All Chapters of Marked From Birth: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

By the third day of the trek, the true "Human Debt" became apparent. In the old world, the wolves provided the protection and the humans provided the labor. Now, with the wolves losing their strength and the humans losing their fuel, the power dynamic had shifted into a dangerous, jagged tension.They had reached the edge of the Frozen Marches when the caravan ground to a halt. One of the main steam-sleds had blown a gasket, and the engineers were refusing to fix it until they were given a larger portion of the dwindling meat rations.Audrey found Silas standing over a group of human workers, his hand on the hilt of his blade. "You'll fix the machine because the children in that sled are freezing!" Silas roared."And my men are starving!" the lead engineer shouted back, unafraid of the former General. "We’re the ones keeping this scrap-heap moving. Why should we give the best cuts to the wolves who can't even hunt a rabbit anymore?"Audrey stepped between them before steel could be dr

The sun hung low over the Steam-Basin, casting long, amber shadows across the iron-ribbed streets of Aethelgard. It was the hour of the "Great Venting," when the geothermal pressure valves throughout the city were opened to release the day’s excess heat. A low, harmonic whistle echoed through the valley—a sound that had replaced the terrifying howl of the High Alpha’s summons.Audrey stood on the balcony of the clock-tower, her hands resting on the cool brass railing. She no longer wore the heavy, suffocating silks of a Silver Queen or the tattered rags of a Moon Shadow servant. Her clothes were made of sturdy southern wool and reinforced with leather—practical, warm, and earned.She watched the city below. From this height, Aethelgard looked like a living lung. Steam rose in rhythmic pulses from the chimneys, weaving through the stone terraces where green-houses now flourished in the permanent warmth. She saw a group of children playing in the central plaza—wolf-born and human-born c

The journey from the bunker to the Great Geyser was a crawl through a landscape of nightmare. Audrey was no longer walking; she was being dragged by Lucas and Silas, her body radiating a heat so intense that the stone floor beneath her feet cracked and hissed. She was a leaking reactor, her skin shimmering with a terrifying, ghost-light that pulsed in time with her frantic heartbeat."The pressure is building in her," Silas grunted, his face covered in a wet cloth to filter the steam. "She’s not just a filter anymore, Lucas. She’s a bomb. If we don't get her to the intake, she’s going to detonate."They reached the Geyser Chamber, the gargantuan hollow at the base of the mountain where the planet’s blood met the city’s steel. In the center was the "Primary Exchange"—a series of massive brass turbines that converted the geyser’s heat into the city’s mechanical life-blood.High above, perched on a suspended walkway of crystalline light, stood Aurielle. The Golden Queen looked down, her

The directive was a form of madness that only a woman who had consumed a star and lived to tell of it could conceive. Audrey sat at the head of a massive oak table in the War Room, which had been transformed from a place of military strategy into a frantic laboratory of industrial design. Spread before her were the blueprints for the "Iron Exodus," a series of scrolls so large they had to be weighted down with discarded artillery shells."You want to put the city on treads," Commander Vane said, her voice flat, devoid of its usual mechanical bravado. She wasn't arguing; she was simply stating the physical impossibility of the task as if she were reading a death sentence. She tapped a metallic finger against a cross-section schematic of Aethelgard’s basalt foundations. "Audrey, the calculated weight of the Central Plaza and the primary geothermal intake alone exceeds four hundred thousand metric tons. To move that, we don’t just need an engine; we need to cage a god and force him to cr

The "Great Engine" did not move with the grace of a ship; it moved with the unrelenting, crushing inevitability of a glacier. For weeks, the city of Aethelgard ground its way southward, its massive caterpillar treads flattening hills of basalt and pulverizing ancient pine forests into mulch. But as they crossed the final ridge of the Frost-Spine mountains, the landscape changed from the grey of ash to a blinding, crystalline white.They had reached the Sea of Salt.This was a dead zone—a five-hundred-mile expanse of salt-flats where the sun reflected off the ground with such intensity that it could sear the retinas of anyone caught without protective quartz-tinted goggles. In the old world, it was the "Great Barrier" that kept the North and South apart. Now, it was the first true test of the mobile city."The external temperature is climbing," Vane reported from the Bridge. Her mechanical arm was wrapped in cooling coils, and she was constantly adjusting the pressure valves. "The salt