The Dregs didn't raise children—it forged them in the smog-choked crucible of neglect and survival. Ryn learned this truth at nine years old, when his mother traded him to a slumlord named Cabbot for a sack of synth-rice and a half-empty bottle of rotgut whiskey. He'd stood barefoot in the alley, watching her threadbare coat vanish into the sulfur-yellow haze, and decided then that trust was a currency for fools. Love, even thinner.
Cabbot's domain was a stack of rusted cargo containers welded to the skeleton of a collapsed refinery. The man himself was a wheezing monument to vice, his lungs rattling with every drag of his corroded vapor pipe. He put Ryn to work combing through Oblivion-tainted scrap heaps, where the air buzzed with unstable energy and the ground crunched with shattered Shard fragments. "Find anything shiny," Cabbot croaked on that first day, "or I'll sell your bones to the Bazaar."
Ryn survived by becoming a ghost—small, silent, sharp-eyed. He learned to spot the faint glint of salvageable metal beneath mounds of ash, to pry loose Oblivion filaments before their corrosive hum could blister his fingertips. But the Dregs always collected its toll. By twelve, his hands were scarred from a hundred near-misses with unstable Shard shards. By thirteen, he'd learned to pick locks, pockets, and the perfect moment to vanish.
The Shatterdome became his sanctuary. Once a grand arena where Shardbearers dueled for the amusement of Gilded Spire elites, it had collapsed decades earlier into a labyrinth of broken pillars and unstable tunnels. The air there thrummed with residual Oblivion energy, a static charge that made Ryn's teeth ache and his scars prickle. He'd hide in its shadows when Cabbot's temper flared, listening to the whispers of dead fighters etched into the walls.
It was there, one rainless night, that he found the Shard.
Inquisition drones had cornered him near the sulfur pits—mechanical hounds with glowing red optics and jaws lined with serrated steel. Ryn fled, feet bleeding, lungs burning, until he stumbled into a fissure in the Shatterdome's underbelly. The walls wept black sludge, and there, wedged between the ribs of a long-dead Progenitor, was a thumb-sized crystal, jagged and dull gray. It hummed like a trapped wasp.
Take it, the arena seemed to hiss. Or maybe it was the Shard itself.
He did.
The bond was a flicker, not a blaze. No grand visions, no serpent's voice in his skull. Just a cold itch in his palm as the Shard—Scavenger's Echo—burrowed into his flesh. When the drones cornered him minutes later, Ryn grabbed a rusted pipe from the rubble. The Shard flared, and for three frantic heartbeats, the metal shifted in his grip—edges sharpening, weight balancing, rust melting into a lethal sheen. He carved through the drones like they were made of paper, their gears spitting sparks as they collapsed.
Then the pipe disintegrated into dust.
Cabbot found him hours later, curled in the arena's ruins. The slumlord's yellowed eyes narrowed. "What'd you steal, boy?"
"Nothin'," Ryn lied, grinning through split lips. "Just got lucky."
He never told Cabbot about the Shard. But a week later, when the slumlord backhanded him for "holding out," Ryn slit the man's throat with the jagged lid of a soup can—enhanced just long enough to do the job.
Now, years later, Ryn crouched behind a stall in the Bone Market, tossing a Shard shard between his fingers like a coin. The air reeked of pickled organs and burnt ozone, the stalls around him hawking everything from Husk-Mimic tendons to bootleg neural suppressors. Across the crowded thoroughfare, Kael melted into the shadows, his corrupted arm glistening beneath a tattered sleeve. Gutter lurked nearby, her crystalline hackles raised, while Mira adjusted a syringe filled with silver liquid—her latest "solution" for Progenitor dissection.
"Remind me again why I'm bait?" Ryn called, just loud enough to draw stares from a passing trader.
Kael didn't glance his way. "Because you're expendable."
"Flatterer." Ryn smirked, but the humor didn't reach his eyes. The Inquisition had tagged the Bone Market as a Progenitor nest, and their plan was simple: lure the monstrosity into the open, let Mira paralyze it, then carve out its geode heart for study. Simple. Clean. Likely fatal.
The Progenitor emerged moments later—a grotesque amalgam of flesh and market debris. Its torso was a fused mass of splintered stalls and human limbs, its core a pulsating Oblivion geode that cast sickly green light over the cobblestones. Shoppers scattered, their screams swallowed by the creature's guttural roar.
"Showtime," Ryn muttered, palming a broken shock baton from the ground. Scavenger's Echo flared in his veins, a familiar icy burn, and the baton crackled to life in his grip, fractured tip spitting arcs of stolen electricity. He lunged, driving the weapon into the Progenitor's gelatinous flank. "Hey, ugly! Catch!"
The shock sent the creature reeling—for six glorious seconds. Then the baton sputtered and died, its borrowed energy spent. Ryn dove behind a meat cart as a tendril of splintered bone speared the spot where he'd stood.
Kael's venom lashed out, dissolving the tendril into acrid smoke. "Distract it. Don't die."
"Don't die? Brilliant. Why didn't I think of—shit!" The Progenitor lurched forward, geode glowing like a malignant star. Ryn rolled, snatching a dented spice canister from the mud. The Shard's itch deepened, and he hurled the canister into the geode's core.
The explosion was…
Not enough.
The Progenitor screamed, half its mass vaporized, but its remaining limbs thrashed wildly, one clawed appendage slashing toward Mira's exposed back.
Ryn moved without thinking. He snatched a child's doll from the ground—faded, one-eyed, its yarn hair matted with filth—and Scavenger's Echo seared his nerves as he poured every shred of the shard's strength into it. The doll's stitching unraveled, threads snapping into barbed wires that ensnared the Progenitor's limbs.
Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
"Mira, now!"
She plunged her syringe into the geode. The Progenitor shuddered, its roar dying to a wet gurgle as it collapsed into a pool of acidic slurry.
Ryn's Shard went dormant, the doll's threads disintegrating to ash. He slumped against a wall, trembling, his shirt soaked with sweat. The bond's itch lingered, sharper now, hungry.
Kael eyed him. "You held the enhancement longer."
"Yeah, well. Don't get used to it." Ryn flicked the doll's lone button eye at him. "I'm still not joining your tragic hero club."
But that night, as Mira dissected the geode and Kael brooded over his creeping corruption, Ryn sat alone on the refinery's roof, staring at his Shard-scarred palm. The memory of Cabbot's blood on his hands—warm, sticky, deserved—floated to the surface.
Three more seconds, he thought, flexing his fingers. That's all I'd need.
The bond pulsed, a silent plea.
He closed his fist.
Trust was for fools.
And Ryn wandered.
'am i still a fool?'