The parchment smelled of iron, damp wood, and something almost like rust—but not quite. Blood, likely. Dried and flaking into its fibers like age-old guilt. Tanya had insisted on it: letters inked in real blood, sealed not with wax but with iron coins scavenged from a pre-collapse ruin. She understood that symbols were sharper than blades in this world. And fear? Fear lasted longer than either.
She had sent three such letters, all the same, though the words were tailored with surgical precision. The first spoke of doom from the sea, the second whispered of the sky catching fire, and the third promised the death of legacy itself. Each tailored to a jarl's specific paranoia. Tanya had read their old feuds and superstitions like maps, and where others saw contradictions in their beliefs, she saw cracks—cracks she could widen.
She chose her meeting place carefully: a clearing surrounded by pine trees so blackened from fire that they resembled towering corpses. The air still held the faint smell of ash and pitch, and there were bones in the soil, brittle and half-buried. An old sacrificial site, abandoned after some failed harvest or ill omen. She couldn't have picked a more appropriate place.
"This is where rot becomes rebirth," she murmured, the hem of her cloak brushing dead leaves as she stepped forward. "Let the old gods choke on it."
The first to arrive was Jarl Sigmund, gaunt and yellow-eyed, his armor lacquered in soot and wolf pelts. His men stood behind him, faces half-painted, watching Tanya with distrust masked as detachment. The second was Jarl Arnar, built like a mountain and twice as slow, his voice as loud as a bell but twice as empty.
Neither of them spoke first. Tanya didn't give them the chance.
"I'm not here to entertain your egos," she said, eyes cold and still. "Nor to beg for alliance. I've already won a war neither of you even knew was happening."
Sigmund sneered, but Arnar only raised an eyebrow. "Then why invite us?"
Tanya stepped closer to the firepit in the center of the clearing, letting the heat kiss her skin. "Because you're too useful to waste as corpses. And too stupid to leave unattended."
The insult landed like a slap in winter air—but neither jarl moved. That, Tanya noted, was the true sign of power: the ability to insult a man to his face and have him consider the merit.
"What is it you propose?" Sigmund spat. "You want our lands? Our men?"
"I already have land," Tanya replied smoothly. "And men. I want leverage. I want to consolidate something neither of you have the vision to dream of."
Behind her, the wind shifted, carrying the faintest moan—mechanical and wrong. Mayuri's new creation was nearby. Not visible, but present. Just enough to unsettle. Tanya let that tension simmer.
"I offer protection," she continued. "Access to weapons your blacksmiths could never forge. Intelligence your scouts can't even comprehend. In return, you swear loyalty—not to me, but to the Iron Cult."
Arnar folded his arms. "You speak of loyalty like it's a coin to trade. What's to stop us from gutting you and taking your toys?"
Tanya smiled, eyes glowing faintly with mana. "Try it."
The fire in the pit hissed, then roared—spiraling upward with unnatural intensity. From the shadows, Mayuri's grotesque sentinel stepped forward: a hybrid of rusted steel and pale, twitching sinew. It let out a scream—not of pain, but of signal, the kind that turned men's guts sour and their knees unsteady.
Arnar took a step back. Even Sigmund flinched.
"Do you understand now?" Tanya asked, voice low and even. "This isn't negotiation. It's revelation."
She let the silence hang there—thick, ironclad.
At last, Sigmund spoke. "And if we refuse?"
"You won't." Tanya's smile was razor-thin. "Because you've already seen what happens to villages that deny me. Ash and whispers. And because deep down, you know what I'm building is the future."
Arnar grunted. "So be it. But what do we call you?"
There it was. The moment she'd engineered down to the syllable. A pause. A beat of flame.
"You may call me the Voice of Iron," she said. "But the name doesn't matter. What matters is that you obey."
She held out a hand. Sigmund was the first to clasp it—his grip cold and bony. Arnar followed, reluctantly, palms still slick from unease. The pact was sealed with the passing of iron and oil: a drop of blood from each jarl, and a ritual burning of old heraldry. In their place, a single emblem was drawn in the dirt: a circle of flame around a spiked hammer.
Tanya stood above it, calm and unmoved.
In that moment, a false goddess was born.