Morning crept into Gederra like a thief, pale and thin, slipping through the cracks of shuttered windows and soot-streaked glass. The city groaned awake: iron wheels grinding along frozen tracks, the hiss of steam from factory towers, the distant clatter of hooves on cobblestones slick with old rain.
I stood in the center of my workshop, staring down at the letter where it lay on the bench—mocking me with its quiet patience.
The Philosopher's Circuit.
I'd scoured every scrap of alchemical lore I owned, every page my father left behind, and still the name made no sense. No diagrams. No formulae. No hint of what such a thing might be.
But there was something else. Something hidden in the parchment's brittle edges.
I ran my fingers across the back of the letter, slow and careful. The texture was wrong—too thick, uneven. A faint ridge traced the outline of a second sheet, pressed between the fibers.
A hidden page.
The old tricks came back unbidden: the ways the Verdant Sigil hid their work from the Order's spies. Heat, solvent, pressure. Secrets layered in flesh and bone.
I lit the brass spirit lamp, held the letter close to the flame's edge, careful not to burn it. The warmth softened the glue binding the paper's layers.
The hidden sheet peeled free.
Small. Tattered. Covered in cramped symbols written in my father's hand.
I felt the breath catch in my throat.
It was a map.
Not a true map—no streets, no names—but a circle of marks, linked by lines, symbols, and numbers. Coordinates in cipher. And at the center, drawn in trembling ink:
The Ouroboros.
Below it, scrawled in haste:
"Begin where the flame was snuffed."
The words stirred old memory.
The Verdant Sigil's tower.
Or what was left of it.
I swallowed hard, feeling the weight of the city pressing down on me—the laws, the fear, the long silence of forbidden things. No one went near the ruins. The Order patrolled the old guild quarter with their clockwork scouts and iron-clad enforcers. Trespassers disappeared without trace.
But if the Circuit began there...
I glanced at the wall above the bench. The iron clock—my own design—ticked softly, its hands pointing toward the gray hour before market dawn.
If I moved quickly, before the patrols changed, I could reach the old quarter unnoticed.
I hesitated. My heart drummed sharp and hollow in my chest.
I could leave the letter. Burn it, forget it, let the past rot in the dark where it belonged.
But I knew I wouldn't.
Because curiosity—the old hunger—had awoken.
Because my father's ghost whispered from the page.
Because something else stirred in the city's shadowed heart.
I gathered my coat, tucked the map and letter inside my belt, and checked the small iron blade hidden in my boot. Habit, born of years navigating the alleys where law did not reach.
The workshop door creaked as I opened it to the damp morning chill.
A single scrap of paper hung nailed to the lintel. I hadn't seen it the night before.
Rough parchment. Smudged charcoal. A symbol drawn in jagged haste.
A circle. A serpent biting its tail.
The Ouroboros.
Someone knew.
Someone had been here.
I stared at the mark, the back of my neck prickling, breath turning cold in my throat.
Too late to turn back now.
I stepped into the mist-choked streets of Gederra, the weight of forgotten secrets pressing at my shoulders, and made my way toward the ruins where the flame had been snuffed.
Toward the beginning of the Philosopher's Circuit
The old quarter slept under a veil of mist and silence.
I kept to the narrow lanes, avoiding the main streets where the Order's scouts rolled past—iron spiders clicking and whirring, their lenses sweeping for warmth, for movement. In this city, you learned to walk like a shadow. To vanish when the machine's red eye flickered past.
The ruins of the Verdant Sigil lay at the quarter's heart, buried beneath time and fear.
Few spoke of the place. Fewer dared approach.
They said the ground was cursed there—that wild sparks flickered in the dust, that the stones whispered in dead tongues when the moon hung low. Superstition, perhaps. But I'd seen stranger things in my father's books.
The closer I came, the heavier the air grew. Like something watching.
I paused at the mouth of Hollow Street.
It had not changed. The same crumbling arches. The same blackened windows staring like blind eyes. My boots crunched on old cinders—the last ash of the day the Order came with fire and steel.
The Verdant Sigil's tower had once risen proud and bright above the rooftops—copper and quartz gleaming in the sun. Now only its jagged stump remained, charred stone and twisted metal clawing at the sky.
I tightened my grip on the hidden map.
"Begin where the flame was snuffed."
This was the place.
But I was not alone.
A soft sound drifted from the shadows.
Footsteps—light and quick—vanished into an alley before I could turn. The flicker of a coat hem, dark against the mist. Gone.
I swallowed hard, forcing my breath to slow.
Probably nothing. A vagrant. A rat-catcher. No one sane lingered here.
And yet... the scrap of parchment nailed to my door burned fresh in memory. The serpent's mark. The warning.
Someone knew.
I pressed on, eyes sharp, boots whispering over the broken stones.
At the tower's base, the rubble split open into a dark crevice—an old service arch half-buried in collapse. My father's secret way in. I'd followed him here as a child, clinging to his coat, watching as the walls shimmered with faint sigils drawn in quicksilver.
I stepped through the gap.
The darkness inside smelled of soot and cold metal. My lamp hissed to life, casting weak amber light across the ruin's bones—fractured staircases, shattered glass, rusted chains dangling like dead vines.
Here, the Order's fire had not reached. Here, old things lingered.
Faint shapes traced the walls—symbols burned into stone by hands long gone. Alchemical circles. Veins of copper glinting in the gloom. A broken workbench strewn with dust and bone-dry parchment.
I laid the map atop the bench.
The ciphered marks matched the room's layout. A circle of points. Lines of connection. At the center—the same symbol. The Ouroboros.
Something shifted in the darkness behind me.
I froze, breath caught.
Not footsteps.
Not whispers.
A scent.
Faint and impossible.
Crushed violets. Burned silver.
The scent of my mother's workshop.
I turned—lamp flaring high—expecting empty air.
But on the far wall, fresh lines gleamed in quicksilver.
New alchemical marks.
Drawn not by age or memory, but by a living hand.
My throat tightened.
Someone had been here.
Recently.
The symbols pulsed faintly, as if breathing. The center mark—the serpent—coiled in perfect silence.
A message. Or a trap.
I stepped closer.
The marks shimmered. A low sound stirred the air—a distant chime, thin as glass breaking. The symbols began to shift, twisting of their own accord, drawing new lines, new circles—
I stumbled back, heart hammering.
The circuit was alive.
And somewhere in the depths of the ruin, something old stirred in reply.