The city of Eisenreich had once been a marvel of human ambition. The capital had been more than a city; it was the embodiment of a nation's will. Every spire was a tower of command, every street paved with the rhythm of iron boots.
Now, all of that grandeur was smothered beneath the choking haze of Draugr occupation. The sky was no longer blue above Eisenreich—it had become a perpetual storm of smoke, ash, and red haze from the endless furnaces that consumed ore, coal, and flesh alike. What was once the proud beating heart of the Eisenreich Empire had transformed into a skeletal mockery, a factory-prison that never slept.
Smokestacks rose higher than church spires, belching fire into the heavens. The clanging of machines was unrelenting, like a drumbeat of misery. For twenty-four hours of every cycle, foundries thundered, stamping weapons, forging armor, feeding the ever-hungry Draugr war machine.
Humans worked these lines. Not citizens, or laborers, nor soldiers—slaves. Men, women, even children Their backs were bent, their hands blistered, their eyes hollow from exhaustion. Overseer-Draugr stalked the aisles like carrion birds, their skeletal frames gleaming with iron plating, their eyes glowing a cold mechanical blue. Each carried shock-staves or plasma whips, punishing failure without hesitation. A stumble, a dropped tool, a moment of hesitation—all answered with crackling pain.
The air was a poison of soot and oil. No bird sang in Eisenreich anymore, no sunlight touched the cobbled streets. Even the once-proud banners of the nation—black and crimson eagles of conquest—had been stripped away, replaced by the sigils of Draugr dominion: a jagged rune etched into steel, burning faintly with red fire.
Where once the capital had sung with the discipline of soldiers, it now groaned with the chains of slaves.
And always, above the din of industry, came the unbroken sound of hammering—like a heartbeat. Eisenreich lived, but only as a corpse animated by its conquerors.
Eisenreich had become more than a city under Draugr occupation. It had become the production heartland of their mechanical empire. Every street had been converted into assembly lines. Every courtyard was now a storage yard of minerals, every cathedral an energy processing plant.
The city consumed its own people.
Chains clinked as slaves shuffled into cavernous halls, carrying raw ore from the mines beneath Eisenreich's mountains. The iron was smelted in towering blast furnaces, steel rolled and hammered by machines taller than houses. Coal and uranium were dragged in wagons by chained men who coughed blood as the radiation burned their lungs.
Copper wires were wound by trembling fingers. Rare earth elements were refined by chemists who once held university chairs, now stripped bare and working under threat of the lash. Quartz and silicon were baked, carved, and pressed into crystalline circuits. The city had become a grotesque parody of progress, where the price of production was measured in lives.
And then there were the biomass refineries.
They were not spoken of openly, not even among the slaves, yet everyone knew. They were built in the shadows of the foundries, massive black towers sealed from outside view. The unlucky were sent there: the sick, the weak, the rebellious. From within those halls came no sound but the low hum of machinery and the occasional scream that was swiftly silenced.
Inside, human bodies were reduced to fuel. Blood and marrow were drained, organs harvested for catalysts, flesh broken down into bio-gel that fed the Draugr synthesis chambers. Bones became ash for composite alloys. Not a fragment was wasted.
The Draugr had found a way to make humans more than slaves—they had made them resources.
Families were torn apart to feed this demand. Fathers were sent to the deep mines where collapse was certain. Mothers to the factories where they worked until they fell at their posts. Children—those deemed too weak to labor—were dragged to the biomass pits.
"We are fuel now." They say in secret
The words spread despair like infection. No one was safe. To be human in Eisenreich was to live on borrowed time, measured not in years but in usefulness.
The Draugr ruled Eisenreich with calculated terror.
Each week, the central square of the capital became the stage for demonstrations. Slaves who had failed in their quotas were dragged before the crowds, forced to kneel as the Overseer-Draugr announced their crimes. Then, before the horrified eyes of their fellow captives, they were cast into the foundry furnaces alive, or strapped to experimental devices until their bodies ruptured under impossible strain.
Children were made to watch. The message was clear: disobedience meant obliteration.
"Obedience parades" followed. Columns of Draugr marched through the streets, their feet clanging in unison, their glowing eyes sweeping the caged humans who were forced to bow. Those who did not bow were beaten until they could no longer stand.
But the Draugr were not reckless brutes. Their oppression was systematic.
Drones patrolled the skies, their red searchlights sweeping alleys at night. Curfews were absolute; anyone found outside was executed on sight. Slaves were implanted with subdermal nodes that delivered crippling shocks at the first sign of rebellion. The overseers could track their heartbeats, their movements, even their whispers.
And worst of all was the police.
They were hybrids—humans who had betrayed their kind, surgically fused with Draugr machinery. Their eyes glowed faintly red, their voices were distorted with static, their loyalty enforced by implants that would kill them if they disobeyed. They moved through the city like shadows, rooting out conspiracies, dragging entire families away for suspicion of disloyalty.
The Draugr Overlord who had claimed Eisenreich, orchestrated this regime with chilling precision. From his citadel of iron and glass, he looked down on the city as a farmer of resources. His vision was not conquest for glory but harvest for necessity. Humans were simply another mineral vein to be mined, another ore to be smelted.
Under his watch, the once-proud nation of Eisenreich was not merely conquered—it was broken.
Yet, beneath the weight of chains and despair, embers still glowed.
In the ruins of Eisenreich's old districts—where Draugr searchlights rarely ventured—survivors gathered in secret. They were few, their weapons pitiful compared to the machines above, but they carried something that could not be smelted down or refined: defiance.
Among them were scarred veterans of the Grand Army, men who had watched their comrades slaughtered but had refused to surrender. There were enslaved engineers who knew the factories better than the Draugr themselves, smuggling blueprints and tools into the shadows. There were mages, stripped of their staffs, who whispered forbidden incantations and hid fragments of their craft in coded songs.
At their center was a man once called Commander Hadrik Voss. Once, he had led legions in the War of the Shattered Crown. He had fought for Dravik, then against him, and finally against the Draugr themselves. He bore the scars of fire across his face, and one of his arms had been replaced by a crude mechanical prosthetic he had built himself in secret.
Voss did not speak often. When he did, it was not of victory, but of duty.
"We are not fighting to win," he told his ragged followers. "We are fighting to remind them we are still here."
The resistance moved carefully. They sabotaged machines, planting flaws in circuitry so weapons would misfire. They smuggled food into hidden tunnels, keeping children alive who might otherwise have starved. They painted messages of defiance on the walls, symbols the Draugr could not decipher but which gave slaves courage: a broken chain, a rising sun, the word Freedom.
Hope spread quietly, almost invisibly, but it spread nonetheless. For every life the Draugr crushed, two more swore they would not go quietly.
The humans of Eisenreich had been reduced to fuel, but even fuel can burn.
As the sun set behind the iron spires of the fortress-city, the horizon glowed blood-red, reflecting against the choking smog that hung heavy in the air.
A long line of slaves trudged across the ruined courtyards, dragging carts filled with iron ingots, uranium crates, and the broken remains of their own dead. Their shoulders sagged under the weight, their faces masked with soot, their chains rattling with every step.
Above them, Draugr warships passed in formation, their black hulls blotting out the last of the daylight. Their engines roared like thunder, carrying stolen resources to other fronts, to other conquests, to other nations soon to fall.
In the shadow of a crumbling wall, a resistance messenger crouched, chalk in hand. He scrawled a single word across the stone:
Freedom.
The slaves shuffled past without looking, but in their eyes, something flickered.
Once a powerful nation with rich colonies, now they felt the weight of oppression above them and the humiliation of being caged like birds.