By Way of Pain

You’ve forgotten this story.You always do.You carved numbers into your own skin, thinking it would outlast the forge. It didn’t. The Womb keeps the true tally—every breath, every broken bone, every prayer you mumbled to gods you don’t even know exist. You sharpened your hammer on the teeth of weaker men and called it survival.The Blazewomb remembers.It branded you beneath the ear… right where the screams drip in. You pretend the scar isn’t burning now. You pretend you can’t hear her feeding.Diafel, they whisper. The name sticks to your tongue like burnt hair. You tell yourself the child is simply another cog in the machine. A map wrapped in bruised flesh.A key to the weapon that can slit the machine’s throat.But when their fingers trace your scars, you taste bile. They don’t know who you are—not yet—but the forge does. The Womb’s been chewing on your memories for years, tenderizing them, waiting for you to come back.Your name becomes Ash on a dead wind.

BY WAY OF PAIN is a grimdark fantasy where an executioner feeding a volcanic, memory-devouring forge becomes its next target, forcing him to partner with a hunted child and battle through a corpse-labyrinth hellscape to steal a reality-rending staff—before the forge erases everything they are.