The rain in Greystone always smelled like rust.
It slipped through the cracks between the towers, soaked the torn fabric that passed for Arther's blanket, and gathered in little pools beneath his spine. Cold. Constant. Filthy. He didn't mind it anymore.
The rooftops of the Outer Ring were better than the alleys below. Up here, there were no city guards. No drunk preachers. No noble sons with fists looking for something beneath them to break. Just the wind. The rain. And quiet.
Arther liked the quiet.
He lay still under the dripping metal sheets of an abandoned smokestack, watching the sky.
No stars.
They hadn't appeared in days.
People said it was just the clouds. Pollution. The divine fog.
But Arther knew better.
He watched patterns. Tracked silence. He counted the stars every night — or what little of them peeked through Greystone's black veil. And something had changed. Subtly. Deliberately.
The city was hiding something.
And no one cared.
Not the traders who lit incense to the Church of Time. Not the nobles who dined on cloudfruit. Not the orphans who clawed each other for crumbs.
They were too busy surviving.
So was he.
By morning, the streets were crawling again.
Brass-plated clocks ticked from every tower. Carriages rolled past thick iron gutters. The city groaned to life like a tired beast choking on gears.
Arther was already gone.
He moved fast and invisible — the way street rats were supposed to. Duck under the cart. Don't look too clean. Don't look too dirty. Act like you belong.
He reached the outer edge of the market district before the patrols set their routes. Two stalls down from a butcher, one merchant was still setting his table — fat hands, loose pockets, too distracted to notice a coin pouch vanishing.
Arther didn't even stop walking.
He never ran. Running drew eyes.
By the time the man shouted, Arther had turned down a side alley and was gone.
Again.
He found breakfast in the bones of the old chapel ruins.
A single heel of bread, left near a grave post. Offering to a saint no one remembered.
He took it without guilt.
Saints didn't starve.
He ate slowly, fingers curled against the stone, watching fog drift over the grass. The ruins were quiet now. Mostly forgotten.
But something about the place… it felt too quiet. As if the silence here was watching.
He came every week.
Not for food. Not for saints.
But for the hole in the floor.
It wasn't large. Just a crack between two gravestones, covered by a sheet of broken wood and an old iron ring. He'd found it by accident last winter, chasing a rat through the rain.
When he first lifted the cover, he thought it was just a drain.
Then he saw the symbols.
Carved into the stone. Glowing faintly.
And beneath them… steps.
He hadn't gone down. Not yet.
But tonight? He would.
Arther waited until dark.
He always moved at night.
Not because it was safer — it wasn't. But because everything hidden in this city moved at night, too.
He returned to the chapel ruins, peeled back the rusted cover, and slipped into the hole.
The air beneath the surface was cold and sharp. Like it had been trapped for centuries.
The steps curved downward, deeper than any basement he'd ever seen. Stone walls. No lights. Just faint lines glowing with shifting runes, breathing like faint heartbeats.
And at the bottom… a door.
No lock. No handle. Just metal, and a single word carved into its center:
UNRECORDED
His breath caught.
He reached forward, hand trembling slightly — not from fear, but from something else.
Something like knowing.
He pressed his palm to the word.
And the door opened.
What lay beyond was not a room. Not a chamber. It was…
A silence so vast it pressed against his bones.
The walls pulsed with moving script, ancient and fluid, like language and machine had blended into something alive.
And in the center, suspended above a pedestal of black iron, was a book.
It had no pages. Only plates. Silver and scorched, engraved with constantly shifting lines.
It hovered.
It breathed.
It looked at him.
And it spoke — not aloud, but inside him:
"There is no record of you."
"No thread. No Epoch. No name."
"You do not belong."
Arther said nothing.
He didn't flinch. Didn't run.
He just stepped forward.
And placed his hand on the book.
⚙️ [System Interface Activated]
Designation: Unknown
Epoch Level: None
Fate Thread: Absent
You are not bound by any Cycle.
You are not written in any Age.
You are Epochless.
[Access Granted.]