The wind screamed through the tall towers of Aurion, bearing the smell of smoke and the faint rumble of dying machines. The city, once aglow with knowledge and pure light, was ablaze. Fire licked the sides of old alloy spires. Plasma bolts cracked through the darkness like thunder. The sky above had become ash.
Aevor Nyreth stood at the railing of the inner sanctum's balcony, holding a data core and observing the world's demise.
He was just sixteen.
Below, the gleaming streets of Aurion were broken. What once had been glowing pathways and murmuring gardens now swarmed with chaos. House Virell drones buzzed through the air in tight squadrons, searching for survivors. House Ferrix war mechs walked down once-holy corridors. Screams rang between the imposing archive domes as explosions coursed through the foundations.
"Aevor!" a voice shouted. "Inside, now!"
He spun to find his mother—Lira Nyreth, mistress of House Nyreth, her beautiful coat smeared with soot and blood. In her hand, she clutched the Aetheris containment case.
His heart caught in his throat.
"It's not safe outside," she said, settling the sphere in the recess of his pack. "You know what to do."
"The under-tunnels," he breathed. "Protocol Theta."
She nodded, her eyes fierce but gentle. "They'll come for this, Aevor. For you. But the Core chose you. That means something."
In the distance, one of the resonance towers exploded in a burst of colorless light—no flame, no smoke, just a shockwave that reduced everything to dust. The enemy had discovered it: the resonance gate. The secret they'd hidden for decades.
"We have minutes," she told him. "I'll hold them."
"You can't."
"I must."
There were footsteps down the hall. Plasma rifles charging.
Lira grasped Aevor tightly and buried her forehead against his. "Run. Remember what we are."
He did.
House Nyreth—guardians of truth, sentinels of the Core, upholders of the mythic law.
He turned and ran.
By burning corridors, through dead comrades, by hidden passages cut into the city's foundations. The walls hummed with lingering vibration, nearly singing as he walked by. Lights were lit where his feet landed.
Behind him, Lira entered the main corridor. Six Virell enforcers in armored suits advanced, rifles held high. She raised her hand, the resonance bracer wrapped around her forearm crackling to life. Her eyes shimmered pale violet as auras of energy coursed around her.
She didn't react.
The enforcers fired.
Lira flowed like a wave of energy, deflecting beams with puffs of kinetic power. She released a wave of resonance that cracked the floor they stood on. One soldier plunged into the void. Another burst from the inside out as his armor overloaded. But there were more. More were coming. She flowed back toward the last tunnel that her son had escaped through, smiled gently.
And charged into the fire.
Aevor spotted Davin, the chief engineer, over his desk, hiding blueprints of resonance cores with his dead body. Kara, the resonance archivist, suspended in time by a failed gate collapse, her dying breath still ringing in the chamber.
As he walked over a narrow bridge between two archive towers, an explosion shook the city. The blast hit him sideways, knocking the breath from his body. He fell hard on the steel, the Aetheris coming loose from his back and spinning towards the edge. He crawled forward and caught it before it fell into the fire below.
He gazed into its glow—flickering shades of violet and blue. It throbbed, almost a heartbeat.
He stood up and went on.
He arrived at the vault in the center—a room buried below the city's roots. Circular, its walls were lined with memory crystals and echo-screens still playing old film. His father's voice recurred in one loop:
"Knowledge is not survival. Truth is."
Aevor inserted the data core into the spine of the archive and initiated the protocol. A concealed panel slid open, and a prototype scanner, a plasma-hardened cloak, and a cylindrical hilt: the first Ultrablade, lay before him.
The chamber shook. Dust poured from the ceiling. Above, the resonance tower collapsed, the hum of its ancient song finally stilled.
He took the blade and tossed the pack onto his shoulder. The Aetheris thrummed. The way ahead was illuminated in violet-blue currents under the stone ground.
He walked.
[Flashback]
He was younger. Twelve. He sat in the garden lab beside his mother.
"What does it do?" he asked, his eyes observing the orb throb in its stasis cradle.
"It remembers," she told him. "All of it. The stars. The first sound. The pattern behind all things. We don't use it, Aevor. We listen to it."
"Why don't the others believe?"
"Because they stopped listening a long time ago."
A flash of another memory—his father instructing him on how to construct a resonance stabilizer.
"This won't make you powerful," his father told him. "But it will make you precise. Power without clarity is destruction."
The memory passed.
[Flashback end]
The emergency tunnel ejected him onto the cliffs beneath Aurion. Above, his city split asunder as two war mechs crashed in a burst of anger and metal. Blocks folded together, collapsing into the sea.
He looked back once.
And once only.
And watched Aurion, city of mythic truth, go down in fire.
Aevor powered the boots—aged technology his father had never let him try, and took flight into the darkness.
He roamed for weeks.
Along the Fractured Belt, the remains of the West Grid, the wastes of the Dust Market. The world was broken worse than he'd thought. Survivors inhabited machine bones. Cities operated on quiet and breathed rationed air. Water was money. Reality was poison.
He battled scavengers with repurposed technology. Outpaced Ferrix patrols. Defended himself from mutant hounds with resonance bursts he couldn't comprehend.
One evening, in a destroyed relay station, a Ferrix drone discovered him. Surrounded, wounded, he grabbed the Aetheris instinctively. The light blazed—too intense. Time broke apart. When he opened his eyes, the drone was a mangled ruin on the ceiling, and his own body vibrated like a tuning fork.
Two days later, they found him once more.
Two Ferrix enforcers, with pulse blades and an aerial scout unit, pursued him into the cratered depths of a fallen arcology. Aevor sprinted until he hit the edge of a dead hydro-reactor chamber—then halted.He spun, boots clicking onto the steel floor.
He recalled the layout. Saw the environmental schematics flash in his head, down to where the ceiling was thinnest. He had only seconds.
The drone had gone in first. Aevor tossed in a wobbly coolant core and set it alight with a spark from his gauntlet. Mist burst, obscuring sensors.
Then they came in.
One rushed blindly into the steam. Aevor dodged, allowing the pulse blade to pass inches from his head, and struck low at the knee joint of the enforcer. The armor creaked. He flipped backward, his heel against the wall for balance. As he turned, he threw a magnetic blade at the second attacker, stripping him of his weapon.
A burst of light from the Aetheris alerted him—incoming.
The first enforcer shot.
Aevor fell, rolled, and smashed a shattered panel off the ground. Steam issued upwards, and he diverted it using the shattered shielding of a wall unit. Blinded, the enforcer staggered into the area Aevor had computed.
The ceiling overhead collapsed.
Rusty pipe and concrete fell, crushing both attackers beneath the rubble.
Aevor remained stationary. Panting.
He was not powerful.
He was accurate.
He memorized schematics. Figured the airflow, the angle of metal fatigue, ignition timing. He was not a warrior at sixteen.
But he was deadly.
He walked away from the site without speaking.
And the Aetheris vibrated—not only in warning. In approval.
In the wreckage of a fallen metro, he discovered a circle of starving kids in the dark. He left them a power cell and instructed one to siphon charge from dead drones. On his departure, they bowed.
He didn't seek followers.
Whispers trailed after him anyway. A specter in a tattered cloak. A boy who radiated. The final of the myth-makers.
He lived. Heard the hum of the Core at night when the world remembered not to speak.
Every time he meditated, memories arose—of lessons, of warnings, of love and betrayal. Lira's face, sometimes smiling, sometimes screaming. Imagery of Aurion not as it had collapsed, but as it might have been.
And through it all, the Core continued to pulse.
Years went by.
He became legend. A warning. A question shared between House agents and scavenger lords:
"What if Nyreth isn't dead?"
And now he struts the ruins with purpose.
Aevor Nyreth—last of a forgotten House, carrier of a truth that might unmake the world, or remake it.
And the Aetheris… the Aetheris has started to wake.