The sun over Veyrune did not rise. It peeled itself from the horizon like an old scab, thick and red, bleeding light into the dust-choked streets below. Morning came not with warmth but with heat, and the city exhaled smoke from a hundred thousand stone mouths.
Kaien Vale stood in the shadow of an abandoned forge, watching a rat chew through a sack of old wheat. The metal tools once used by the blacksmith still hung above the workbench, rusted in place by years of rain and neglect. No one had touched them in seasons. No one would. The gods had taken their attention elsewhere.
This was the Outer Ring. The kind of place where divine banners no longer flew. No temples. No Aether lanterns. Just lowborn hands scraping at stone and soil for copper coins. And silence. Thick, tired silence that settled in like ash.
Kaien adjusted the cloth around his shoulder and kept walking. He passed two vendors arguing over spoiled figs. A child ran barefoot past him, clutching a crow feather like it was gold. Smoke curled from a nearby cookpot, turning the air sour with the smell of burnt roots and boiled bones.
Above it all, rising behind walls of polished quartz and stormsteel, stood the Inner Ring. Towers of white and gold shimmered against the sky, homes of the divine clans and their chosen bloodlines. Aether currents glowed faintly between the spires, threads of raw power braided through the air like invisible chains.
Kaien never looked at it for long. Staring at the Inner Ring made his stomach feel hollow. Not from envy. Not exactly. It was something else. Something colder.
He turned into a narrow side street, feet moving without thought. His hands were tucked into his sleeves. His thoughts drifted. Every morning followed the same pattern. Wake. Walk. Deliver. Survive. Repeat.
Somewhere behind him, a bell rang. Not the heavy clang of temple bronze, but the brittle chime of a soul bell. Someone had died. Again.
Kaien did not flinch. Death was common here. The gods had not walked these streets in decades. Their bloodlines ruled from far above, wrapped in divine rights and ancestral power, while the rest withered beneath their gaze.
He pulled out a folded note from inside his tunic. It was worn and half-torn. A delivery order for herbs and pigment to the inkmakers' guild. He would get four copper coins if he arrived before midday. One if he was late. Nothing if he was caught loitering.
A breeze rolled down the alley. It carried dust, feathers, and a sound that made Kaien stop.
It was faint. Like metal twisting under pressure. Or the groan of something deep beneath the city. No one else noticed. The vendors kept shouting. The children kept laughing. But Kaien's skin prickled.
He stared at the cracked stones beneath his feet. For a moment, he thought he saw a flicker of something. A ripple of black threading through the cracks.
Then it was gone.
Kaien blinked. The noise stopped. The wind shifted.
He kept walking.
He never saw the figure watching him from the roof above. Wrapped in parchment robes and shadow, the watcher held a seal etched with an unrecorded mark. One the gods had ordered destroyed long ago.
The seal pulsed once. Quiet. Patient.
The world did not know it yet, but something had already begun to stir