“You can build a thousand machines and call yourself a smith, but you can only call yourself an Ironwright when the day comes that you repair something holy, when the thing before you does not ask for your hands, but accepts them, when you learn the difference between work and worship. It is a humbling experience like no other. It's one that stays with you, even when the you become old and withered like I have.” -Excerpt from Iron, Flame, and Flesh: Reflections on Craft and Spirit, by Journeyman Faret Illun, Golden Cog defectee and Ironwright-at-Large

  The leg had been there for years. Hung just outside the shop’s entrance like a reliquary blade over an altar. It hadn’t moved in over a decade, and neither had the town’s opinion on it. Some thought it was bad luck to leave it out. Others said it was his pride. A few of the kids from the cathedral school across the stone bridge liked to sneak past and touch it, like it might bless them before mass.

  He never moved it. Never even let a speck of dust besmirch the servos. Always polished it on quiet nights.

  It had belonged to Ser Carlen Vash, Iron of Sable Ward. A real Knight. He had died during the Coil Reclamations after defending a collapsing bridge, solo, for nineteen minutes. The story had been passed down like scripture through his family, and he’d inherited the limb from his great-uncle, who inherited it from the Knight for his servitude in life.

  Whether that was true or not didn’t matter. What mattered was that the piece was a real, Crown stock, full-grade, Ironsaint leg. But it had never truly belonged to him. So when the stranger stepped into his shop that night, trailing oil and old blood, eyes sharp and mouth tight with command, and when he said, "My name is Riven Holt. Knight of the Crown."—everything inside the smith seized up like a gear jammed mid-turn.

  He bowed. Of course he did. What else was there to do? He didn’t even think about charging the Knight, he almost couldn't conceive of the thought. The idea felt like spitting into an engine’s intake. You didn’t put a price on something sacred. You offered.

  After their short conversation he watched them leave, the Knight, Ser Riven, had a certain look about him. Worn, not polished like the ones in the histories, but honest. And his saint, though wounded, moved like a whisper given weight.

  He didn’t sleep for the rest of that night. Not from excitement, but from purpose. He pulled the leg down, cleaned it like a priest cleaning bones, re-primed the mounting socket with hands that didn’t shake until he stopped to think about it. Everything he’d made, every sculpture, every sigil-carved pipe joint, every candle holder wrought from castoff alloys, none of it mattered until now. He’d kept a space clear in the courtyard. Always had, just in case one day, the Gods would bless him.

  The Ironsaint entered the courtyard like a king returning to a long-dead chapel. Eight meters of tarnished elegance, its frame sleek and angular like something built for war and philosophy at the same time. Its chassis was old, the core unit clearly Crown-forged, reinforced in a stylized, almost organic ribplate configuration, but the limbs were another matter. Each had been fitted from different lines. Field-forged, perhaps. One shoulder bore a faint etching of Embercoil spirals. The right arm was newer, cleaner, likely replaced recently. But they worked together seamlessly. A mutt. But one with soul.

  The head was low-slung and sleek, more mask than helm, with a single wide optic that narrowed or widened as it processed its environment. No traditional faceplate, just that lens, like a the pupil of a cyclops judging those beneath it. Then there was the shoulder-mounted flood lamps, they casted a wide and steady light over the courtyard. It lit the statues, the altarwork, even the little things he made over the years in a hundred nights where no one came to his door. And the saint looked upon them, perhaps with some form of appreciation, but with a flick and a gentle chk- they receded into the shoulders.

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  They worked through the night. Ser Riven said little and worked with a calm precision that only came from grief and habit braided too tightly to separate. The smith knew the rhythm, he had lived it himself after his wife had died at the hands of a disease and he had nothing to distract himself but his work.

  He hadn’t expected the Knight to help. Not really. Knights were known to care for their Ironsaints, some deeply, but not with tools. Not with oil-streaked fingers and callused palms that knew the exact tension of a torque wrench by feel alone. When Ser Riven rolled up his sleeves and started unbolting the brace himself, the smith had paused for a breath too long. Long enough to feel unsure of the Knight. He knows what he’s doing, he’d thought, and his next thought was worse. *Knights aren’t supposed to know this.* Though just as quickly as it came, it faded. The thought shamed him the moment it formed.

  Of course they did. Of course a true Knight would know how to care for his Ironsaint. They were chosen. Bound. The machine wasn’t just a weapon, it was a vessel. Strength made flesh, a divine spirit given form by the Machine God. This wasn’t blasphemy, this was fidelity. The Ironsaints were angels with sinew of steel and hearts of echoing logic, and their pilots were more than men. They were their hands, their purpose. The very first pilot and his chosen had ridden into the Churn The Pilot With No Name, and beside him Voice in Iron, Virenna.

  The stories told of their bond, perfect and unspeaking, of how they vanished into the storm and never returned. Of how he, a mortal, flew with the will of the Machine God and remained untarnished by the Churn. Maybe that was what he was seeing now. Ser Riven, tired, wounded, almost gaunt, moving with such unflinching attention to detail, not because he wanted to fix the machine, but because he refused to let it remain broken. There was no script for this, no ritual but it felt like a rite.

  Together, they dismantled the brace and mounted the limb. The Ironsaint adjusted as if re-learning how to stand. It rotated its hip, bent the knee and settled. It looked down briefly at its foot. Then forward. Like a commander surveying familiar ground. The smith saw it then, and only then. In the way the light caught the silver-brass alloy. In the way the leg, his family’s heirloom, matched the frame not by design, but by devotion. He saw it not as a replacement, but as a return. The Ironsaint had not been given something new. It had reclaimed what was always meant to be part of it.

  They moved on to the arm next. The patchwork field brace was stripped and replaced with care. Cabling was realigned and tucked into proper grooves. The fingers were unjammed and tested, each one flexing in sequence, then curling once into a perfect fist. Ser Riven flashed a small smile at the sight, evidently content, and the smith felt his chest swell.

  Later, once the repairs were done, every screw tightened, every panel realigned, they stood in the courtyard and just… watched. The crickets had long since ceased their humming, and in response the Ironsaint stood tall, every part of it aligned now. Nothing sagged or stuttered. And thought it didn't speak, the air felt fuller just having it there. The smith leaned against the old stone wall, arms crossed. “I’ll never see another one, but I pray that some meager part of myself will live on through it,” he said aloud. Not to Ser Riven, nor to the Ironsaint. Just to the night, and whatever spirits heard his plight.

  He’d built things all his life. Forged tools, shaped alloys, whispered oaths over repairs not because he had to, but because something in him believed. Tonight he hadn't just repaired something. No, in some ways it felt like the beginning of a miracle, something that felt more holy than any prayer he’d ever whispered before.