Gerald of Humanity stepped into the bog with the last king's skull tied to his belt. He needed more bones to finish the crown. The burial mounds rose from the black water ahead. His armor hissed softly, steam curling where the muck touched the burning metal. A huge iron cage marked the center ground. Skeletons hung chained inside, green with algae. Around it, staffs had been driven into the mud. Each staff held a pale orb that breathed out a slow, drifting fog. Gerald felt the fog press against his thoughts. He kept walking. She came out of a tree. Its roots made a hollow door, and she stepped from the dark inside it. The bog-witch was small and gray and very old. "These dead are mine," she said. "Turn back." Gerald drew his claymore. "I need their bones. I will take them." He did not raise his voice. He spoke the way a man names the weather. She lifted a staff, and the fog thickened. Gerald's vision bent. He swung anyway, by memory, where her voice had been. The blade struck the staff and split it. The orb burst. The fog snapped back into the swarm of glowing things it had hidden — fireflies, burning bright, swirling around her in panic. They caught on her wet robes and went off like sparks in dry grass. She screamed once and fell. Gerald wiped his blade on the moss. He walked to the iron cage and pulled the chains loose. Bones clattered into his sack. The tree behind him still stood, hollow and waiting, and he marked it in his mind. He had what he came for. Now he needed a fire hot enough to shape it.

Gerald left the burial mounds with the sack of bones knocking at his hip. The bog steamed under his boots. He needed heat, real heat, and the bog gave only wet smoke. Then he saw it on the far rise — a dark tower of stone and red sinew, growing where the ground had burned. Its mouth was a gate. Its breath was hot. He walked toward it. Inside, the floor sloped down to a forge that roared on its own. Flames climbed a black spire and folded back into themselves. The heat pushed against his armor and made the burning metal sing. This was a fire that could shape bone. Gerald set the sack down and drew out the king's skull. He needed fuel to feed it hot enough to hold. He went back out and gathered what the witch had left behind — dry roots, the cracked husks of the burning bugs still smoldering in the moss. He dumped them into a stone pit near the forge mouth. They caught at once. The pit swirled black and orange and would not go out. Gerald worked. He snapped the jaw from the skull and threw it aside. He pressed the long bones into the flame and pulled them out white and soft. He bent them. He set them into the cracks along the skull's crown, points up, like teeth pushed through the bone from inside. The skull cracked wider where he wanted it to. He widened the cracks on purpose. He held the half-made thing up in the firelight. Jagged spikes of worked bone rose from the brow. It was ugly and it was his. He had the forge. He had the shape. The crown was real now, not just an idea in his head. Then the tower shuddered. The walls of red sinew pulsed and climbed higher around him. The gate behind him narrowed by a hand's width. The forge had not been free. Something in the stone had been feeding while he worked, and now it wanted the rest of him paid in.