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Your relationship with Mr Iron begins with a single letter, requesting you visit its kingdom at winter’s end to represent your own in discussion of an alliance. You aren’t sure what strategic advantages an alliance with your kingdom could provide, nor are you sure who this even is, but what you are struck by immediately is its pristine handwriting, not a drop of ink smeared. This is someone who puts careful consideration into every word it writes, everything it does, every connection it chooses, and it’s chosen you. If you want to find out why, you’ll have to agree to this meeting, and it would be unwise to enter into this meeting without first establishing a correspondence.
The letters continue over the long winter, first strictly business, but soon shifting to something approaching friendship, the fine lettering keeping you company through the cold, lonely months. You find yourself confiding things you never have in another person, and the steadiness of its writing brings you a steadiness of heart. After an especially dour letter, you’re delivered a rose welded from copper along with its response. You keep it on your windowsill.
Finally comes the long awaited day when the weather has cleared enough for safe travels and you can finally meet your mysterious new friend. You’re struck by the imposing architecture of the gates that guard the kingdom’s borders, the precise layout of the streets, the stateliness of iron lampposts and fences and doorplates, the gleam of everything from shoe buckles to weathervanes. The kingdom is as pristine as your letters.
You’re escorted to the palace, and then into the throne room. The walls are decorated with countless weapons, many too large for a human to wield. This observation still doesn’t mitigate any of the surprise when you see the looming figure waiting for you on the throne. The Master must be over seven feet tall, shrouded in formal black robes with chain mail glinting from underneath. Its gloves end in sharp points, and noticing this snaps you from your shock. If claws can produce such beautiful handwriting, you can’t be afraid of them. You aren’t afraid of it. Even if you can’t see its face, you’ve grown to know it over your correspondence. You may even dare to consider yourself fond.
Mr Iron presents you with another metal rose to commemorate you meeting at last, this one of silver. You keep this one clipped in a pocket where all can see it and know that you’re here as an honored guest of the King.
Your relationship progresses more quickly than you can comprehend. You arrive at the palace to discuss an alliance. You become a regular guest at the palace. You have your own quarters at the palace, in the Master’s own wing. Talk of business becomes less and less frequent until it all but stops. Time for negotiating an alliance has passed, and you honestly aren’t sure how they ended, distracted as you are by the Master’s attention. Clearly, you’ve made a good impression on it, so you remain optimistic. The point stands that your job has concluded but you’re still here. You spend less and less time alone, and more and more time accompanying the Master on its duties.
You’re invited to join it on its rounds inspecting its militia, ensuring not a spot of rust is on a single sword, shield, helmet, or piece of mail. You watch the meticulousness with which it pores over maps and intelligence, determining the best strategic positions for fortresses and troops along the kingdom’s borders. It drills its militia relentlessly, expecting nothing less than the best, noting each individual’s performance with either its left or right hand. Those marked by the left are escorted away and not spoken of again. You keep the thought from your mind of what might have happened to them.
In a rare moment you have alone while Mr Iron is occupied with private work that even you aren’t an exception to, a commander remarks to you that the Master has seemed more preoccupied with defense since you came. You wonder what that could mean. How quickly would a creature who curates weapons and hot forges turn violent to protect its own? You’re struck with the image of yourself in danger and Iron swooping in front of you to tear your assailant to shreds with its claws sharper than blades. You don’t know what you feel about that thought, nor why it makes you feel warmer.
You’re invited to join it on tours of its forges and works, sheltered from cinders and heat by its heavy cloak around you. When you tour a blast furnace and watch glowing hot steel pour into rail cars, it sways slightly on its feet as if content to stand here forever watching over the process. You recognize the appetite with which it supervises the lines, a gleam in its gray eyes like light glinting off the point of a sword, a gleam similar to that which you’ve started to catch when it looks at you but thinks you don’t notice.
Mr Iron keeps you away from the more dangerous sides of industry. Its facilities are run with the same precision with which it approaches everything, but there is always a margin of error. Neither alarm bells, nor shouts of the injured, nor pesky inquiries of charities can be heard through the thick walls of the overseer’s office. You convince yourself the Master tries to keep everything under control. If it can show you such tenderness, in its own way, it can’t be a bad ruler. It can’t.
Neither of you officially says anything, but it becomes clear that there is something special between the two of you. Mr Iron is never direct about its feelings, but in the most recent letter it leaves under your door, you notice the slightest tremor in the ink where it’s written your name. It’s taken you entirely too long to realize what has been going on: a courtship.
In quiet moments, just as its letters kept you company, you repay the favor to it, perched in its offices where it’s placed you on a chair too tall for you to get into on your own while it fills chalkboards with its problems, bouncing ideas off you. Here, in private, it’s dressed more comfortably, ensemble resembling something a simple blacksmith would wear. As the sun sets lower in the sky, Iron becomes less guarded, more honest. It confides in you the pressures it feels as a ruler to appear strong and sturdy as a steel beam, but every piece of metal has a load under which it will buckle. Having you, it says, gives it support it cannot articulate. You take its hand, both of yours covering only a few of its large fingers, and unspool its worries like wire.
Iron is not only the sword, the rod, the fence. It is the sewing needle, the key, the cog. It is the essential element in your blood without which you'd suffocate.
Your private meetings become more frequent afterwards. Mr Iron shows the highest form of affection: it introduces you into its collection. It insists you know how to defend yourself, alluding to powerful rivals it has. In early mornings, before the sun gets too hot, your schedule becomes regularly filled by lessons. Mr Iron trains you personally in dueling. Human sized weapons look silly in its hands, but it takes immense care to limit its strength so as to not hurt you, each of its moves measured. You’re touched, worthy of the gentleness with which it treats its letters. Immeasurable strength, yet it has never punctured paper.
The intention carries in softer moments, when a hand brushes against your back to escort you, or a golden fork is held up for you to sample a fine dish. The finest example you get of its capacity for tenderness comes on the evening a servant carelessly hums a tune while clearing the table, and you’re allowed to come closer to Mr Iron than you ever have before. You climb into its lap and struggle a bit to get comfy with the stiff mail under its robes, but it wraps an arm behind you to ensure you don’t fall. This is your first time seeing it with its hood slipped low. Its ears swivel alert at every sound you make, silver eyes piercing you like the nibs of pens. You aren’t surprised it has fur, but you are surprised by how unimaginably fluffy it is. Really, this creature that compares itself to steel is softer than a pillow? You spend hours running your fingers through thick waves of copper fur streaked with gold, the tips frosted with silver that matches its eyes.
These such occurrences become more and more frequent, any moment Iron can spare away from its duties occupied with clandestine encounters with you. The silver rose clipped to your outfit changes to gold, and if anyone takes an implication from that, they're wise enough not to say anything to either of you. You respect the Master’s strong desire for privacy, so you never press it to do more.
After much anticipation and preparation, the most exciting day of the year comes, the midsummer day of celebration of the kingdom’s prosperity. You stand beside Mr Iron on the balcony of the palace, watching the parade of industry. The parade, like the kingdom, like everything Mr Iron touches, runs smooth as clockwork and according to tradition. Soldiers march in perfect formation, armor and weapons gleaming. Floats with great moving pieces shaped of copper and gold flash in the light, accompanied by dancers with a great many bells and metal studs sewn into their outfits. Musicians follow carrying, but not playing, brass instruments and steel drums. Mr Iron would never lose constitution unless it was alone and confident its position was secure. The band will play after the two of you have retired, during the party that will follow as a formality to appease the people but is of zero interest for the Master.
The parade comes to an end on schedule to the second. The people look up to you now for the Master to acknowledge them with a gesture of its gloved hand. This year, to everyone’s surprise, it breaks tradition. With every eye in the crowd watching, it presents you with a gift. You’re shocked for it to be so forward in public. It gestures for you to stand in a certain place and close your eyes. You feel a gentle weight placed on your head, followed by claws gently trailing through your hair. You open your eyes and look in your reflection in the metal floor to see you’ve been given a silver crown, measured exactly to fit on your head. It isn’t something flashy, that isn’t the Master’s style, but there is great beauty in simplicity, and it does compliment you.
A reverent hush falls over the crowd before it resumes cheering. Mr Iron lifts its cloak to shelter you from their gaze as it leads you inside, not content to share you any longer with the attention of strangers. You want to ask what the meaning of all that was, but you know better than to press. It will explain when the time is right, like always.
That evening, in private, it presents you with a second gift, one that explains its uncharacteristic behavior earlier. After a dinner of your favorites, expertly carved and sliced and served on platinum dinnerware, a hand falls on your shoulder, and a package wrapped in red paper with copper wire ribbons is placed in your lap.
You open it to find an ornate dagger, forged just for you. It could never function for defense or even as a cooking utensil: the edges are curved, and shapes have been etched into the blade and handle. Still, every piece has a function. If you turn the dagger to catch the light in just the right way, the lines spell out a sigil marking your bond.
You’re reminded of an old tradition of gifting a carved wooden spoon to one’s lover. If accepted, it symbolized an engagement.
You take its hand to put over yours holding the dagger. Hadn’t your relationship started with negotiations for an alliance? That arrangement never came to pass, but the two of you have come away with a much better partnership.
Mr Iron leads you off for a third gift, given behind the closed doors of its private rooms. You are the paper, and it is the pen, and it will treat you with the care, precision, and thoroughness in which it does all things.