didn't roar.
It didn't shatter.
It just… opened.
Like a mouth silently parting.
Kaien had never seen anything fall from the heavens before. Not a star. Not a plane. Not even rain, if he was being honest. Harrowhold hadn't seen real rainfall in five years.
So when the sky bloomed into a slow violet ring above the city's outer sector, Kaien did what every twelve-year-old boy without guidance or shelter would do.
He stared.
And when something fell from that violet ring — not a meteor, not a drone, but a figure — Kaien didn't run.
He held his breath.
And kept watching.
---
It started as a speck.
Too fast to be a bird, too straight to be debris.
The air shimmered faintly. Everything else — the machinery, the barking orders from construction officers, the moans of tired workers — faded into a kind of silence that wasn't normal.
That was the first sign.
The second came when the speck became a body.
It had arms.
It had legs.
But it didn't flail.
It didn't move like a human being falling from terminal height.
It just… drifted. Like gravity wasn't quite done writing the rules yet.
Kaien's hands were still dusty from carrying reclaimed stone. His shirt clung to his back with sweat. He was just another forgotten kid among dozens in the demolition lines, repurposing ruins for the State.
He wasn't special.
He wasn't marked.
But he was the only one staring when the figure landed.
---
There was no explosion.
No smoke. No flame. Not even a shockwave.
It simply touched the ground in Sector 3 and bent the earth around it.
Steel curved inward. Pavement folded like wet paper. The sound it made wasn't impact — it was implosion. Like something too heavy for the world to bear had pressed its weight down all at once.
And then came the screaming.
---
People ran before orders were even shouted.
Those who remembered the last breach didn't need to be told what to do. The Gateborn didn't always come. But when they did, there were no warnings, no sirens, no defenses.
Only death.
Kaien tried to run.
But his legs moved in the wrong direction.
He wasn't heading to the shelters.
He wasn't following the crowds.
He was running toward the thing.
---
The streets bent as he neared the epicenter. Rubble already clogged the narrow alleys between the tenement blocks. Smoke drifted from crushed air vents. Power had gone out three zones wide, and the electric buzz that always haunted Harrowhold's border sectors had vanished.
The silence wasn't just quiet.
It was vacant.
Kaien ducked under a collapsed awning and climbed onto the broken second floor of an abandoned printing house. From the window, he saw it.
The Gateborn.
---
It stood nearly four meters tall. Its body was elongated, almost human in shape — but its arms dragged on the ground, and its legs bent wrong at the knees. Veins bulged beneath semi-transparent skin. Its head looked like bone polished to mirror-glass, reflecting the city in jagged distortion.
It wasn't moving.
Not anymore.
It just stood there, head tilted, as if listening to the ruins.
Kaien dropped to his knees behind the window ledge.
His breath caught in his throat.
But nothing happened.
Seconds passed.
Then minutes.
And then—
The creature's head snapped in his direction.
---
Kaien froze.
The Gateborn took one step forward.
The metal groaned underfoot.
Kaien's heart pounded so loudly it felt like it echoed across the debris. His hands clutched the window frame. His legs refused to move.
Then the creature tilted its head.
Just slightly.
As if it recognized him.
And then—it turned away.
---
He didn't breathe again until it was gone.
---
By nightfall, Sector 3 was declared "contaminated." The State sealed it off with temporary barricades. No one was allowed in. Drones patrolled the outer zone. Reconstruction was suspended indefinitely.
Nobody mentioned Kaien.
Nobody even noticed he hadn't gone to the shelters.
He climbed back to the rooftop where he usually slept — a cracked apartment building five blocks from the edge of Harrowhold — and sat against the old water tank.
His arms were scraped.
His mouth was dry.
His mind was on fire.
Why did it stop?
Why didn't it kill him?
And why… why did it look like it knew him?
---
The next morning, a ship arrived.
Not a cargo vessel. Not a med transport. Not even military standard.
It was black. Sleek. Silent.
And it didn't broadcast any identification code.
Three people stepped out.
Two wore coats — long, dark, reinforced. They walked like soldiers but didn't carry weapons.
The third was a woman with pale hair and sharp features. Her eyes moved across the ruins with surgical calculation.
She didn't ask questions.
She only observed.
---
Kaien watched them from the top of a shattered signal tower. They hadn't spotted him.
Until the woman turned her head — and looked straight at him.
---
She didn't say anything.
She didn't signal the others.
She just watched him for a long, unsettling moment.
Then nodded once.
And walked away.
---
Three days passed.
Kaien didn't return to the labor shifts. No one came looking.
He ate what he could steal. He drank what he could find.
But something inside him was changing.
Not his body.
Not his brain.
Something deeper.
He couldn't stop hearing the silence the Gateborn had brought.
It had stared at him.
Stared like it remembered something.
And now he couldn't sleep.
Not because of fear.
Because of need.
He needed to understand.
---
On the seventh night, the Gate opened again.
---
There was no light. No scream.
Only a flicker of violet high above the clouds.
Kaien stood alone on the top of the radio station, watching the sky.
The second Gateborn didn't fall in Harrowhold.
It fell two cities over.
But Kaien felt it.
Like pressure behind the eyes.
Like a whisper in a voice he didn't understand.
And when it fell, his knees buckled.
His vision blurred.
And for the first time in his life, he cried.
Not because he was scared.
But because something inside him had answered.
The morning after the second descent, Harrowhold doesn't wake up.
It limps.
The skies are quiet. No shuttles leave the ports. The western rail freezes mid-route, and the announcement tower stutters the same sentence every hour:
> "Remain calm. Do not engage. The zone is under observation."
But nobody listens. People start leaving.
Not because they're told to. But because of the silence. The kind of stillness that presses against the back of your neck and convinces you something is breathing behind you.
Kaien watches them go.
From the roof of the old comm tower, he sees families dragging bags down cracked streets, away from Sector 3, away from the Gate's shadow. A line of trucks moves through the main road, each tagged with the black-and-red insignia of the State Recovery Division.
That insignia doesn't mean help.
It means the dead are still warm.
---
Kaien hasn't slept since the Gate opened again.
He hasn't eaten in two days. His stomach growls, but he doesn't move. Every time he closes his eyes, he hears it.
Not a voice.
A tone.
A hum, low and constant, echoing behind his skull like it's vibrating something inside his bones.
It only started after the first creature looked at him.
It hasn't stopped since.
---
That afternoon, the soldiers arrive.
Not the tired ones with patched gear and chipped rifles.
These ones wear dark gray armor. Seamless. Identical. Their helmets have no visors, only thin blue slits that glow faintly when they walk.
There are eight of them.
They don't say a word.
They don't need to.
Every local backs away the moment they step into the district.
Everyone knows who they are.
The Black Unit.
They don't report to city command. They don't serve the local magistrates. They answer directly to the Sovereign Council — the last surviving body of leaders left from the Eastern Collapse.
And when they appear, someone is either already dead…
…or about to vanish.
---
Kaien tries to avoid them.
He slips through alleyways, crawls through cracked pipe routes, and hides beneath the concrete frame of a flooded basement.
But it doesn't matter.
One of them finds him anyway.
---
He sees her boots first.
Black, steel-plated, dustless.
Then the legs. Then the coat — long, heavy, and stitched with a faded red emblem on the back.
She doesn't draw a weapon.
She doesn't shout.
She just says one word:
> "You."
Kaien doesn't answer.
His hand closes around a shard of broken glass in the dirt beside him.
He doesn't move.
But she doesn't care.
The woman steps closer, kneels down, and tilts her head.
Her face is young. Pale. There's a scar running from the edge of her left eye to the bottom of her jaw, clean and pink.
She studies him the way someone might study a damaged tool.
Then she speaks again.
> "It looked at you."
Kaien doesn't respond.
> "It stepped around you."
Still silence.
Then—
> "You're coming with us."
---
There's no debate.
No choice.
No permission.
She grabs his wrist and drags him to the edge of the street.
A transport is waiting — matte black, no markings. Two more soldiers stand at the rear. One opens the door.
Kaien doesn't scream.
He doesn't kick.
Because deep down, something tells him he was always going to end up here.
Inside the transport, it's cold. Too cold. The air smells like ash and metal.
He sits across from two other people.
One is a boy, maybe fifteen, older by a few years. His face is calm. His eyes aren't. His right hand keeps twitching near the blade strapped to his leg.
The other is a girl. Younger than Kaien. Maybe ten.
She stares at the floor and doesn't blink.
Her arms are wrapped in bandages.
Kaien looks at both of them.
Then at the soldier beside him.
> "Where are we going?" he asks.
She doesn't look at him.
> "To the place where they send things the Gate doesn't kill."
---
The facility has no name.
It's not on any map.
Not on any network.
Not listed in any file accessible to civilians.
It sits five kilometers outside of Harrowhold, buried beneath a mountain ridge.
The entrance is a narrow crack in the earth, just wide enough for the transport to slip through.
They descend in silence.
Kaien feels pressure build in his ears as they go deeper.
The air grows colder.
Then the vehicle stops.
They step out into light.
But it isn't sunlight.
It's artificial — cold, clinical, buzzing.
A concrete corridor stretches ahead, wide enough for tanks, lined with red lights on both sides. Cameras follow them as they walk.
Kaien doesn't know how far they go.
But eventually, the soldiers split them up.
The boy is taken left.
The girl is taken right.
Kaien is led straight ahead.
---
The room they bring him to is small. White walls. Steel floor. One metal chair.
He doesn't sit.
A voice crackles from a speaker in the ceiling.
> "Name."
He doesn't answer.
> "You were seen in Sector 3. You survived proximity to the Gateborn. You made eye contact."
The voice pauses.
> "We have questions."
Kaien clenches his fists.
His voice is dry.
> "Why did it look at me?"
The speaker hums.
> "That's what we want to know."
---
They keep him for four days.
No windows.
No clocks.
No one tells him what time it is.
They feed him twice a day, maybe. Sometimes three. He's not sure.
They ask him questions over and over.
What did it sound like?
Did you feel anything before it came?
Did you touch anything?
Did it speak?
Kaien gives the same answer every time.
> "No."
And every time, the voice thanks him.
---
On the fifth day, they move him.
The woman with the scar returns.
She doesn't smile.
But she nods.
> "You're not infected," she says.
Kaien doesn't know what that means.
> "But you're not normal, either."
She tosses him a uniform — dark gray. Lined with old patches stitched by hand.
> "Put it on."
He does.
> "From now on, you belong to Requiem."
Kaien looks up.
> "What's Requiem?"
The woman doesn't answer.
---
They call it Requiem Division 9.
It's not a school.
It's not a military barracks.
It's a holding pen.
For people who should be dead.
Kaien meets others like him — survivors from Gateborn events. A boy who lived after his house collapsed during a Gateborn landing. A girl who watched her family turn to ash but remained untouched.
None of them are older than seventeen.
None of them are normal.
Some twitch in their sleep.
Some stare at walls for hours.
Some don't speak at all.
They call themselves the Forgotten.
---
Kaien trains with them.
Not for power.
For survival.
He learns how to move without sound. How to spot drones in the sky. How to recognize Gateborn movement patterns from satellite footage.
Every day, more footage comes in.
Every day, more dots on the map turn red.
The Gate is opening more often now.
And the creatures are changing.
Some walk.
Some crawl.
Some fly.
One, they say, didn't have a body at all.
Just a sound.
---
Kaien becomes silent.
He stops asking questions.
But at night, when the lights go out, he sees it again.
That moment.
The creature pausing.
Its mirrored head tilting.
The pressure in his chest.
The feeling that it knew him.
---
And then, one night — three weeks later — the alarms go off inside the facility.
Not a drill.
Real.
The Gate has opened.
And this time, it's not far.
This time, it's inside Requiem territory.
Kaien stands in the hallway with the others, half-dressed, breathing hard.
They all look at each other.
No orders.
No guards.
Just silence.
And somewhere, above them, something is descending.