Charles POV

“Legacy isn’t inherited, it's manufactured.”

The world believes I’m dead.

Good. The dead are feared longer than the living.

The mirror in front of me reflects a man I barely recognize. Half my face is carved with burn lines that twist like rivers of coal.

My right eye still works; the left one clouds and burns whenever light touches it.

I look like a ruin wearing a suit, Appropriate, Empires fall, not gracefully but in fragments.

The refinery groans around me, a metal ...