Beneath the peeled canvas, the face of Zhu Heling was no longer that of a conqueror, nor that of a machine.
It was the face of a dying mortal man, stripped of his brass illusions and returned to the fragile reality of his mortal origins.
Without his riveted brass mask, Zhu Heling appeared surprisingly young. His mortal age was barely thirty-five winters—the same age as Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu when they had taken the oath of the Fathom-Scribes in the lower archives. The madness that had hollowed his cheeks and burned his eyes was gone, replaced by the frail, exhausted vulnerability of a scholar who had spent his youth reading by the light of animal fat lamps. In his dying features lay the tragic reminder that every conqueror was merely a frightened mortal attempting to build an iron wall against the certain tide of death.
The riveted brass faceplate had been blown free by the internal explosion of his clockwork heart, exposing the pale, gaunt flesh of his human skull. His dark hair, matted with coal dust, whale oil, and cold salt-spray, lay plastered across his temples. His organic right eye, no longer whirring with crystal-clear sight lenses, looked up into the dome with the cloudy, dimming gaze of a man whose lamp was running dry of oil.
