The Citadel Accord Archives, Sub-Level 14, was a place defined by cold and weight. The air, thick with the smell of wet metal and old, brittle paper, felt physically heavy in the chest. Here, meters beneath the massive, fortified walls of Ashfall Sanctum, no natural light had ever penetrated. Survival was measured in the quality of the gaslight and the steady, predictable groan of the steam pipes that ran like mechanical arteries through the ceiling.
Cinder was a Junior Clerk, an easily replaced cog in the vast, grinding machine of the Citadel Accord. His survival depended on being utterly forgettable—one more ghost moving documents through the polluted heart of the city's government.
He ran a gloved hand over the chilled steel of the main document cabinets. His current task was auditing the requisitions from the Outer Walls, a crushing process of recording the relentless, desperate consumption of resources by the Rust Tide. The endless numbers were a tally of slow, certain defeat, but Cinder focused only on the columns. If he concentrated hard enough on the numbers, he could almost ignore the dull, constant ache behind his eyes.
"They ration the tea, Cinder, but they're generous with the paperwork" Kael, Cinder's companion and fellow clerk, sighed from his desk. He slapped a hefty report detailing copper allocation onto a stack. "If I see one more manifest detailing the 'strategic redeployment' of a perfectly good steam coupling, I might actually volunteer for the Outer Walls."
Cinder managed a quiet, noncommittal sound. Kael, with his cynical wit and his exhaustion, was Cinder's anchor to normal life. Kael was a friend—the only real friend Cinder permitted himself.
Cinder glanced at a stack of antiquated personnel files he was meant to be purging. He wanted the cold, dependable silence of the archive. But the silence was breaking.
It started not with a loud snap, but a subtle, discordant sound: a high-pitched, grinding tremor in the metal of the lift mechanism directly above their desks, where the supply chute delivered fresh stacks of reports. It was a noise that suggested imbalance, like two colossal weights shifting against one another incorrectly. Cinder's neck muscles tightened with instinct.
His own personal flaw—the heightened, sensitivity that plagued his mind—screamed at him. It wasn't logic, it wasn't a warning, it was a pure, overwhelming wrongness that paralyzed his vision and made his palms sweat. His focus was drawn to the heavy filing cabinet—a cold mass of obsolete files—that stood directly beneath the supply chute.
"Kael," Cinder said, the word coming out a tight, dry rasp. "We need to move the cabinet."
Kael leaned back, annoyance etched into his face. "What? Are you serious? It hasn't been moved in three years. My back is already—"
"Now," Cinder insisted, his voice sharp and dangerously low. He slammed his own shoulder against the cold metal of the tall cabinet, forcing his body into the pointless labor. His temples throbbed in rhythm with the awful sound from the ceiling.
Kael saw the unusual, strained intensity in Cinder's eyes. He hesitated only a second before dropping his pen. "Fine, fine, you miserable sod." He planted his feet and braced his weight against the cabinet's side. Together, they managed to scrape the heavy metal box a single, agonizing meter across the cold stone floor and out of the way.
The sound of protest from the metal above peaked into a deafening, tearing shriek.
A moment later, a section of thick, rusted steam piping, heavy with water and sludge, accompanied by a rain of mortar and concrete dust, tore through the ceiling. It slammed into the exact square foot of floor where the filing cabinet had rested seconds earlier, shaking the entire sub-level. A scalding cloud of black steam hissed across the archive.
Cinder stood, trembling, his senses overwhelmed by the violent chaos. His lungs burned from the dust, but he was alive.
Then, the true horror hit. The noise and the steam seemed to vanish. Cinder's mind was instantly filled with a cold, deafening pressure—the pure, raw Static of the cosmos pressing in. His vision dissolved into a blinding kaleidoscope of fractured light and impossible angles, a sensation of utter mental breach. He didn't see the pipe; he saw the flaw: a vast, intricate, unseen mechanism of metal and bone that had been deliberately snapped by an invisible hand. The agony was immediate and absolute, tearing through his temples.
Kael was frozen, covered in gray dust, staring wide-eyed at the jagged debris. He looked back at Cinder, shock giving way to raw, disbelieving confusion.
"What in Ascendant Patriarch's name was that?" Kael whispered, his voice thin and shaky.
Cinder didn't answer. He couldn't. His body was shaking from the adrenaline, but his mind was shaking from the knowledge that he had been moved by an uncontrollable force. He looked at Kael, knowing his friend would never believe the truth: that Cinder had saved his life based on a flaw he couldn't explain.
He had just used a terrifying, unexplainable instinct to survive. Their monotonous routine was dead.