The Cathedral's spires pierced Vespera's smog like skeletal fingers, groaning in sync with some unseen celestial rhythm.
Kael lingered at the edge of the crowd, his face shadowed beneath a tattered hood, fingers clenched around the cog the Shadow Child had gifted him. The air vibrated with a chant that bored into bone:
"Gears grind the unworthy. Gears cleanse the faithless."
A procession snaked through the square, robed figures stitched with glowing Cipher runes. At its center, a palanquin swayed, bearing a figure masked in interlocking brass plates, Highwind, the Clockwork Prophet.
His amplified voice boomed through the square, each syllable laced with static and sermon:
"The Clockwork God hungers! Feed Him your lies, your doubt, your imperfections!"
The faithful obeyed. Trinkets rained into the smelting pit, wedding rings, rusted tricycles, prosthetic limbs. Aether-blue fire licked upward with each sacrifice, and the Cathedral's gears spun faster, hungrier.
Kael's lens flickered. The objects weren't burning, they were arranging themselves. Cipher patterns emerged in the fire:
ⵊⵍⵍⵓⵙⵀ ⴽⵓⵎⵎⵉⵜⵀ
(Illusion commits).
He slipped through a side door, ducking into a corridor lined with hissing pipes and flickering brass lamps. The cog in his hand vibrated faintly, its rune Sacrifice, pulsing brighter the deeper he went.
At the Cathedral's core, reality bent.
The chamber writhed with steam and reverence, a biomechanical sanctum where faith met circuitry. A massive aether-core hovered in the center, suspended by cables thick as limbs. Cipher runes swam across its shell, Kael's stolen prototype, reworked into something blasphemous.
Wires snaked from the core into rows of kneeling acolytes. They didn't move. Didn't speak. Aether-blood pulsed visibly beneath their skin.
From hidden speakers, Highwind's voice returned, velvet and venom:
"The unworthy become fuel. The faithful become gears."
Kael's lens zoomed. The runes weren't static, they were rewriting themselves.
A memory rose like bile: the Blackthorn Project. Volunteers chanting as their skin split into code.
This isn't religion. It's replication. A living algorithm.
Something cold brushed his wrist. He spun, wrench raised--
Smoke.
"Brother…"
The voice was warped. Familiar.
His lens fogged. A shape formed in the core's glow, a young woman, grease-streaked hair framing eyes too hollow.
Elara.
"They're using me," she whispered. "The Architect's key… in the sky-manor… Don't trust the---"
Her image shattered.
Kael's heart kicked. A cog-wheeled enforcer rounded the corner, red optics flaring.
He ducked behind the core. The enforcer paused, sniffed the air.
"Meat," it growled.
Kael bolted. Metal feet slammed after him.
He burst onto a high balcony overlooking the smelting pit. Below, the crowd still chanted, entranced.
Highwind's mask turned sharply toward him.
"An intruder! Aliaramong the faithful!"
The crowd responded as one, eyes glowing, heads snapping upward.
Kael didn't hesitate. He raised the cog. Sacrifice. Then hurled it.
It struck the pit with a shriek of metal and rune.
Blue fire erupted, not in destruction, but in revelation. Patterns bloomed in flame. The Cathedral's gears screamed, then halted mid-turn.
The enforcer seized, limbs frozen.
Highwind howled, his mask splitting to reveal scarred, frothing flesh.
"Heretic! The God will flay your soul!"
Kael vaulted the railing. Crashed into a vendor's cart full of clockwork birds. They shrieked skyward in a whir of wings and shrapnel, cloaking his escape.
He vanished into the alleys.
The Cathedral behind him fell silent, save for the groaning of its halted heart.
Back in his workshop, a package waited. Inside: a mechanical eye. The iris, familiar. A shard of the Cathedral's aether-core.
Tucked beneath it, a scrap of paper, Elara's handwriting scrawled across it:
"They're watching through me. Find the Architect's key before the gears restart.
-E"
From the vents above, the Shadow Child's laughter drifted down.
"Tick-tock, liar. The sky-manor's hungry too."