The factory forge and assemble floor was hellish—heat, noise, and the acrid stench of burning oil assaulting my senses all at once. The Exhibition Hall's polished brass fixtures and gleaming marble walkways felt like a heavily dreamscape compared to this inferno of machines.
Here, in the belly of Kuznetsov Industries, reality stripped away all comfort. Steam bellowed from massive boilers while workers moved between towering machines, their faces streaked with soot and sweat. They shoveled coal with heaps spilling across the metal baseboards as I walked. My dream from the night before led me down here to perhaps understand what happened to the two workers or I was just foolish.
Father forbade me from coming down here, but my mind was stretched with these visions, and my only clue was deep in these furnaces. A worker nearby struggled with a valve that seemed to be stuck fast. His shirt clung to his back, darkened with black sweat, and I noticed how his hands shook from exhaustion. Without thinking, I stepped forward.
"Might I assist?" I asked. Rolling up my sleeves to help. "Seems two would get it to close."
He glanced up, recognition flickering across weathered features. His expression shifted from surprise to wariness.
"Lord Rhylorin." The title came out flat, almost accusatory. "You shouldn't be down here—Lord Gregor is going to fire me…"
"You're fine," I tried to assure. "He is at parliament getting an award for service to the city." Heat crept up my neck as I helped close the valve. "I wanted to see how things operate down here."
A bitter laugh escaped him. "Operate? That's one word for it." He resumed his struggle with the valve, muscles straining. "We 'operate' sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Your father's machines operate just fine—it's the people that break down."
The worker seemed to lose any fear of unemployment as his frustration was parent. I'd heard whispers of long shifts and dangerous conditions, but standing here, breathing the thick air that burned my lungs, witnessing the exhaustion etched into every face—the reality felt overwhelming.
Another worker limped past, favoring his left leg. Burns scarred his forearms, pink flesh marking where steam had kissed too close. He avoided my gaze entirely, as if acknowledging my presence might invite trouble.
"How do you bear it?" The question slipped out before I could stop myself.
The man paused, studying me with sharp eyes. "Bear what? Work, or knowing that folks like you sleep soft while we bleed down in these pits?"
My throat tightened. "That's not... I don't..."
"Don't what? Don't know? Don't care?" He straightened, wiping grimy hands on his trousers. "Maybe you don't know, but that ignorance is a luxury we can't afford."
Around us, the factory's rhythm continued—hammers striking metal, gears grinding, steam venting in sharp bursts. Workers bent over their tasks, bodies moving with practiced efficiency born of necessity. I caught glimpses of their faces: hollow cheeks, dark circles under their eyes, premature lines carved by stress and exhaustion.
A young woman, perhaps only a few years older than I, fed sheets of brass into a cutting machine with movements that spoke of months, maybe years, of repetition. Her hands moved with precision, fingers dancing around the machine's hungry jaws with practiced caution. But there was something mechanical about her motions, as if her spirit had retreated somewhere deep inside while her body performed its endless dance with metal and steam.
I found myself staring, wondering what dreams she'd abandoned to work here. Had she once sketched pictures in the margins of schoolbooks? Did she have ambitions beyond these walls that stretched far past the rhythm of cutting and shaping? Had she ever gazed at the sky and imagined flying free like our prototype airships, soaring above the smokestacks that now defined her horizon? The questions burned in my throat, but I knew I had no right to ask them—no right to pry into sorrows my family's fortune had helped create.
Her dress, once perhaps a cheerful blue, had faded to the color of old bruises, stained with oil and metal dust that no amount of washing could fully remove. A thin scarf covered most of her hair, but I caught glimpses of auburn strands that might have been beautiful if they weren't dulled by the factory's perpetual grime.
"The guilt's twisting deeper in my chest," I whispered, my voice barely audible above the machinery's roar, coiling like a serpent around my ribs.
These people's labor funded my education, my comfortable life, my very existence. The weight of this truth pressed against my chest like molten brass. Their suffering—the burns on their arms, the exhaustion carved into their faces, the dreams they've buried beneath necessity—it all paid for Father's grand exhibitions and Mother's silk dresses. Was this what I was supposed to witness? Were the dark corners of my life the very shadows from my visions manifested into reality?
The factory's echoes took me back—years ago, back when I hadn't yet realized the dangers lurking within these walls. I must have been seven, or maybe eight. My fingers had wandered over the assortment of machines, captivated by their clinking clockwork, unaware of the peril they concealed. Father had been there, looming like a sentry, proud to show a young heir the beating heart of his empire.
I remembered the gleam of the blade, a snake of sharp steel, slicing through the air faster than I could blink. It had danced from the conveyor with a life of its own, furious and unstoppable. Pain—bright and terrible—seared across my stomach. My cry barely cut through the cacophony as crimson began to stain my shirt, a stark contrast to the oil-streaked floor.
Father had been beside me in a second, his powerful hands pressing against the wound, his voice barking orders. Yet in that moment, despite the soothing intensity of his presence, fear crumpled me. The memory of that fear was as tangible as the scar that tattooed my skin, hidden beneath layers of fine cloth—a reminder, a secret left undisclosed behind formal attire.
Mother had paled ghost-like when they rushed me home, and weeks were spent under her vigilant care as the wound slowly closed. Her fingers had traced the stitches gently every night, like she could unweave the hurt. The wound healed; the pain endured.
That memory lingered as I glanced at the worker beside me, struggling with the valve. I recognized something beyond exhaustion—a thinly-veiled pain, raw and unresolved. His body moved differently, as though he was carrying a load that wouldn't shift. My own ghost wound ached in empathy.
"I've known a pain like yours," I finally ventured, voice subdued, a clumsy confession.
The worker paused, regarding me with curiosity and soft understanding. "A young master who knows pain?"
"The blade," I nodded towards the conveyors. "Ten years past. Nearly opened me from navel to heart."
He huffed, not unkindly. "Lucky you to have survived such—those damn machines..."
It was a small bond, forged in shared suffering, spanning the chasm of our lives. Neither of us spoke of it again, but in that exchange, I sensed a measure of recognition, a reluctant acknowledgment of our shared humanity beneath the threads of status and servitude.
The factory pressed on around us, indifferent to the fragility of human life. But for a moment, in the shadow of age-old cogs and gears, there was understanding unspoken yet felt, a fragile bridge amidst the clanging storm of brass and industry.
I swallowed hard, the words tasting bitter. "Every comfort I've ever known has been purchased with their pain, and I've been too sheltered, too willfully blind, to see it."
"I could speak to my father," I offered weakly to the worker, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. "About conditions, wages... improvements..."
The worker's laugh rang sharp and bitter as metal shavings. "Speak all you like, young lord. Words don't fill empty stomachs, heal broken backs, or bring back fingers lost to machines and lungs ruined by poison." He gestured at the hellish forges surrounding us. "Your father's heard complaints, please, demands over the years—still we're here, bleeding for his brass."
He turned away then, dismissing me as effectively as any royal decree, his attention returning to the relentless machinery.
"The golden boy of House Kuznetsov," I whispered bitterly, "heir to an empire built on blood and brass. The title feels less like an honor now and more like a chain around my neck, each link forged from the suffering of people whose names I've never bothered to learn."
When I recited the words to myself-it dawned on me that those were the words being chanted by the man:
"Blood into brass. Brass into life. Life into dominion."
A pain gripped my head, only brief but a sharp pulse and the man working seemed to show me a glimpse of his life. I seen two little girls, alone with the man and a painful joy he held because of that fact. The small shack he lived- single bed on the floor for the three of them and one of the girls said "I miss Momma…"
She had died of sickness, and they were left at the house every day from this man to come work to provide for them. Fear fell over me and before I could weep in front of my father's workforce-I fled back upstairs vowing to never come down here again. How did I see that man's mind? My hands trembled and at the top of the staircase were whisps of sand blowing faintly in the rays of sunlight.