Kael stood beside the sewer lid he had noted the day before. His body felt completely refreshed. The sleep had been good, genuinely good, in a way he hadn't taken for granted since before Velthoria.
He crouched and grabbed the metal piece jutting from the lid. The metal groaned when he pulled, but it didn't move.
'Locked from the inside?'
He walked around and took it from the other side. With enough force behind it the lid peeled open like a tin can, bending further than it was built to before finally snapping loose.
He tossed it aside and dropped down.
The military cape settled around his frame as he landed. He raised his head and looked around.
The ceiling was high, high enough that even jumping with an arm fully outstretched he wouldn't reach it. The walls were staggered brick laid in a net-like pattern, and the ground beneath his boots was bone dry. Not surprising given that this was where the dealer had gone. What he was most likely looking at was an unused section of the sewage system, repurposed for something the city would prefer not to know about.
Then he started walking.
Turn after turn, deeper.
Sole's sewer system made Velthoria's look like an afterthought. Not only was Sole vastly larger and considerably older, it was developed in ways that suggested whoever had designed it had been thinking centuries ahead.
Kael found a downward slope that stretched further than even the primordial eye could comfortably follow. Beside him a slow stream of crystal clear water ran along the base of the tunnel, bright green sheet moss lining its bed, making it look more appealing than water in a sewer had any right to.
'This must be drinkable.'
It was.
Most sewer systems weren't what people assumed, especially large ones. What Kael was expecting to find, based on what he knew, was something close to three distinct levels.
The uppermost tunnels would carry rainwater and spring water, the kind most residents drew on for daily use. Washing clothes, filling bathhouses, that sort of thing.
The second level would handle stormwater and overflow, the channels that absorbed what the upper tunnels couldn't.
And only at the third and deepest level would he expect to find waste and household sewage.
The slope was a bother to descend but it evened out before long.
The bricks surrounding him had darkened noticeably from years of use, broken now and then by lighter streaks where water pushed through invisible cracks in the mortar.
He turned another corner and the space opened up.
He was no longer walking a narrow tunnel. What he stepped into was something closer to a hall, vast enough that the sound of his boots changed. Water poured over an edge ahead of him in a constant fall, the flow roughly a dozen steps wide.
"This has to be the second level."
He was actually looking for someone. Not anyone specific, just someone. With how expensive life was on the surface there had to be people who had abandoned it entirely, retreating into the sewers for cover from the elements and from everything else. And where people gathered outside the law, crime followed. An unmapped space this large was close to ideal for it. The drug dealer had already proven that point without being asked.
Kael walked in silence for another ten minutes before a faint murmur reached him from somewhere ahead. He followed it. A flicker of orange appeared on the wall, casting human shadows.
He looked around the corner and smiled.
"Hello, friends."
He stepped out.
Three people rested around a small fire, one woman and two men. Clothes and makeshift bedding covered the ground around them. He had apparently walked into someone's home.
All three froze the moment they saw him. They were mortals, and the question on all three faces was the same. What was someone like him doing down here?
Kael was an anomaly in these depths by any measure.
Snow white hair loose and cascading over his shoulders. Skin pale and fair. And his eyes, one so deeply blue it made people who had never seen a glacier start imagining one, the other so golden it seemed to hold light rather than just reflect it.
His face was something none of them would normally encounter this far underground. Sharp features, clear skin, the kind of appearance that made people look twice without knowing why. Some of it was the awakening, which had refined what was already there. But more of it was the primordial eye. His face had been scarred once, his bones healed unevenly in places. The eye had corrected all of that when it came under his control, removing the last imperfections from something that had never needed much work to begin with.
"W— Who are you?"
A young man managed it first.
Kael raised a hand.
"I mean no harm. I'm simply lost."
They wanted to believe it. How could they?
The man saying those words was wearing clothes so fine they were worth more than all three of their lives combined.
"We don't have anything." The woman began gathering her things in a panic, pushing them toward him. "Take it all. We'll leave."
Kael pulled the blade from his back and set it on the ground, then walked over to the fire and sat down.
"I mean it." He produced a glass bottle and held it out. "I've always been drawn to the minds that build things like this. How did they do it? But this time I went further than I should have and got turned around."
A warm smile settled on his lips.
"I'm Valerian." He set the bottle down beside them and extended a hand.
The young man was the first to take it. "Lorel." He said, some of the tension leaving his shoulders with the word.
The others followed slowly.
As it turned out, the three had been childhood friends with a shared dream. They had promised each other that if any one of them awakened, they would pull the others up with them. Reality had been less cooperative. None of them had awakened as a Luminaire, and when that possibility had finally closed behind them, they had come underground. Away from the expectations, social structures, and the constant reminder of everything they hadn't become.
One part of Kael could respect that. They had lived true to something. Stayed loyal to a belief they had carried since childhood.
Another part didn't. Luminaire status wasn't a gift handed down by the heavens. It was the result of effort. They had stopped at the first real obstacle and called it the end of the road.
He pushed the thought aside. They were young, around his age, and he hadn't come down here to pass judgement on how they had chosen to live it.
As the bottle made its rounds the three grew more comfortable. Perhaps not all Luminaires were the same after all.
"Do you know the routes by heart?" Kael asked, passing the bottle along.
"Well. Kind of." Their voices dropped slightly. "We're technically not supposed to draw maps of what we know for security reasons."
"No?"
"There's more going on under this city than someone like you could probably imagine… no offence."
Kael leaned back on one hand. Their understanding of nobles was completely off, but he said nothing.
"Are you involved in any of it?"
Their bodies tensed at the question.
"My other interest," Kael continued, "is in the parts of the world that don't normally show themselves. I think it's a waste not to understand everything happening around you."
They relaxed slightly.
"Everyone living under the city is involved in some kind of crime, more or less." Lorel said. "Can you believe we pay rent to sleep down here? They call it keeping the rodents out, but everyone who lives here knows it's just Luminaires squeezing what they can out of us."
Kael raised an eyebrow.
It was unusual to hear a mortal speak about Luminaires that casually. Then again, he had gone out of his way to find the strongest alcohol available and brought it down into a sewer.
He pulled out a notebook.
"Could you draw everything you know? I'll pay, of course. And I'll keep quiet about it."
Their eyes lit up when Kael placed three mindstones on the ground between them. Years of rent settled in an instant. Another step toward the freedom they had been chasing since they were old enough to name it.
None of them had time to prepare before Kael tossed them over.
"Ugh." Lorel caught them and hit the ground with the effort.
"I'll draw them." He said, still clutching the stones hard enough to whiten his knuckles. "And if anything happens to me because of it, neither of you knew anything about this."
Kael scoffed inwardly.
It took a while, but eventually Lorel handed over a detailed map and walked Kael through everything he had drawn, leaving no room for confusion.
'Curious.' His eyes moved across the page. 'There was a turn I could have taken back there. How did I miss it? There are even paths running under the water somehow.'
The map was dense enough with detail that it was almost black in places. How Lorel had committed all of this to memory was a feat worth acknowledging, especially for a mortal.
There were white spaces though, sections left deliberately blank. Lorel explained these were only accessible to Luminaires. Which meant that was exactly where Kael was going next.
Before leaving he tossed them one more mindstone.
"My name is Valerian Eireindaile. All I ask in return for that is that you preach my name among mortals in the same position as yourselves."
Then he left.