Grimwall — hero portrait
villain Volcanic

Grimwall

Roland Cheng

South Orange, Essex

Origin Roland Cheng inherited the Grimwall forge-heat at age forty, when he pressed his palm to the old clan anvil his grandfather had kept in a South Orange basement and burned through the workbench, the floor, and three feet of subsoil before he got it under control. He has had it under control ever since — precisely, meticulously, and with a long view.
Landmark Montrose Park
Nemesis Glassholm
Powers
Hero portrait Portrait
Villain Nemesis
Action scene In Action
Landmark Landmark
⚔ Battle

Part One: The Cold Open

The bulk pickup notices had gone out on time. Residents of South Orange had dutifully dragged their old appliances, bent bicycles, and discarded microwaves to the curb — only to find every single piece of metal fused into slag by morning. Not crushed. Not stolen. Melted. Refrigerator doors had pooled into silvery puddles on the pavement along Scotland Road. Aluminum frames had become abstract sculptures on Ridgewood Road, still warm to the touch at nine in the morning. Roland Cheng stood at the edge of the Montrose Park tree line, hands folded behind his back, watching a filing cabinet finish collapsing into a neat silver coin, and felt the deep, abiding satisfaction of a man who had been right about something for two hundred and eighty-three years.

Part Two: The Investigation

He had spent Tuesday perfecting the perimeter. The plan was elegant: forge-temperature generation, applied with patience and the Grimwall Clan’s meticulous knowledge of Essex County’s iron-laden geology, could re-temper the mineral memory in the ground itself. Heat the slag markers at precisely the right depth, and the ridgeline remembered. It remembered Grimwall. Roland walked Scotland Road in his good coat — charcoal wool, nothing remarkable — pausing at each melt point to press two fingers to the cooling puddle and confirm the depth signature. At Mountain Station, a commuter in a cable-knit vest stared at the faint orange glow at his cuffs. Roland told him it was a new kind of hand warmer. The man seemed satisfied. At Seton Hall, Roland scorched the Grimwall territorial cipher into the base of Walsh Library’s Gothic stonework with the focused heat of a jeweler’s torch channeled through one steady palm. A passing student asked if he was doing maintenance. “Restoration,” said Roland, which was entirely true.

Part Three: The Pivot

The melt points were not random and they were not petty. Roland spread the old Ironwright deed map across the hood of his car on South Orange Avenue and traced the perimeter he’d completed: Scotland Road north, Ridgewood Road east, the Seton Hall quad as anchor. The Glassholm Clan had held this ridgeline by spectral trickery since 1743, bending light and heat to obscure the original markers every time the Grimwalls came close to reclaiming them. The bulk pickup was an opportunity the ancestors would have recognized immediately — dozens of ferrous metal objects, publicly placed, thermally available. The Grimwall Clan had not come this close to a clean territorial reset since the founding of the Orange Invitation race, when a Glassholm had redirected the afternoon sun directly into a Grimwall judge’s eyes at a critical moment. Roland buttoned his coat. “This time,” he said to no one, “the deed stands.”

Part Four: The Reckoning

She found him in Montrose Park at half past four, which was irritating because he had planned to be gone by three. Roland Cheng turned to find Margaret Glassholm walking across the grass with the particular expression of someone who has already won and is simply completing the paperwork. He raised one hand and the cast-iron park bench began to soften at the edges — a demonstration, not an attack, which he felt was an important distinction. She pushed concentrated ultraviolet through both palms and hit him like a cracked kiln diagnosis. Every fault line in his forge-heated armor lit up. The corrupted plate had weaknesses he had not had time to address. He redirected his output downward — glazed a patch of grass to ceramic, scalded nothing that mattered — and tried again with the park’s old wrought-iron fence rail. She built a thermal wall between them with redirected infrared and scattered his forge-heat sideways into the dirt. The boundary markers would hold for weeks. Maybe a month. Not the season. He looked at her with the measured professional respect of a man who had been foiled by the same family in the same park across four separate centuries. “Next season,” he said, and walked calmly into the tree line.

Part Five: The Resolution

The slag on Scotland Road was repurposed by a confused but entrepreneurial local sculptor. The Seton Hall stonework needed a wire brush and a good institutional lie. The bulk pickup was rescheduled with no incident. Roland drove home along South Orange Avenue, fingers still faintly warm at the knuckles, and calculated the next approach. The Grimwall perimeter had held for eleven days before Glassholm collapsed it — three days longer than 1912, two days shorter than 1887. Progress was incremental when your enemy bent light for a living. He turned on the radio. The former Police drummer was coming to town. Some things, at least, were new.

Sources

Published May 3, 2026