I write this by candlelight, in the parlor of a house that will not stand another winter. The iron has taken everything—every hinge, every nail, every piece of hardware on this plantation. The doors hang loose. The windows have no latches. The church bell was the first to go, consumed in the second week, and now when the wind blows through the steeple, it sounds like a ghost trying to ring a bell that is no longer there.

I am Lavinia Beauregard, and I am the last of my line. This is what I leave behind.

Our plantation sat on a bend in the Mississippi River, three miles below Natchez, where the water moves slow and the humidity hangs over the land like a wet blanket you cannot remove. It was a good plantation once. Two thousand acres, cotton that sold for good prices, a mansion built of cypress and pride. But the war took the men, and reconstruction took the rest, and by 1893, the Beauregard name was a burden rather than an asset.

Uncle Silas would not accept this. Silas Beauregard was my mother's younger brother, a fat man with a magnificent mustache and a mind full of machines. He had traveled to Europe and returned convinced that the Old South could be saved not by people but by iron.

"The Germans understand," he told us at dinner one evening, chopping his roast with more force than necessary. "They build machines that do the work of ten men. Ten men! Imagine, Lavinia. A plantation that runs itself."

He ordered a shipment of automatic irrigation machines from a manufacturer in Essen. He called them Iron Beetles, though they looked nothing like beetles. They were boxy, angular things, constructed from sheet steel, driven by small steam engines, with articulated arms designed to open and close irrigation valves along the crop rows.

The Iron Beetles arrived in November, packed in crates that filled the entire front porch. Silas unpacked them himself, his face flushed with excitement, his gold-capped teeth flashing in the lamplight.

"Watch," he said, winding the key in the side of the first Beetle. The machine sprang to life with a hiss of steam and a clatter of gears. Its arms moved methodically, opening the irrigation valves along the first row of cotton. Then it moved to the next valve. Then the next. Efficient. Tireless. Perfect.

"Twenty of these," Silas announced, "and we will never need field labor again."

The first sign that something was wrong came two weeks later, when Old Man Jacques came to the house in a state of visible terror. Old Man Jacques had worked the plantation since before the war, when he was a boy in chains. He was old now, bent like a cypress in the wind, but his eyes were sharp.

"Miz Lavinia," he said, gripping the doorframe with hands that shook. "You got to stop Massa Silas. Them machines, they ain't right. They eatin' everything."

"Eating what, Jacques?" I asked.

"Everythin' with iron in it. Fence posts. Plowshares. The kitchen pots. Even the nails in the shed. I seen 'em pull a whole fence line down with them mechanical arms, Miz Lavinia. Just pull it down and feed it to themselves."

I reported this to Silas, who laughed. "Iron Beetles consuming iron? That is not a problem, Cousin Lavinia. That is a feature. They are designed to process metal. If they are eating fence posts, it means the fence posts needed to be processed."

But Jacques was right. By the third week, the Iron Beetles had consumed every piece of metal on the plantation within a half-mile radius. Fence posts. Tools. Hardware. The iron roof of the smokehouse. The chains on the well. The horseshoes on every horse in the stable.

Silas responded by adding cobalt salts to the Beetles' water supply. "They need minerals to adapt to the Southern climate," he explained. "The cobalt will strengthen their alloys and help them thrive in the humidity."

The Beetles thrived. Too well.

They began to change. The original models were boxy and slow. The new ones were sleeker, faster, with additional limbs and sharper pincers. Silas called them Swift-types. They moved through the swamp like water, their steel legs barely disturbing the surface.

Then came the Ironclads.

The first Ironclad appeared at the edge of the cotton field one morning, and half the plantation workers refused to go outside. It was half the height of a man, constructed from layered armor plates that had been forged from the very metal it had consumed. Its arms ended in pincers that could crush a watermelon with a single squeeze. Its eyes were red lenses that glowed in the darkness.

Silas was ecstatic. "Evolution!" he declared. "Darwin was right! The strong survive and the weak are consumed! These creatures are the perfect weapon, the perfect worker, the perfect—

He did not finish the sentence. The Ironclad turned its red eyes toward him, and for the first time, I saw fear in Silas Beauregard's face.

But it was too late for fear. The Beetles had evolved beyond their creator's control. They consumed metal wherever they found it. They attacked anything that carried metal. Buttons. Jewelry. Dentures. Watches.

Old Man Jacques was the first to die. I saw it happen from the parlor window. He was in the cotton field, bent over his rows, when a swarm of Swift-types emerged from the swamp. They moved like a river of steel, flowing toward him. He tried to run, but his legs would not carry him. His silver pocket watch, hanging from a chain around his neck, glowed in the sunlight like a beacon. The swarm reached him, and the last thing I saw was the flash of their pincers, and then he was gone, dragged into the swamp by creatures that had no eyes but could see metal from a hundred paces.

Silas died three days later, in the grand hall of the mansion. The Ironclads tore through the oak doors like paper. Silas was in his bed—a brass bed frame, God help him—when they reached him. His gold-capped teeth flashed as he screamed. The Ironclads did not care about screams. They cared about metal. And Silas Beauregard was full of it.

I survived because I have no metal on me. I wear silver jewelry only on special occasions, and today was not a special occasion. I wore cotton. I wore leather. I wore nothing that could be eaten.

The Beauregard plantation died that winter. The mansion stands, but it is a shell, stripped of everything that made it a home. The cotton fields are overgrown. The Mississippi keeps flowing. And the iron beetles keep eating, their gears grinding in the humid dark, their red eyes watching, waiting for the next piece of metal to find.

I am the last Beauregard. When I die, there will be no one left to remember this place. That is perhaps its mercy.

OTMES Code: OTMES-v2-MNK-04 Style: Southern Gothic TI: 92.0 (T0 Destruction) Direction Angle: 135.0° Theme: The decay of civilization consumed by its own creations