Part Eleven – Raymond Hann's Return
Jonathan paused at the landing, letting his eyes drift across the portraits lining the walls. His father's likeness hung there too, painted only a decade ago: Raymond Hann in his prime, eyes sharp and unflinching, a man captured between vision and burden.
Raymond had not been born into power but a family of smiths. In his youth, he had trained in medicine—a healer by inclination, if not by fate. He practiced for a time in Ironclover, tending to the broken miners and smiths whose bodies bore the price of the city's endless hunger for iron. Patients remembered his steady hands, his calm voice, the quiet compassion behind his gaze. But the Fourth War came, as it always came in Ironclover's cycles of fire and ambition, and Raymond answered the summons.
The war changed him. Those who fought beside him said he never flinched, never turned away from the wounded, yet the scale of blood and futility left something burned into him. He returned older, harder—not just in body, but in conviction. Whatever he had believed in before the war had been stripped away, leaving only a cold resolve. Healing hands gave way to building hands, he returned to a profession he believed had ended with his fathers.
he turned to steel. He claimed Ironclover could not survive on forges and families alone; it needed an engine to outpace war itself. Raymond invested ruthlessly—mines, furnaces, patents. His factories grew like iron roots through the city, each one binding Ironclover's fate tighter to his name. Rivals cursed him as a monopolist, allies praised him as a visionary, and the Council had little choice but to admit him into its circle.
The mansion became the emblem of that rise. It was not only a home but a fortress of wealth and ideas, filled with libraries of science, halls of invention, and salons where Council families gathered to feast under chandeliers Raymond had forged himself. Yet, for all its grandeur, Jonathan knew it was the shadow of the war that had driven his father to build it. Perhaps Raymond had sought to create something unbreakable, a monument no cannon could topple, no army could burn.
Now, without him, it stood silent—iron without fire, a kingdom without its smith.