Exploring the Prologue: A Dive into the Iron and Rot Story Sample

The Endless Coil

He only needed the torsos.

Arms and legs were stripped first, clean cuts at the joints, no hesitation. He worked through them in silence, hunched low beneath the colorless sky, his breath misting out in short bursts from the slotted mouthpiece of his helm.

The armor moaned when he moved. Steel layered over steel, plate welded onto scrap, stained with old rust and something darker. A gauntlet clinked against a ribcage as he flipped the body, then drove the blade do

wn through the thigh to sever it at the hip. The weapon was long, heavy. More cleaver than sword. Its edge had long since dulled, but mass did what sharpness no longer could.

He didn’t flinch at the blood. Or the stench. Or the writhing.

He only paused to slit the throat. Deep and wide. From jaw to spine. He needed the heads to stay, but the voices to stop. That was important. No groaning. No screaming. Just breath and jaw twitch.

Sound drew attention. Attention brought movement. Movement spoiled the wall.

He dragged the torsos, one at a time, across the dirt and loaded them into a handcart made from bicycle frames and an old freezer door. They flopped and thumped wetly as they landed, bones clacking against rusted steel. One of them tried to twist, its neck arching backward like a broken branch. The others just blinked.

He worked until the cart was full. It creaked under the weight, and so did he.

The path home was narrow; an old road choked with weeds and skeletal trees. He passed rotted signs, a mailbox torn open by fire, and the remains of what might’ve once been a dog, curled around a fencepost and fossilized mid-snap.

No wind. No birds. Just the occasional click of jaw against jaw inside the cart.

By the time he reached the edge of the village, the sky had turned orange and bruised. He stopped at the breach in the barricade, a ragged stretch of rebar, plywood, and sheet metal twisted into the skeleton of a perimeter.

And then there was the wall.

They lined it in rows — the torsos. Mounted upright, spine-threaded onto iron stakes, hung from collarbone hooks, or bolted flat against vertical supports. No limbs. Just chests and heads. The heads twitched. Eyes followed. Jaws clicked.

None of them made a sound.

The latest breach had been caused by a collapse two days earlier, a loose post, too much rain, too much weight. One of the bodies had slumped off its hook and slithered down like a wet coat. He’d crushed the skull with a brick. Left it in the compost pit.

He unloaded the cart.

One by one, he strung the new torsos into place. Wired ribs to fence. Braced jawbones to wooden beams. Cranked tension lines taut across their backs to stop the sway. They moved. They blinked. They breathed through collapsed lungs and twitching throats.

He watched them for a moment when it was done.

The new section fit perfectly. Uniform height. Even spacing. Their mouths opened and closed, silent as fish under ice.

They couldn’t climb.

They couldn’t smell him through it.

They couldn’t speak.

That’s what made it work.

He stepped back, boots cracking dry soil beneath him, and turned toward the compound beyond the fence; a half-buried silo, a coop, a tower of welded scaffold. Smoke rose faintly from a drum near the center, though nothing burned inside it anymore.

Behind him, a low shuffling sound stirred in the distant field.

He didn’t turn.

He just adjusted the leather strap beneath his gorget, lifted the iron helm back over his head, and sealed it with a hiss.

The wall didn’t speak.

But something else had found its way to the edge of the quiet.

And it was hungry.

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