The leaders of the world
They went underground to pretend the sky could not find them.
The mountain had new corridors and old stone. Air that had learned to be clean. Doors that asked for ten kinds of permission and then decided for themselves. Men and women who were not supposed to share a table took the same stairs and avoided each other's eyes like superstition.
They called it Site Zero. It felt like a first draft of survival.
The chamber was round so no one could pretend to sit at the head. Screens curved like a horizon that refused to be trusted. Flags slept against their poles; there was no wind down here to make them behave like symbols.
A neutral voice old enough to have brokered peace and young enough to still believe in it opened the meeting without ceremony.
"Gates. Monsters. The System. We need a language before we can have a plan."
The language arrived as pictures. Markets burning. Streets that had learned to bleed. Blue panes blooming in front of faces like sudden flowers no one had planted. A lone figure with a spear. A giant falling.
Silence made a circle.
They argued, because that is how humans measure the shape of fear.
"Conscript them," said a general who had put his faith in neat formations. "Users belong in ranks."
"License them," said a minister who had put her faith in laws. "Hunters, not soldiers."
"Control them," said a premier who mistrusted miracles that did not ask leave. "Power without oversight is simply a new disaster."
"Trust them," said a prime minister who had buried enough to be tired of orders. "Or at least build something they might trust."
The room teetered between old habits and new math.
In a smaller room they wrote a Charter with hands that had signed budgets and pardons and declarations, and found that this pen was heavier.
Article I — Purpose: protect life against what does not belong to this world.
Article II — Authority: register, rank, deploy. Faster than parliaments, less corrupt than armies, or at least earn the right to claim it.
Article III — Guilds: one per continent; a spine for each geography; national branches that could be overruled when red turned black.
Article IV — Research: artifacts and anomalies under a lock that needed two keys and a conscience.
Article V — Oversight: auditors chosen by a supermajority because trust that isn't tested is theatre.
Article VI — Rights: awakened are citizens; due process survives the panic.
They signed. The ink dried like a small promise in a large wind.
Maps blossomed. Red rings pulsed. AMBER breathed; RED flared; BLACK waited with its mouth closed.
"How does the sea have a gate?" someone asked, staring at Antarctica as if politeness would make physics reconsider.
"By refusing our categories," a scientist said, exhausted enough to be honest. "We should get used to that."
They approved a maritime response protocol in three minutes. Suns rise slower.
They watched the unknown fighter again in a room that preferred whispers. The spear moved without flourish; the blade that looked like a mistake cut past everything that thought it was safe. The Chieftain died astonished.
"Which registry claims him?"
"None."
"Then find him."
They built a tasking cell and gave it a myth's name Orpheus as if music would help them fetch a man from a world he clearly preferred to walk alone. Public invitations would go out like lighthouses quiet searches would go on like tides.
Elsewhere, they tried to name things without owning them.
Ranks by letters: E through S. A placeholder for EX that everyone pretended not to notice. Boss classes called CROWNbecause king was a word that got stuck in throats. Signal colors for the public: GREEN for dormant, AMBER for nervous, RED for breaking, BLACK for the thing that bends knees.
Evacuation scripts. Paper maps. Loudhailers, because batteries fail and fear scrambles wifi.
Guardianship codes for children who woke to panes before homework. Penalties written in a language grief could not easily misread. A line that said refusal is a right a second line that said refusal has a cost when a city is on fire.
They argued about money the way water argues with stone. In the end they made a river and called it a budget, and promised to let it flood where it must.
A king and a scientist shared a corridor where the lighting forgave tired faces.
"If we empower civilians," said the king, "we become ornamental."
"If we don't," said the scientist, "we become fossils."
"Both end up in museums," the king said lightly. "I would rather be the exhibit with fingerprints on the glass."
"My labs need a home," said the scientist.
"My country will be that home," said the king, and meant it.
They took the Charter back to the circle. The neutral voice read the last paragraph. The lights remembered drama and dimmed without being asked.
"From this hour, we act like neighbors."
Applause like rain in a cave.
The first deployment request arrived while the clapping still remembered how.
Red Sea. AMBER to RED in under a minute. Something walking on the surface like it had made a private arrangement with gravity. Merchant ships already turning without orders because sailors have old senses.
"Deploy," said six voices.
Training halls coughed up two volunteers before the instructors could finish saying absolutely not. The Association learned how to say go and Godspeed in the same breath.
Near midnight, they argued ethics without flinching.
"What if a Hunter kills a human and says it was necessary?"
"Investigate, fast and fair."
"What if a child refuses deployment?"
"Then a child refuses deployment."
"What if a city refuses to host a Guild?"
"Then another city lives with that city's decision."
They wrote teeth into their kindness and locks into their urgency. It did not make anyone feel better. It made the room more honest.
The last video of the night arrived like a rumor that had done its homework. Rooftop angle. Fog. A figure with a spear. For three frames, eyes that were not human long enough to count as a confession.
"Genuine?"
"As far as we can tell."
"Polite search," said the Secretary-General, and then, softer, "for now."
He stood alone after the room emptied and let the world map glow on his face. Red rings blinked like patient threats. He thought about all the documents he had signed that had not mattered and this one that might. He thought about lighthouses and ships that carried their own stars and how both were necessary when the coast forgot to be a line.
"We are building a lighthouse," he said to the map. "Try not to be a storm."
The map did not answer. Antarctica pulsed.
At 03:11, the sea attempted to be an argument.
AMBER → RED. Radius up. Ice shelf sulked into the water in a line too neat to be random. Satellites sent pictures with the embarrassed speed of bad news. Someone said hydrostatic anomaly because saying the ocean is deciding thingswould get you escorted from a podium.
"Where are our Hunters?" asked a prime minister whose ships had names and histories.
"In training," said operations. "Asleep. Or not yet willing to be found."
They made a list of fishermen brave enough to be first responders. Some would live. Some would be remembered. Both kinds matter.
Aboveground, the night turned its face toward morning. In Seoul, a grandmother decided the kettle would sing in an hour, not now. In the next room, a spear leaned where a wall remembered a promise. A young man lay very still and pretended rest could be a plan.
Under the mountain, the Association existed. It was not enough. It was what they had.
They had given the world a shape to put its fear into.
Outside, the fear kept its own shape anyway.
And somewhere in the middle of both shapes, a dragon watched, and a fragment sharpened.