They did not call it Grey Rock yet. For a long time it was a ledger, a trust, a sensible portfolio. Men who counted other men's dues found the same greed in themselves that they hunted in the river. One of them was a tinkerer who learned how to bend lightning into a box.
He did not start with cruelty. He asked a practical question. If power passes when a holder dies and a newborn answers the world, what happens if you time the death and the birth? What if you can make destiny obey a clock?
The first test was ugly and brilliant. A woman in a cottage gave birth while the tinkerer's assistant gripped the cold machine and died as the newborn screamed. On the monitors the numbers met. The assistant's breath stopped. The babe began to cry. The house shook with thunder from the laboratory miles away. When the machine powered down there was a new steadiness in the infant's tiny limbs. The inventor smiled and wrote in the ledger that night.
That ledger became methods. Methods became rules. People in power learned to synchronize births. They learned how to pull the current through dying flesh and call it inheritance. Electricity became ritual. Ritual became statute. The rich learned that blood and timing were better than chance.
Over generations the practice hardened into a system. Names changed but the method did not. Those who wanted order turned it into law. Those who wanted wealth turned it into monopoly. A family that could always make itself the next holder of the final, darker power began to rise. They wrapped their offices in glass and called themselves guardians of progress.
Centuries later, in the year the city lights chewed the stars, the method had teeth and a market. On the highest floor of one such market a man lay strapped to steel. Wires threaded his arms. His chest was a river of currents. He was old and he was the current bearer of the shadowed thing that had walked empires.
A council watched in a room built for people who never learned need. They had booked the birth schedule of a newborn niece in the tower two floors down. That child was meant to hold the shadow of greed that would keep their ledger safe. The council would count its dividend in generations.
The switch closed. Power hammered the old man. Sparks painted the air. A baby wailed. Monitors showed a perfect sync. The council breathed.
For the space of a heartbeat destiny stalled. Somewhere in the grid a micro fault shivered like a caught animal. The current did not find the intended child.
Across the city, in the Outer District where concrete cracked and candles flickered, a woman pushed through contractions in a room where rain came in through the ceiling. No monitors, no council, no ritual. Only the small world of two persons and a newborn.
When the old man's heart gave out he died with his hand on a cold plate. The newborn in the tower took a breath and flicked its fingers. The council called it success and wrote their next acquisition into the ledger.
But the shadow did not care for ledgers. It answered the cry that came from the gutter as well as the cry that came from marble. The power, released into the world, found a vessel in the one who was born in dust and rain. The child in the dark room opened his eyes, and somewhere lightning bowed its head.
Selith, in water older than memory, felt the shift and whispered to the tide: the cycle begins again.