Training began the next morning.
Kael woke before the lamps changed color. The Hidden City was already stirring—hammers, low chants, the measured breath of dozens of people learning to move without making echoes. Liora met him at the square with two wooden batons and a bucket of gray sand.
"Same rule as the Rite," she said. "Breathe with what's around you. The Lines follow discipline, not rage."
He took a stance opposite her. The air here was heavy with the hum of buried machines, the sort of noise that gave weight to silence. She attacked first—quick, flat strikes. Kael blocked, stumbled, and found rhythm only after the fifth exchange. When he forced a parry with anger, his Lines brightened and the air cracked like thunder. Every head in the plaza turned.
Liora didn't. "Control, not power. Again."
They worked until the sand turned black with their sweat. By the end he could move without the glow flaring out of time.
Days fell into pattern.Work, train, rest.Eat when told; listen more than speak.
The Guild wasn't a single clan but a tangle of exiles and believers. Some spent their hours restoring machinery that filtered air through the tunnels; others studied resonance scrolls copied from before the Renewals. Kael was set to both. The work taught him patience, the lessons precision.
At night he helped reinforce the old walls with metallic dust that kept the Empire's scanners from reading the city's pulse. "Everything breathes," one engineer said. "We just teach the walls to keep their breath quiet."
He liked that thought.
Weeks passed. The nightmares came less often. When they did, he could pull himself out of them with steady breaths—the same count Liora had drilled into him. The Lines under his skin no longer felt like foreign veins but tools waiting for instruction.
One evening, the gray-eyed man—Captain to some, Elder to others—found him working alone by the water vents.
"You're adapting," the Captain said. "Most don't."
Kael shrugged. "Most haven't lost what I have."
The older man studied him for a moment. "Loss isn't a virtue."
"It's what I remember."
That earned a nod. "Keep remembering. We live because someone must."
He left without another word. Kael returned to his task, sealing cracks with molten resin. The hum of the vents matched his pulse perfectly.
Later, Kael found Liora by the forges. She was sharpening a blade not for war but for balance, testing the metal's vibration against her palm.
He asked, "How long have you been here?"
"Too long," she said. "Long enough to forget what surface air tastes like."
"You could leave."
She looked up, the forge light turning her eyes copper. "Could you?"
He didn't answer.
She smiled slightly. "Then don't ask what you already understand."
They stood together, listening to the hammering rhythm from deeper tunnels. The sound wasn't violent—it was steady, necessary, alive.
By the month's end, Kael had been assigned a place among the Outer Runners—messengers who carried information between the Guild's hidden enclaves. It meant fresh air and risk, both things he needed. Before his first run, Liora handed him a sealed token marked with a spiral.
"If caught, destroy it," she said. "If you can't, swallow it."
"Swallow it?"
"It dissolves," she said. "Mostly."
He pocketed it. "What's out there worth this?"
She hesitated, then said, "Proof that the Empire's lattice is failing."
Her tone made it sound like both a promise and a warning.
That night, he climbed to the highest vent shaft and looked up through the narrow sliver of sky. The air above was gray, the kind of color that belongs to neither night nor morning. He breathed until the hum of the world matched the beat in his chest.
For the first time, the sound wasn't pain.It was purpose.
He didn't know that the years ahead would carve him sharper than any blade, or that the rhythm he'd learned here would one day guide entire armies. For now, the Hidden City was enough—a heartbeat in the dark that told him the world could still be rebuilt one breath at a time.