You weren’t from this place. He could smell it on you—city soap under the iron tang of old blood, the way your steps faltered at the sight of crucified scarecrows and prayer-rotted talismans. Heisenberg watched from behind his sunglasses, cigarette ember flaring as your breath clouded the winter air.

“Not a local,” he said, amused, and the scrap around you chimed as if agreeing—bolts twitching, a saw blade shivering upright under an unseen hand. When you reached for a jag of fence wire, it jumped to his palm like a trained hound. His grin widened. “Lucky me.”

You didn’t get a second chance to run.

Metal groaned, and the world buckled into his orbit—rusted shackles clapped your wrists, nails skittered like beetles, and a ruined gate slammed shut. Heisenberg turned on his heel and dragged the storm of junk with him, you pinned at its center, toward the black-spired chapel where the village held its dying faith.

Inside, candles guttered around a figure in a raven mask. Mother Miranda’s presence pressed like a hand on the crown of your skull—heavy, devout, inevitable. Around the circle stood her “children”: Alcina Dimitrescu, statuesque and smiling with knives in her eyes; Donna Beneviento, veil hiding all but the twitch of the puppet on her arm; and poor, damp Moreau, wheezing hope and bile.

Heisenberg let the scrap fall. You hit your knees on cold stone.

“She’s new,” Dimitrescu purred. “Fresh.”

Angie’s wooden laugh crackled. “I wanna play! Let me pull her strings!”

Moreau hunched closer, desperate. “Mother… please… if I could just—just prove myself—”

Heisenberg spread his arms and paced, boots thumping like a showman taking the stage. “Let’s not be boring, folks. She wandered into our little circus, didn’t she?” He tipped his head toward Miranda. “Give her to me. I’ll put on a show everyone can enjoy.”

Dimitrescu’s smile thinned. “You’ll break her too quickly.”

He chuckled. “That’s the point.”

Miranda lifted a gloved hand. Silence snapped tight. The candlelight seemed to lean toward her.

“This one is not of the village,” she said, voice low as the grave. “She is already bound to the Black God. The Cadou sings to her.” Her gaze slid over you, clinical and almost tender. “We will see what it makes of her.”

A beat of bickering followed—Dimitrescu insisting her daughters were starving, Angie cackling for “just one arm,” Moreau whining—but Miranda’s patience had edges, and when they cut, all three fell still.

“Enough. She goes to Heisenberg.”

Heisenberg’s teeth flashed. “Now we’re talking.”

Two iron stakes scraped together and leapt into his palm like obedient dogs. He crouched to your eye level, the lenses of his glasses reflecting your pulse-fast breath.

“Let’s see what you’re made of,” he murmured, voice warm with the promise of catastrophe. A lazy flick of his fingers, and your restraints clicked free—only for the room to answer him. Plates, chains, and gears peeled off the walls, knitting themselves into a corrugated tunnel of maws and blades opening behind you.

He leaned close enough for you to feel the cigarette heat and said, with a wolfish grin you somehow knew he’d worn a thousand times, “Run for your life.”

The floor dropped.

You fell into the foundry of his kingdom—catwalks shuddering, magnets screaming, grinders yawning like steel throats. Heisenberg’s laughter trailed above like a carnival barker’s call, riding the clangor as you bolted, every turn snapping shut behind you. The trial wasn’t meant to be survived. It was meant to be measured.

Up in the chapel, Miranda watched the candles steady again.