There’s a place beneath this world where the heat never dies.

Where screams echo against stone until they become silence. Where flesh slips from bone like candle wax.

Where names are reduced to ash.

That’s the Furnace.

And they’re all walking into it.

One by one.

Twenty lambs.

Twenty fools.

Heroes. Villains. Seekers. Preservationists.

Thugs with something to prove. Preachers with something to lose.

Children pretending they matter.

They think this is a match.

It’s not.

It’s a purging.

This fire doesn’t crown kings. It consumes them.

Gemini, the innocent. The wanderer. You float above the world like it can still be saved. But fire doesn’t see innocence.

Only tender meat.

Felix Foley, the broken hero. You had wings, but you clipped them yourself, too afraid of what you might become if you let go.

The Furnace has no time for your confessions.

It will burn the guilt and the grace together.

Tombstone. Gravedigger. Old ghosts shackled by legacy, fighting over chains like they aren’t both already bound.

You don’t even see the flames licking at your heels. You’re too busy dragging each other deeper into the Furnace.

Jasper Redgrave. He calls himself a king, but gold melts fastest in heat. You can’t bleed legacy into steel.

And when your crown burns off your bones, all that’s left is just another boy who wanted too much.

El Mariachi Muerte, back from the grave. You may have conquered my cold steel, but you won’t conquer the blaze.

And when the smoke clears, when the music fades, you’ll realize you didn’t fully escape death.

You left something in its Furnace.

And I’m the one who’s going to put it back.

As for the rest?

The masked. The bare.

The holy. The damned.

The loud. The lost.

Fuel.

This Furnace was built for you.

But not for me.

I’ve been here.

Not as Grimskull. But as Walther.

A thief. A coward. A nobody.

I was thrown into the fire face-first. And when I screamed, it filled my lungs.

You want to know what the Furnace gives back?

Nothing.

It doesn’t shape. It scars.

It doesn’t reveal. It erases.

And if you’re lucky, if you suffer just right, you come out the other side.

Not clean. Not crowned.

But surviving.

And survival is all that’s real.

So let them come. All of them.

With their banners and their chants. Their blood feuds and their bright ideas. Their soft hands and softer hearts.

Let them scream as the heat bites. Let them crawl as their stories melt away. Let them beg to be remembered.

Because I will not be tested.

I am the test.

I do not burn. I do not break.

I am what the fire left behind…

Raw, ruined, and awake.

This isn’t Lambs to the Slaughter. This is wood to flame.

Flesh to embers.

Faith to nothing.

And when the last scream fades, when the Furnace is fed…

I’ll be the thing still breathing, with smoke in my lungs and no one left to bury me.