Iron Sharpens Iron

Flash Fiction

A submission for Iron Age Media’s Prompt: The Crag

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The story began with a flash and six great swells of boiling hot water.

It was a beautiful cycle really, as the twin-twilights that colored in the difference between each day and night set the tone for life living off the land in an ever resilient valley, the clouds that would swim the length of a blue sky would come not only in stark whites and greys, but oranges, reds, and even purples.

The valley was filled with families known to have iron teeth and iron will.

Long ago, unknowable ships arrived with the aforementioned flash, a great blinding light that even the sleeping were perturbed by, and entire lakes and rivers of pure chilled water became salted and steaming.

That started seventeen years ago by now. The process became tradition. Every dawn and dusk the ships returned, never landing, but pouring their discarded fluids into the six sources known to the previously temperate valley turned sauna. Every year the water got hotter and hotter, but the families of iron weren’t bothered in the slightest.

Sure, their tongues would singe and crumple from the burns sustained by drinking the water, and eventually their organs would chafe and roil from the inside out, but inexplicably, they believed this was a good thing.

They gave “Iron Stomachs” a new meaning!

Even as the ships returned to surge the courses with even more sizzling water, not one person stopped to ask after the water’s nature.

It was as though the enigma sister to Adam’s ale was replenishing itself repeatedly. It sat on the edge between liquid and gas, with the clouds reigning overhead being nothing more than disinterested props merely part of the background.

No, instead the “water” served as the iron that sharpened an ostensibly iron people. Had the families been made up of normal, less sturdy people, these strange fluids would’ve left nothing but bones within the first three years. Instead, it tore open muscles and rebuilt them like an overwhelming bevy of lactic acid being used as fuel.

It eventually began to kill organs, the iron stomachs indeed reached their limit, only for their owners to discover that they no longer needed even them.

Furthermore, their skin flushed, imminently becoming the color of stone, and their orifices began to fill with ash.

Inevitably, the previously fleshy population -albeit one literally nurtured by the iron in their blood- became rigid golems made primarily of ash. Their true nature and purpose to a determinant clientele only being revealed once the change had already occurred, and only as the temperature of the rivers got to the point of rocks becoming molten, and the valley became volcanic in texture and temperature, would those ships who were treated as orbiting neighbors by the families, finally land and meet their protectorate turned army.

Favorites were picked, and battle-lines had been drawn. The aliens held a gauntlet, and soon the families would be pitted against one another, and desperate parties even combined their newfangled ashen bodies together, as though they were all the product of some castle still in the making, brick and mortar doomed to enact this many of firsts: an arms race among soot-ful things thought to serve soot-ful interests.

The winning families were allowed to enter the ships. Over time they had become acclimated to their new family, their destinies soon to be impressed upon their very souls.

With a brand new family comes a brand new home. As it happens, the ships came to a slow stop, being carried only by the orbit of one silver gem of a Planet, fourth of its kind in the solar system, and also fourth from its star.

Only upon the ship’s hull cracking open to reveal the marvel of a civilization unlike their own back “home”, did the family of ashen titans discover their true purpose.

They were all greeted by a man of dignified significance and radiant intelligence.

He said:

“You have triumphed in our trials, and now stand amongst our own home. Just as you’ve witnessed our spacecraft in your skies, so we will grant our Planet the same dream, an entire world to venture the whole universe over. We will take you to the Planet’s core, and from there, you will grant us our long sought after golden age.”

Little did the man know, for all his intellect and ingenuity, iron gave over to rust. And that destiny would come to blanket this silver world.