My first form is simple.
I am forged from the hearts of stars, metals from a thousand stolen worlds, bent and folded and compressed into the beating heart of a people. The architect of my nascency bleeds drops of ocean blue on a forge that vaporizes them before they even make contact, tears and sweat not only expected but demanded by the one who calls for my creation. My first father bleeds and works and bleeds, until he can do none of those things, and I claim my first life with his body crumpled over my infancy.
But my commissioners are patient. The hundreds of sweeps it will take to make me are grains of sand in the desert to them, and this desert is hotter and deader than any other as it denudes itself to the sun in all its irradiated glory. The forge is an open flower under an unsetting star, and my first mother comes to continue where her predecessor failed.
She understands the power of elegance. Bands of metal for the wrists, jagged edges to trim the knuckles, her ideas give me shape if not yet strength. So then, when she is old and feeble and lays down to rest for the last time, my nearly completed forms watches her dry into preservation.
It falls to my last parent to complete me. This is how I gain my gears, my complexity, the ability to level mountains. Another rivulet of blue joins the first two, and then I am finished, their hands cradling me in awe. But I am not theirs to keep.
My maestro looks down at me for a time, and then places I on his fist. I subsume him, and he me, and he screams in agony as the ritual binds the two of us together, and anoints me in my last creator's blood.
/So Enters The Savior/
Three smiths, three victims, and he will claim so, so many more. Entire planets are leveled, the violet prince who destroys all in his path, the jewel in the eye of the Empress. I cannot be broken, or defeated, and I embed myself in his flesh to remind him that he is nothing without me. There are two pistons, one through the forearm, one through the wrist, and when the flesh grows back it is around and over, until the nerve endings are familiar enough to me that I can mistake them for my own.
His passion is legendary, his myth boundless, and because he is beloved he gets away with much. There is a teal lover is at his side through all battles, just as vicious as he, and The Saviors elevates him in ways that would earn him enemies if any nobility even dared to think such things. His matesprit seeks justice not just among the weak and pathetic of lesser species, but among the ranks of the complex, vicious but untouchable as he slaughters his way through what has not been purged in a decade.
/So Enters The Scourge/
It is not enough for him. All can see that, even I with my lack of outward sense except that of pain. His eyes see corruption everywhere, and though he clings to the safety of my wielder's title for as long as he can, the betrayal comes eventually, poison pressed against lips.
/The Savior Exits Stage Left/
Treason! Murderer! They are no free to declare what they like, but for some reason The Scourge does not fall as easily as they thought he would. No ship and seemingly no allies, he continues his crusade against those he sees unfit to lead.
He figures out a way to remove the clamps from inside his flesh. For this, I hate him.
He moves through circles, the wars along the edges of the empire forgotten. Each planet he arrives at suffers, and he begins to notice the faults not in just the aristocracy, but in their subordinates. He begins to slow, bogged down in minor trials and vigilantism as each sin is swept clean from his path. And here, here is where he gains his competition.
/So Enters The Successor/
A pirate should be tried, a pirate should be hung, and pirate should be brought before His Honorable Tyranny and devoured in front of a watching empire.
But this one, he eludes, this bronze who shares his hue with my coat. The rivalry springs into something, where they each grow so close without killing the other, nose to nose and then more. The pirate escapes with haul from a successful raid, but the avenger is hot behind, stowing away on his ship.
The cycle repeats, lulling all into a sense of safety, of routine. This is what makes it easy for the one-armed gamblignant. When he is ready, he takes what he wants.
/The Scourge Exits Stage Left/
This one, he modifies me more than any other. I become a replacement for the Successor's missing limb, elongated and jointed and spiked with wicked curling appendages. His followers take it as a sign, this lowblood who wields the power of a conquer, the true heir to a prince's savagery. Word spreads wide; to the fleet, to the inner worlds, to Alternia. Trolls flock to him and he accepts all, traitors found quickly where the faithful stand.
Not all believe. Some are disgraced highbloods, some are frustrated with the laws that keep their violent urges in check. Others just want to see what will happen. It does not matter. Within sweeps, the fleet is larger than it has ever been, greater than even under Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, though there is none who remember the name. They are terror for hire, and I have never been more bloodied.
Three smiths, three wielders, and yet my work is not done. I can feel there will be a next, and that her time is approaching, understanding bleeding through into each lesson. Thee smiths, three doombringers, one gauntlet. Only me. me, and things yet to come.