[center][h1][color=green][b]The [color=gold]Immortal[/color] Iron Fist[/b][/color][/h1][/center][center][h3][b]Orson Randall[/b][/h3][/center]
[hr]
[b]Marseilles, France
June 1940,
...I don't know what day it is.[/b]

It was a gray day, or maybe they just all felt like gray days then, like I was trapped in a fog. Either way I stumbled into a dockside opium den bone-chilled and clammy like I'd just run a mile through the freezing rain and with a pounding in my head worse than any gongfu pummeling I'd ever taken. The pounding feeling was an old friend by now, the sort of friend that'd ask a man for his very last dollar right after he'd been evicted from his house and tossed into a pile of garbage. Sometimes it sounded like the shells that exploded down on us in the trenches, sometimes it was the drums of K'un-L'un summoning their sacred serpent to devour me, the only constant was the one way I could get it to stop. That's why I was there.

This particular opium den, it was big converted warehouse by the docks, all western grime and shabbiness with a veneer of the Far East crusted over it like the scabby wound it was. Red paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling bathed the place in blood-colored light that flickered off of flaking wall-paintings of glitzy four-toed lung dragons that looked offended to be there and white cranes that wanted to fly somewhere else. The floor had intermittent vomit stains across it from when some poor bastard going through the sweat cure hadn't been able to hold out. I was sure if Lei-Kung the Thunderer could've seen the place he would have wept in shame. 

But that didn't matter. Here I wasn't The Immortal Iron Fist, Living Weapon of K'un-L'un and slayer of Shou-Lao the Undying. Hell, I wasn't even Sargent Randall, War Hero. Here I was just Orson the opium addict, and there was only one dragon I cared about. 

I let an East Asian-looking immigrant worker take me by the arm and lead me further in, sit me on a divan in my own private little portion of hell I'd reserved thanks to the kinda money that comes from a few decades of adventuring. I couldn't bear to look him in the face, afraid I'd see too much resemblance to the people I'd left behind, or maybe just afraid that he'd fail to hide the disgust behind his eyes. Soon enough it was time for the ritual, the ancient Chinese secret that would free me from my icy pain and the constant pounding behind my eyes.

The serving-man brought my sacred implements on a tray: the needles, the lamp and of course a well-seasoned pipe. A little pill-worth of chandu was all that I could afford, but with the war on even France's holdings in Indochina weren't enough to keep it cheap.  I needled the bowl of chandu until it boiled into a thick goop like the shelled-out mud-pit that had swallowed up Private Jean-Claude. 

I stopped to shake the memory away, rolled the toffee-like goop into a little pill, jammed it down into my pipe and settled the bowl in on the lamp to heat it.

When the pill started bubbling like Jean Claude's screams I knew it was time to suck in the smoke. It was warm and sweet as a lover's kiss and just as ethereal. It banished the cold and the pounding finally faded as I stretched out on the divan letting my memories vaporize with the opium. The only time I could sleep anymore was with the smoke in my lungs and as I nodded off I thought I heard someone putting a record on and let the words swirl around in my mind

[i]J'attandrai...le jour et la nuit...J'attandrai toujours ton retour...[/i]

A decent song, but anyone who might have been waiting for me had died or left a long time ago. All of my friends...even the kid, Wendell, he was gone...and so many of them dead in those trenches...
Funny, normally my memories would have left me alone by now, but I could almost hear the whistle of a bomb.

[i]Hélas plus rien, plus rien me vient.[/i]

[hr]
The pounding was back worse than ever and what was even more annoying was  that I was almost sure I was dead. After all, the Yu-ti, sorceror overlord of K'un-L'un, wouldn't be visiting me otherwise. Not even in spectral ghostly form, floating before me and wagging a jade-gloved finger under my nose. 

[i]"You were raised to die better than this. The world is being swallowed up by a storm of chaos as atrocity after atrocity is comitted and yet you lie there blown to pieces and wallowing in vice and self-pity?"[/i]

I tried to shut my eyes but it turns out that don't help much when you're dead and hallucinating at the same time so instead I grunted at him and mumbled excuses.

[i]"Maybe I was tired of lookin' for the right death. Maybe I was tired of holding back your so-called storm by myself, Tired of killing. Besides, not much I can do about it now." [/i]

My one-time lord and master made to smack me for my insolence, two-fingered across the forehead the way I'd always hated as a kid. Somehow I still felt it, which seemed hardly fair to a dead man. [i]"The throne of the honorable rests upon a mountain of bodies and its  frame has been made of many bones, Orson Randall. You can choose to die here, but if there is even one scrap left of the Weapon you once were inside you, you know what you must do.[/i]"

The preachy old bastard left me alone then, but the smug way he said that last part like he knew I'd never do it nagged at me, made me want to prove him wrong.

So I turned inwards, deep inwards to that pounding inside me and for the first time in a long time I remembered what it really was that caused it.

It wasn't the shells against the trenches, it wasn't the war drums of K'un-L'un...

...It was a beating heart. A heart a million miles away, but closer than the one dying in my chest...

...and I reached for it.

Golden fire burned everything away. The drugs, the pain, the wounds, the uncertainty. As I looked around the blasted remains of the opium den at the mangled bodies and the blood all that remained in my mind was this:

[i] I am the Immortal Iron Fist

I am a Living Weapon

and I am going to war. [/i]