside, panting and covered in snow. In his hands, the boy carried a heavy, cracked leather saddlebag and a pair of brass feed bags.
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"The horse is safe, Master Ethan," Toby said, brushing flakes from his eyelashes. "I rubbed his hock down with some dry hay and wrapped his wound with a burlap feed sack. He's chewing on some dried clover. But... I found these in her saddlebag."
Toby placed the saddlebag on a side stool. It was half-empty. Inside lay three empty clay bottles smelling of raw potato moonshine, a battered brass compass with a cracked glass face, a folded parchment discharge paper stained with beer, and a bronze campaign medal with the ribbon burned off.
No money. Not a single copper penny. Just the bare, bitter remnants of an abandoned soldier’s life.
Ethan pulled off his work gloves and stepped up to the table.
Beside the warrior's head, Pip hopped down from Ethan's shoulder. The little lizard sniffed at the woman's frost-crusted cheek, let out a soft, concerned whuffle, and curled his warm, peach-glowing body right against the side of her neck, radiating a steady, gentle forty-five degrees of pure body heat into her jugular artery.
The woman’s violent shivering eased by a fraction of an inch, a faint, ragged sigh slipping past her chapped lips.
"Toby!" Ethan called out. "Stoke the auxiliary hearth. Put two large copper kettles of water on to boil. Fetch the clean linen strips from the upper cabinet and the jar of refined bear tallow. Then open the chimney damper all the way—we're going to need maximum draft."
"Yes, Master Ethan!" Toby sprinted to the stove, stoking the birch coals with practiced speed, pulling down the iron flue lever to create a roaring updraft that pulled air straight toward the ceiling hood.
Ethan leaned over the woman’s right shoulder.
The armor here was completely fused to her flesh. The steel straps and brass rivets holding the heavy pauldron to the breastplate had become encrusted in a gnarled, crystalline growth of deep blue rime. When Ethan touched the metal with his bare fingertip, a sharp, burning pain shot through his nerve endings—not ordinary cold, but the stinging, necrotic bite of corrupted magical frost that tried to freeze the moisture out of his skin.
His left eye flickered.
A sharp, electric pulse ran across the back of his retina, and the Precursor Firmware engaged with a silent hum.
Lines of pale cyan light traced across the surface of the blackened steel pauldron. In Ethan's vision, the armor turned semi-transparent, revealing the internal grain of the metal, the shattered clavicle bone beneath, and the chaotic, spiraling tangle of frozen etheric channels running through her tissue.
+-------------------------------------------------------------+ | FIRMWARE DIAGNOSTIC: ARMORED EXOSKELETON & BIO-MERIDIAN | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | Subject: Female Human (Age: ~27 | Mass: ~78 kg + Armor) | | Affliction: Corrupted Imperial Frost Matrix (Model 3-B) | | Defect Analysis: Substandard lead-bismuth solder failure; | | thermal grounding fuse bypassed by contractor defect. | | Status: Inverted Cryogenic Feedback Loop. | | Penetration: 18mm into right clavicle & sub-deltoid plexus. | | Frost Necrosis Progression: 84% through humeral joint. | | Estimated Time to Heart Valve Failure: 11 Hours. | | Recommended Procedure: Immediate mechanical excision of | | fused runic plate; thermal plasma cauterization of core. | +-------------------------------------------------------------+
Ethan’s jaw tightened into an iron line.
"Contractor defect," Ethan muttered under his breath, his voice dripping with icy contempt.
"What did you say?" Gerrick asked, stepping closer with a frown.
"Her armor didn't fail because of an enemy weapon," Ethan said, pointing a hardened carbon-steel scriber at the corroded brass rivets beneath the rime. "Look at the stamp on the inner mounting flange. That’s the mark of the Valerius Munitions Guild in the capital. They skimped on the bismuth balance in the grounding fuse to save ten coppers per suit. When she took an etheric hit three years ago, the safety cutoff never tripped. Instead of grounding the frost mana into the air, the circuit shorted out and turned the entire pauldron into an inward-drawing heat sink."
Ethan traced the blackened, purple line of swollen tissue creeping down her bicep.
"The rune has been feeding on her own body heat for three years," Ethan continued, his voice steady, clinical, and deadly serious. "Every calorie her heart pumps out, that rotten piece of military surplus absorbs and converts into frostbite. It’s grown roots into her collarbone like an iron parasite. If this plate stays attached through the night, the frost will reach her pulmonary artery. Her heart valves will freeze into glass before sunrise."
Gerrick stepped back, his face turning gray. "Can you save her? A surgeon in the lower quarter would just hack the whole arm off at the shoulder with an axe—and with that much poison in the bone, she’d bleed out on the floorboards before they finished the cut."
"I am not a surgeon," Ethan said, picking up a heavy cold-chisel and a three-pound ball-peen hammer from the rack. "I am a mechanic. And this isn't an amputation. It’s a component replacement."
Ethan turned to Gerrick, his eyes hard and commanding.
"Gerrick, I need you at the front door. Bar the windows from the inside. If Bailiff Barrow or any of his informants hear that an Imperial knight collapsed on my porch, they’ll bring twenty men to drag her to the garrison cellar and strip her armor for salvage."
Gerrick nodded firmly, slapping his fist against his breastplate. "No one gets through that front door, Vance. Not tonight. Not while an Ironanchor is breathing under this roof."
The old sergeant turned on his heel and strode back into the showroom, dropping the heavy iron drop-bars across the window shutters and pulling the thick wool curtain shut behind him, cutting off any view from the dark street outside.
Ethan turned back to the workbench.
He adjusted the twin brass reflector lamps hanging above the table, angling their concentrated beams directly onto Ira’s shoulder, bathing the blue-black frost rime in brilliant, shadowless golden light. He fetched the new six-inch cold-iron graver he had shaped from Brun’s high-conductivity deep-vein ore, along with a slender bone scraper, a pair of heavy wire nippers, and two pairs of long-nosed iron pliers.
"Toby," Ethan said.
"Water’s boiling, Master!" Toby hurried over with a steaming copper basin, a stack of clean linen rags, and a bottle of high-proof potato spirits.
"Good. Wash your hands in the spirit. You’re going to hold the bone clamps."
Ethan picked up the bottle of clear alcohol and poured it generously over his own hands, then splashed it over his chisels, gravers, and pliers. The sharp, clean antiseptic sting of distilled grain cut through the foul chemical stench rising from the pauldron.
He leaned over the table and looked at Ira’s face.
As if sensing the sudden change in light and the sharp scent of alcohol, the woman’s eyelids fluttered.
A low, guttural moan tore from her throat. Her body convulsed in a violent spasm of fever, her head tossing from side to side on the pillow.
"Hold... the redoubt..." she muttered, her voice hoarse and broken, lost in the delirium of an old battlefield. "Keep the arrows flying... the frost-horns are blowing in the marsh... don't let them take the bridge..."
Her breathing became rapid, shallow gasps.
Pip let out another gentle whuff, pressing his warm snout closer against her temple, his glowing peach belly pulsing like a soothing heartbeat.
Then, Ira’s eyes snapped wide open.
They were a striking, wolfish amber—clear, fierce, and burning with a wild, cornered fury. Even half-dead from hypothermia and septic shock, her instincts were those of an apex predator who had survived ten years in the bloodiest trenches of the Empire.
Her left gauntlet shot out with terrifying speed.
CLANK!
Her iron-clad fingers clamped around Ethan’s right forearm like an iron bear trap, her grip strong enough to bruise muscle through his leather sleeve. Her knuckles turned white, her breathing shallow and ragged.
"Don't..." she rasped, her voice like two millstones grinding together, flecks of dark blood appearing at the corner of her mouth. "Don't... touch... the sword..."
Ethan didn't flinch. He didn't try to pull away. He looked down into her fierce amber eyes, his expression calm, unmoved, and steady as a mountain granite block.
"I don't care about your sword, Captain Ironanchor," Ethan said, his voice quiet, firm, and resonant in the warm room. "I have plenty of iron of my own. But you have about four hours before that rotten Imperial shoulder plate freezes your heart valves solid."
Ira stared at him through glazed, feverish eyes, her chest rising and falling in ragged heaves. She looked at his face, then looked down at his arm, realizing she was gripping a craftsman in a leather apron, not an Imperial executioner.
"Who... are you?" she wheezed, her grip on his arm trembling with exhaustion. "An Imperial... hound?"
"I'm Ethan Vance. I run this workshop," Ethan answered. He used his free hand to pick up the slender cold-iron graver—its dark, fine-grained metal gleaming clean in the lamplight—and held it up where she could see it. "And right now, I'm the only person in five hundred miles who knows how to break a short-circuited Valerius grounding rune without hacking off your arm."
Ethan leaned in closer, his gaze locking onto hers.
"It’s going to hurt," Ethan said bluntly. "I don't have milk of the poppy, and I don't have temple healing spells. I have boiling water, clean alcohol, and a very hot lizard. If you fight me, you die on this table. If you hold still, you might live to swing that oversized butter knife again."
Ira looked at Ethan.
She looked at his steady, unblinking eyes. She looked at the leather apron, the clean workshop, the warm light of the lanterns, and the tiny black lizard sitting on the pillow beside her ear, gently licking the frost from her cheek with its warm, sticky tongue.
Slowly, her iron gauntlet unclasped from his forearm.
Her arm fell back to the table with a heavy, metallic clatter.
"Do it," she whispered, her teeth clattering violently from the deep chill in her marrow. "Just... don't let... Barrow's bastards... touch my sword."
Ethan picked up a clean, smooth cylinder of dense ash-wood from the scrap bin—an offcut from his walking staffs—and placed it gently between her teeth.
"Bite down on this," Ethan said. "Toby, hold the clamps on the pauldron collar. Pip, get ready."
Pip scampered off the pillow, hopping onto a fireclay brick set right beside Ira’s right shoulder, his neck frill flaring with alert readiness.
Ethan set the edge of the cold-iron chisel against the first frozen rivet.
"Bite down, Captain," Ethan whispered, raising the three-pound hammer. "I'm going to carve this rotten scrap metal off your bone."