I looked down at my stomach again, flexed without meaning to, and stared.

  Abs.

  On a three year old.

  The light in the bunkroom caught on the ridges like it was proud of itself. Several lanterns were fixed high along the stone walls, their steady glow washing over the wide space in overlapping pools of warm yellow light, bright enough to keep apprentices from tripping over each other in the dark.

  The room itself was simple, almost aggressively so. Bare stone walls stretched outward, old chisel marks still visible if you looked too closely. Rows of narrow bunks lined the walls and filled the center of the space, sturdy wooden frames reinforced with iron bands and sunk deep into the stone floor so they could not be tipped or broken easily. Every bunk was empty. Blankets were folded at the foot of each bed, untouched, the room prepared in advance and deliberately cleared. Greta had brought me in early so there would be no witnesses, no frightened children waking to screaming or blood or the smell of something going wrong.

  My bunk was one of many, identical except for the small wooden chest at its foot. The chest was scarred and plain, but the iron fittings hummed faintly with reinforcement enchantments meant to keep curious hands out and contents intact. It held everything I owned in this place. There were no pegs, no private hooks, no space that truly belonged to anyone. This was a shared room, built for rotation and turnover, not comfort.

  Everything about the place said temporary, functional, and used.

  Everything about the place also said I had been lying in it for hours while my body decided whether it wanted to stay alive, watched over instead of abandoned.

  I lifted my hands, slowly, like I was testing new tools. There was weakness there, real weakness, a heavy drag beneath the smoothness. My muscles obeyed, but they tired quickly, as if the strength was still settling into place and had not yet decided how much it was willing to give me. My fingers opened and closed. The movement felt smoother than it had yesterday. Like my muscles had been packed tighter under the skin, tightened with rope instead of loose cloth.

  I ran a hand over my stomach again, because I did not trust my own senses.

  The body underneath my palm was mine.

  It was also not mine.

  It was a toddler’s frame with a wizard’s awareness inside it, and now, with a tin core anchored somewhere behind my heartbeat, it felt like the frame was beginning to accept that awareness instead of rejecting it.

  A thought flashed, bright and sharp.

  Form.

  Not strength.

  The God of Iron had not promised me strength first. He had promised me form. Control. Precision. The kind of awareness that made movement deliberate instead of accidental.

  Which was good.

  Because if I tried to fight another hammer turtle in this body, even with abs, I would still lose.

  I swallowed and forced my breathing to slow. Breath in. Breath out. Longer out than in. Control the panic first. Control the body second.

  I was still processing that horrifying revelation when I realized Greta had never actually left.

  She was sitting on the chair beside my bunk, elbows on her knees, watching me with open amusement as I poked at my own abdomen like it might explain itself if I pressed hard enough.

  Greta was an orc, which meant she should have been terrifying.

  She was.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  She was also, somehow, scared in a way that made her gentler than she wanted to admit.

  Her skin was green, deep enough that it looked almost black in bad light, but the lantern warmed it to a mossy shade. Her tusks were small compared to the war orcs I remembered from old stories, but still sharp enough to cut skin if she bit down. One tusk had a tiny chip at the tip, like she had once tried to bite something she should not have. Her shoulders were broad and strong, the kind built from hauling carts and splitting wood and throwing people out of taverns.

  And right now she had a little wooden nose clip pinched over her nostrils.

  It made her voice sound slightly wrong, thinner and muffled at the same time.

  She laughed. “Ah, you’re awake. And I see you’ve noticed.”

  The laugh was real, but her eyes stayed sharp, watching every small twitch of my face, every shift of my shoulders, as if she expected me to seize again.

  I stared at her nose clip, then at her expression.

  “You’ve been sitting here the whole time,” I said.

  Greta shrugged, as if spending hours guarding a child through a body rewrite was the most normal thing in the world. “Someone had to. And I wasn’t letting you roll off the bunk and snap your neck after all that work.”

  Work.

  That was a funny word for what had happened. My heart had been impaled from the inside by a cold piece of evolving stone. I had died. Briefly. Briefly enough that my soul still had the taste of the in between on it.

  Now I had abs.

  I looked down again.

  Greta snorted through the nose clip.

  “Greta,” I said carefully. “Is this normal?”

  She leaned closer, squinting at me like I was a mildly interesting medical puzzle, her gaze sharp enough to catch the way my shoulders dipped when the effort started to cost me more than I wanted to show. “You’re a little more toned than I’d expect for a tin core,” she admitted. “And you’re weaker than you think you are right now. Don’t confuse control with strength. But honestly, you were skin and bones before. The contrast just makes it obvious. You’re probably starving too.”

  My stomach chose that moment to growl in agreement.

  The sound was loud in the small room.

  Greta’s mouth twisted like she was trying not to smile. It failed.

  I swallowed. “Do we have bananas?”

  Greta blinked. “That’s a strange thing to crave, but yes. The mess hall should have some.”

  “Oh good.”

  I said it too fast.

  I said it like it mattered.

  Because it did.

  I had never eaten a banana in my last life.

  That fact felt ridiculous, but it was true. In five hundred years I had never once held a banana. I had eaten things that glowed, things that screamed, things that were technically illegal in nine kingdoms. I had drunk wines older than the nations that held them. I had eaten kraken meat, and I had eaten bread so hard it could have been used as a weapon.

  No bananas, mostly because I had never had the opportunity before.

  Then the God of Iron had handed me one in his heaven like it was sacred scripture.

  One banana a day.

  Three meals.

  One banana.

  Nonnegotiable.

  The whole thing was absurd. It was also, somehow, comforting. Not because a banana was magical, but because the regimen was simple.

  I shifted, intending to sit up.

  My muscles responded instantly, the movement too smooth, too coordinated for a toddler who had been unconscious for hours.

  I felt it and stopped halfway.

  Greta’s eyes narrowed.

  I lowered myself back down, then tried again, slower, careful to respect the faint tremor running through my arms. The control was there. The endurance was not. Not yet.

  I rolled my shoulders first, testing the joints. Then I tightened my stomach, engaged the core the way the God of Iron had forced me to in that endless plank that felt like a year inside a single held breath.

  Then I sat up.

  Deliberate.

  Controlled.

  My spine stacked itself like I actually knew where it was.

  Greta watched me like she was watching a weapon assemble itself.

  “You move like you know where every bone is,” she said, voice muffled by the clip. “Most kids just… move.”

  I looked at my hands again, because I could feel the difference in the way my body answered me. “I used to have to command everything with magic,” I said quietly. “Now I have to command it with… me.”

  Greta made a sound that might have been agreement. “You seemed to have a greater understanding of your body than most I have taught,” she said. “Even other reincarnators. Now that you’re truly tin core, it’s even more evident. You’re going to master your bodily control in a way that few ever do.”

  The words hit me harder than they should have.

  Praise.

  Praise felt dangerous.

  Praise was how gods baited you.

  Greta was not a god.

  Greta was an orc wearing a nose clip in a room that smelled like death.

  I trusted her more for the nose clip than I did for any comforting speech.

  I nodded once, because I did not know what else to do with that.

  Then the smell hit me.

  It had been there before, faint, buried under the exhaustion and the haze of waking. Now that I was upright and moving, it rose like an enemy.

  The bunk reeked like something had died and then made several bad life choices.

  It clung to the air. It clung to my skin.

  It was in the blankets, soaked deep.

  Greta snorted. “I was wondering how long it would take you to notice.”

  I froze, then slowly looked down at the mattress.

  The stain was not brown.

  It was darker. Greasier. Almost black in spots.

  My nose rebelled.

  “Greta,” I said, voice tight, “what is this? Did I poop myself?”