Iron Warrens, Vespera – Hour 1 of Silas's New Life
The Shadow Child was gone by the time Silas reached the alley, only a soot-stained smear on the cobblestones remained, as if her presence had never been more than smoke. He clenched the brass lens tighter, its etched edge biting into his palm. The pressure grounded him. Focus. Prioritize. Survive.
Kael's workshop crouched three levels above, tucked into the spine of a decaying building like a parasite. The rusted ladder shrieked under Silas's weight, shedding flakes of metal with each rung. At the top, he shouldered open the warped door and slipped inside.
The room was barely larger than a coffin, lined with corroded shelves, groaning gears, and flickering aether-lamps that buzzed with dying energy. Half-built automatons slumped in corners like dismembered beasts. Schematics papered the walls in frantic layers, some burned at the edges, others stitched together with thread and tape. On a stained workbench sat a leather-bound ledger, its cover frayed to ruin.
Silas flipped it open. The entries were tight, jagged, nearly illegible. Paranoid.
Day 27: Syndicate cut rations again. Found another rune in the sewer valve, matched the ones in my dreams. They're watching.
Day 43: The lens works. Saw the Archive in the smoke. They're not gods. They're prisoners.
He ran a thumb across a smear of ink. Kael hadn't been deluded, he'd been unraveling something vast. And someone had made sure he never finished.
A knock rattled the door. Heavy. Authoritative.
"Prototype better be worth my time, Kael."
Silas's breath slowed. He adopted Kael's slouch, shuffled to the door, and cracked it open. The Syndicate enforcer filled the threshold-- tall, broad-shouldered, her coat gleaming with aether condensate. A jagged scar cut beneath one eye. Her brass knuckles didn't match, one too new, the other too old. Stolen, probably.
"Almost ready," he said, voice pitched low and hoarse. "Final calibration's delicate. Aether-core's... unstable."
She stepped into the room, crowding him against the bench. "Unstable," she echoed, with a sneer. "You know what happens to unstable things in the Warrens?"
"They vanish," Silas murmured. "Or explode."
A beat of silence passed between them, taut as a pulled wire.
"It's a risk," he added, layering his voice with weariness and just enough mania. "But the yield, triple the quota, like I promised Mara. Maybe more."
Her gaze shifted toward the tarp covering the broken pump-engine he'd scrounged from the dump. "Show me."
He pulled the tarp back with a wince. "Don't get too close. The core's exposed. One spark and--"
She flinched back. Her fear smelled of oil and scorched memory. Fire, then. A past trauma. Noted.
"You've got until sundown," she snapped, already turning away. "Fail, and I'll scrap you for parts."
The door slammed. Silence reclaimed the room. Silas exhaled through his teeth and turned back to the bench.
Time to work.
The lens, when pressed to his eye, shimmered with hidden truths. Runes lit up across the ledger in invisible aether-ink, coordinates, phrases, warnings. Under the Archive. Fragment 7. Gods are locked things.
He turned it on the walls. Symbols flared where none had been, etched into the plaster like scars beneath skin. One phrase repeated: "The key is the lock."
Beneath the bench, dried blood traced a spiral. The Cipher pulsed in his mind. One word, glowing faintly: ⵊⵍⵍⵓⵙ-- Illusion.
Kael had found something real. Something buried. And someone had silenced him with precision.
The refinery dump festered like a wound, but it offered salvage. As Silas picked through broken parts, Mara found him. Her claw-arm clicked with irritation.
"Prototype's a bust, ain't it?" she spat, aether-black phlegm hitting the dirt. "Should've let the Syndicate grind your bones."
Silas held up a twitching pressure gauge. "This isn't for the Syndicate. It's for you."
Her good eye narrowed.
"The refinery's filters are rigged," he said. "Syndicate's been siphoning aether, forty percent, maybe more. Blames it on leaks. This'll prove it." He tossed her the gauge. "Plant it in Valve Seven. You catch them red-handed. You get promoted. I get forgotten."
She rolled the gauge between her fingers. "Why help me?"
"You didn't rat me out earlier," he said. "And you want more than scraps."
A moment passed. She grunted. "Sundown, Kael. Don't be here."
The workshop was colder when he returned. The lamps buzzed nervously overhead. He locked the door, pulled the rug aside, and began prying up the floorboards. The Cipher was no longer passive, the lens grew warm, almost feverish. He pressed it against the wall again.
"The key is the lock. To ascend, devour the lie."
Behind him, something clattered.
He turned.
The Shadow Child sat on the windowsill, legs swinging, her too-long shadow snaking across the floor like spilled ink. Her face was a child's, but her eyes were endless, spinning clocks behind flesh.
"Liar," she whispered, sing-song. "You're not Kael. You're… empty."
Silas didn't move. "Who sent you?"
She grinned, mouth too wide. "The gears grind. The Archive hungers."
She tossed a brass cog to the floor. It rang like a bell. Etched into its surface: ⵙⵀⴼⵓⵍ-- Traitor.
Then she was gone.
So was the ledger.
Silas stood frozen, the scent of her still lingering, char, rust, old blood.
He dropped to his knees, tore up the last of the boards. Beneath, wrapped in oilcloth, was Kael's final secret: a hand-drawn map inked with sewers and dead zones. A stoppered vial of glowing aether-blood. And a folded scrap of paper, the handwriting crisp and utterly foreign to this world.
Perfect English.
Welcome to the experiment, Dr. Vorne.
-The Architect.