*"Some fathers give their sons names.Mine gave me a number.Experiment forty-seven."*
—Malakor's Journal (burned)
---
**The Forgotten Fortress - Day 11 After the Fall**
Malakor knew he was nineteen years, three months, fourteen days old.
His father reminded him every morning. Along with how much he cost to maintain.
"Nineteen years of investment," Vorgoth circled the chair where Malakor sat bound—not with chains but with refined souls, ropes woven from thousands' suffering. Each thread whispered its former owner's final words. *Mama. Please. I don't want to die.* The same words Malakor had whispered, once. "Know what you cost in souls?"
Malakor didn't answer. Answering brought pain. Not answering brought pain. Existing brought pain. First lesson learned at age seven when his father began the Grafting.
*Seven. Yellow birds outside the window. Mama holding his hand.*
*"Don't let them hurt me, Mama."*
*"I won't, baby. I won't let anyone—"*
*Then screaming. Hers first, his afterward.*
The memory cut off—surgical precision. Vorgoth's work. Memory surgery performed while Malakor was awake, father's hands in his brain, cutting away love like cancer. The procedure table. Straps. His skull opened while conscious, dragon-fire essence poured directly into his spine.
*"She was weakness," his father had explained, fingers literally inside his head, scraping away recollections. "Weakness makes weapons unreliable. I'm doing you a favor."*
The favor of forgetting her face. The favor of losing pieces of yellow bird songs until only fragments remained. The favor of growing up with a mother-shaped hole in his soul.
"Forty-six thousand souls," Vorgoth continued, oblivious to his son's memory-spiral. "To keep you stable. To stop the dragon burning through the human. Stop the human suffocating the dragon."
But stable was a lie. The fusion burned constant agony through his nervous system. Dragon-fire in human veins that couldn't process it—literal flame where blood should flow. Every heartbeat pumped liquid fire through arteries meant for warm blood. Every breath drew superheated air into lungs that charred and healed and charred again in endless cycle.
His bones—dragon-scale reinforced but deliberately incomplete. Constant cracking like ice only he heard. Scales erupting through skin, his back a scar-map of emergence and healing.
*Birds, Mama. Yellow birds. Do you see what he did to me?*
The Death Angel essence was worse. Grafted when he turned fifteen, on the anniversary of her murder. Vorgoth had made him watch the process—his own chest cut open, alien cold poured directly into his heart like liquid entropy.
Death Angels were ending given form. They didn't live so much as exist as termination points. Having one's essence fused with mortal flesh was like mixing flame and ice—both diminished, neither pure, the result catastrophic.
His right side was permanently numb-cold—seven degrees below zero, matching Ora's corruption elsewhere in the world. When he breathed, frost formed on his lips, crystallizing the moisture in his lungs. When he bled from that side, the blood froze before hitting ground, shattering like red glass. His right eye saw only endings—how everything around him would die, was dying, had already died in possibility.
His left side burned at dragon temperatures—seven degrees above boiling, skin constantly blistering and healing. Steam rose from that half of his body, creating a permanent mist around him. When he bled from the left, the blood boiled on contact with air, hissing like acid.
The contradiction killed him cell by cell. His spine—the battleground where essences fought. Temperature differential should've torn him apart, but Vorgoth made pain the binding force. Agony kept him whole.
Fire versus void. The human between.
*See me dying, Mama? See me ending before I ever lived?*
His skin couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Left side scales pushing through, right side ice crystals forming beneath the surface. The meeting line down his center was raw meat—constantly tearing as opposing forces pulled him apart.
But the human core endured. Damaged, fractured, but stubbornly human. Love was the most persistent thing in existence—harder to destroy than diamond, more enduring than mountains. His love for his mother, hers for him, the connection no amount of torture could completely sever.
It was also killing him. Love required warmth, hope, the possibility of joy. These couldn't coexist with Death Angel entropy. The contradiction created constant internal war—human love against alien void, life against ending, hope against certainty.
Every day, a little more of the boy died.
Every day, a little more of the weapon was born.
But the love remained, hidden in the spaces between heartbeats, in the pause between breaths. A secret flame his father couldn't touch because he'd never understood what it was.
*Still here, Mama. Still your little bird, underneath all the blood.*
The dragon essence pulsed, recognizing something. Vash'nil—the whelp whose essence was grafted to his spine at age twelve. Not all the whelp's essence, mercifully. The little dragon lived somewhere in the fortress, caged in perpetual agony, drained drop by drop to power the God-Eater.
Through the grafted connection, Malakor could taste the whelp's soul—3 Gravitas, impossibly light for a dragon, flavored with milk and eggshell, innocence curdling into rage. His own soul was fractured, constantly shifting weight—sometimes 3 Gravitas like the child he'd been, sometimes 7 like the weapon he was becoming, sometimes weightless as the void between.
But enough was grafted to Malakor for dragon strength, dragon rage, dragon flame. And dragon memory. Sometimes, in the fusion-fire agony, he caught glimpses of what the whelp remembered. A nest. Warmth. A mother-dragon singing in frequencies that made crystal sing in harmony.
*Dragons had mothers too. Dragons knew love too.*
The realization came with fresh torture. Vorgoth had chosen Vash'nil specifically because the whelp was torn from its mother. Two broken children grafted together, their mutual mother-loss creating resonance that amplified both their pain.
"Today we march north," Vorgoth said, circling like predator. "Toward kingdoms pretending war isn't coming. You'll be my vanguard."
The soul-rope bonds tightened as he spoke, responding to his will. Each strand was a person who'd died screaming. Each fiber was final breath, last thought, terminal agony refined into binding. Malakor felt them all—their deaths inside him, their pain added to his own.
*They had mothers too. They called for their mothers too.*
Malakor's human side recoiled. "Can't... control it. When I fight, I lose myself. Become—"
"Perfect. What I made you for. A walking weapon. Genocide with legs." Vorgoth leaned close. His breath smelled like grave dirt and dying stars. "You don't need control. Just aim."
The truth burned worse than dragon-fire. He'd been designed as weapon from birth. Every choice made to maximize destruction. Even his mother—had she been real? Or just another variable in his father's equation?
*No. The yellow birds were real. The songs were real. Love was real.*
Soul-chains dissolved. Malakor collapsed, muscles screaming after days motionless. His body was mapped with scars—grafting procedures, punishment for resistance, experimental modifications. New ones appeared daily as the fusion progressed.
Today, scales along his jaw had pushed through overnight. Blood crusted where they'd torn skin. His right shoulder was solid ice beneath the surface—Death Angel entropy spreading like infection.
*"Little bird," he remembered her voice. "Little bird with broken wings. Mama will fix you."*
*But she couldn't fix this. No one could.*
Worse were invisible scars. Memory gaps where childhood should be—holes cut with surgical precision to remove anything that might breed compassion. He remembered the procedure. Age twelve. Strapped to the table. Father's hands inside his skull.
*"Hold still. This will hurt."*
*It had hurt beyond description. Beyond endurance. But he'd endured anyway because the alternative was forgetting her completely.*
He remembered fragments now. Yellow birds at a window—what window? What house? The memory was severed from context. Soft hands braiding his hair—whose hands? The face was cut away. A voice singing lullabies in language he couldn't identify but his heart recognized—what language? Who taught it to her?
*Mama.*
The name was all he had left. Not her face. Not her real name. Not her voice except in dreams. Just "Mama" and the certainty that she'd loved him once. Before Vorgoth found them. Before the screaming started.
*"She made you weak," his father had explained during the memory surgery. "Weak weapons break. I'm making you stronger."*
Stronger. By cutting away the only thing that made strength worthwhile.
Sometimes, in dreams, she came back. Complete and whole and holding him while he cried. In dreams, she was stronger than Vorgoth, fiercer than dragons, more enduring than Death Angels. In dreams, she sang about yellow birds that carried messages between worlds.
*"My little bird," she'd whisper. "Fly home to me."*
*"But I'm broken, Mama. My wings are gone."*
*"Then I'll carry you. Mothers always carry their broken birds."*
But dreams ended. Waking meant chains and pain and the constant reminder that love was luxury weapons couldn't afford.
The armor reminded him. Every piece designed to cause discomfort—not enough to impair function but enough to prevent peace. Constant small agonies to keep him focused on hate instead of hope.
Or human.
"Rise."
Malakor stood. Not obedience—survival. The alternative was worse. Always worse.
"Armor."
The armor waited—more container than protection. Black metal plates etched with runes that burned to read, connected by death-hair mail literally woven from the dying's final agonies. Each ring was a person's last breath made solid.
Wearing it, he felt the change. Human Malakor retreating to whatever space was left. Monster advancing to fill the void. The armor was part of the weapon—not just protection but programming. Each piece inscribed with commands his body couldn't refuse.
*Kill. Destroy. Forget. Obey.*
But underneath layers of conditioning and pain—rebellion. Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday he'd show his father what creating a thinking monster meant.
*"I'll come home, Mama. Somehow. Even if home is just a memory of yellow birds."*
"Army's ready," Karach entered—pure Ghul'rok, eight feet of muscle and fang. Battle-scars covered his hide like trophies. "Ten thousand Corrupted. Thousand Devourers. The Machines."
The Machines. Malakor shuddered, dragon and Death Angel essence recoiling in unison. Golems powered by decomposing souls. Half-flesh half-metal abominations held together by nothing but suffering. When they moved, you could hear the screaming.
"March," Vorgoth commanded.
---
**The Northern March**
Ten thousand horrors that had been human, elven, dwarven, now twisted into shapes that hurt to perceive. The Machines walked among them—three meters tall, steps shaking earth, corpse-light leaking from joints. Leading them all, Malakor in black armor.
Through dragon-essence, he felt the Weave faintly. Somewhere north, another corrupted soul burned with purpose. Ora. His father's true target. Everything else was just positioning.
*Everything according to plan,* Vorgoth had said.
But walking at his army's head, feeling ten thousand abominations follow his lead, Malakor wondered: whose plan?
Inside him, Vash'nil's essence pulsed with dragon rage and remembered nest-warmth. Beside it, Death Angel entropy whispered that everything ended, everyone died, nothing lasted. Between them, human love insisted that some things were worth dying for.
*I was human once.*
The thought was rebellion itself.
Behind him, ten thousand monsters marched toward war. But the greatest monster walked in front, wearing a boy's broken face and carrying a dragon's stolen heart and a mother's murdered love.
And somewhere deep beneath conditioning and pain and surgical memory-holes, that boy was starting to remember he could choose.
Not freedom—that was impossible.
But maybe, just maybe, he could choose his own damnation.
*"Fly home, little bird," the memory whispered. "Fly home to me."*
Even if home was just a dream. Even if mother was just yellow birds singing in languages that no longer existed.
Even if love was the thing that would kill him in the end.
---