Chapter Three: Blood and Firelight
The Undercity stirred like a long-dead creature roused by pain.
Whispers spread faster than smoke. Sparks lit hidden corridors with cautious flame. In the abandoned freight tunnels beneath the western domes, messages were passed hand to hand—coded, old tongue, marked with the sign of the Throne Below. The people were afraid, yes. But they were no longer alone.
They had Veil.
And Veil had a plan.
The chamber once known as Boilerhold had become the rebellion's heart. It was an ancient industrial furnace repurposed by the resistance—wide enough to house five hundred, deep enough to be unseen by even the most advanced surface scanners. A relic from before the Divide, it thrummed now with life. Magic, tech, and purpose collided within its rusted walls.
Veil stood at the head of the council, beneath a banner scrawled hastily with a single phrase: Ash to Ash, Blood to Fire.
A crowd had gathered: former engineers, Spark-channelers, rogue ex-military, old bloodlines hiding in the cracks of civilization. Not an army. Not yet. But something was forming.
Among them stood three figures who would become the rebellion's first generals.
Tyren Vox, a former drone architect from the surface who defected after his family was killed by the Null Guard's "cleansing" sweep. His mechanical knowledge made him indispensable.
Jassa Vell, a muscle-bound woman with the scars of a hundred underground brawls and a voice like gravel and steel. She spoke for the laborers, the diggers, the gear-turners who made the Undercity run while the sky-world above dined on their breath.
And Niko, a silent teen who never spoke but whose spells turned walls to dust and shattered steel with a flick of a finger. No one knew where he came from. He followed Lyra.
And Lyra… she sat beside Veil, changed.
Since returning from the Throne Below, she'd carried herself with strange weight—less spark, more starfire. Her eyes glowed faintly now in moments of silence, and she'd begun to dream not only of magic, but of battle.
"The Obelisks channel energy from the Undercity," Veil said, pointing to a rough map carved into the stone table. "Each one is a node in a lattice of suppression—built not only to power the surface, but to bind the world beneath."
Tyren nodded. "They regulate temperature, food synthesis, surveillance, even water pressure. They own everything we need to survive."
"Then we take them," Jassa said, cracking her knuckles. "Piece by piece."
"Not destroy?" Lyra asked.
Veil shook his head. "Not yet. They are too vital. If we destroy them all, we suffocate our own. But if we control them… we cut off the surface from its lifeblood. And force them to speak."
Jassa grinned. "Good. I'd rather choke the bastards slowly."
The room murmured approval.
Veil leaned forward. "This is not just resistance. This is war. The surface thinks the Undercity is too fractured to rise. They believe our divisions will keep us weak."
He looked around.
"They are wrong."
He paused. Then, almost softly:
"I will not ask you to die for me. I am not a king. I am not a god. But I am older than their empire, and I remember what it was like to live in a world where magic belonged to the people. If we do this, we do it together. No heroes. No martyrs. Just fire, and freedom."
Lyra stood beside him and raised a clenched fist.
"For the Throne Below," she said.
And the crowd echoed, louder this time:
"For the Throne Below!"
They began with Obelisk Seven.
Located beneath a decrepit SkyDome above Sector 19, it was lightly guarded and partially automated. The rebellion hit it at midnight.
Tyren's engineers scrambled comms with arcane disruptors. Jassa led a team through the ventilation shafts, silent and brutal. Niko melted the outer casing with a single touch. Lyra rerouted the energy flow through the network, siphoning power back into the Undercity's grid.
The operation took seventeen minutes. No casualties.
The Obelisk glowed red for the first time in a century—defiant instead of submissive.
The surface didn't respond. Not right away.
Obelisk Ten followed two days later. Then Five. Then Three.
Each time, Veil allowed the enemy to see him—briefly. Enough for their panic to grow. He wasn't just a threat. He was a myth incarnate.
But Veil did not celebrate. He knew war did not live in the taking. It lived in what came after.
In the shadows beyond the light of victory, he sensed the shifting tides. The High Houses would not be idle for long. The Chancellor would not let magic rise again. And something else stirred—something older than even Veil, moving beneath the surface like a forgotten hunger.
He had awakened more than the world.
He had awakened the dark.
In the depths of the rebellion's growing camp, Lyra approached him one evening as Veil sat before a small, flickering flame made from rune-oil.
"You don't sleep," she said.
"I do not dream," he replied.
She sat beside him. "I had a dream last night. Of the Throne Below."
He looked at her. "What did it say?"
"That the world must bleed before it can breathe."
Veil was silent for a long moment. "That is prophecy. And prophecy is a dangerous thing."
"I saw you on it," she said, softly. "Sitting. Alone."
He met her gaze. "I have ruled before. I have no desire to do so again."
"Then who will?"
He didn't answer.
But he looked at her in a way that made her wonder if he already knew.
Days passed.
The rebellion grew.
Children once starved in the mines now ran messages between sectors. Old warriors from fallen Spark families rejoined the fight. Engineers sabotaged the water filtration drones so they fed clean water to the Undercity first. Disguised Spark channelers began healing the sick again. The people smiled.
Hope had color again.
But hope also had a cost.
Obelisk One fell with a scream.
The Chancellor responded.
On the fourth day after its capture, the Null Guard launched an assault on Sector 13. They didn't just fight. They cleansed. Firebombed tunnels. Flooded escape routes. Released damping gas that stole magic from the air and left Spark-bloods twitching, broken.
Over 200 died.
The rebellion mourned. Then it hardened.
"We give no more ground," Jassa growled. "We bleed them back."
Veil disagreed.
"We bleed upward," he said.
The next phase was retaliation, but not with fire.
Veil's command was simple: Infiltrate. Expose. Unmask.
The surface's greatest strength was ignorance. They believed in the myth that the Undercity was full of monsters and criminals. That the Obelisks were peaceful. That magic was dangerous. But what if the truth came from inside?
Tyren reactivated a long-abandoned Sky-Diver drone and patched it with forbidden arcane code. It rose above the Divide cloaked in silence and began to broadcast truth to the surface.
Footage of children living in rot. Sparks chained like batteries. A young girl—a healer—shot by a Null drone while feeding the sick.
And then came Veil's face, bare and pale, his voice like the death of stars.
"You do not see us. You never have.
But you will.
We are not ghosts.
We are the storm."
The broadcast went viral in under an hour.
The surface panicked.
In the Skyborne courts, Varik issued an emergency decree. Martial law. Curfews. Surveillance doubled. The elites remained safe, for now. But common citizens—those in the lower towers, the transit rings, the border-zones—began to question.
The cracks spread.
And into those cracks, rebellion poured.
Veil stood once more at the center of the council, surrounded by the newly organized Rebellion Guilds—fighters, medics, technomancers, spies, emissaries. A revolution born not from power, but from need.
"Tomorrow," Veil said, "we strike Obelisk Zero."
Gasps followed.
"That's the heart of their system," Jassa said.
"It's suicide," Tyren added.
Veil smiled. A slow, terrible thing.
"Not if we've already won the hearts of their people."
He turned to Lyra.
"Activate the Throne."
Far below, the Throne Below pulsed with light.
Its runes spiraled out across the Undercity in a web of waking power, reconnecting ancient channels once broken by war. Lyra placed her hand upon its armrest.
And the Throne responded.
Lights across the Undercity blazed. Obelisks shuddered. Forgotten magic surged up through stone and bone. A great cry echoed across the tunnels as the city itself seemed to wake.
Veil raised a hand.
"To the ones buried beneath silence," he said.
"To the Sparks," Lyra added.
"To us," Jassa roared.
And they moved—not as a mob, not as a myth, but as a movement.
The rebellion had a name now.
The world would remember it.