Book 1: Chapter 1 - The Sound of Failing Power
The sound of Aethel dying was not a bang; it was a high-pitched, desperate whine.
Torvin knelt in the dust of the Grand Archive's Sub-level 7, his makeshift Aetheric Siphon humming—a noise that, against the background whine of the city's overloaded power grid, felt like a silent prayer.
Sub-level 7, the Forbidden Wing, was considered structurally unsound and politically inconvenient. It was where the city's elders and the Spire's Keepers dumped all the historical data they couldn't sanitize or digitize: ancient, fragile scrolls, metallic diagrams etched with forgotten symbols, and the dense, compacted history of the Root Cities. The air here was cool, smelling of ozone and decay, which Torvin preferred to the artificial citrus scent pumped into the regulated Upper Levels.
He ran a careful hand along a crack in the vaulted stone ceiling. Another power surge had clearly shaken the foundations recently. An inconvenient truth, he thought. The Spires pretended the Current's failure was localized maintenance, but down here, every flickering light and trembling archway was proof of systemic, terminal decay.
Torvin adjusted the siphon, a device cobbled together from a repurposed lantern and a stolen circuit board. It was currently directing a meager trickle of emergency power to illuminate the one thing he cared about: a cracked, palm-sized ceramic plate resting on a tripod.
The plate was worthless to the Archive, cataloged simply as "Pre-Founding Ceramic Fragment: Decorative." To Torvin, it was a schematic. It depicted a complex, three-dimensional energy lattice, unlike anything used in modern Aethel. He suspected it was a piece of the Source Regulator's original design, dating back to when the Current was first harnessed, thousands of years ago.
"The Current weakens," Torvin muttered to the diagram, his voice swallowed by the vast, empty hall. "But not because it's old, as they claim. It's weakening because the foundation is being starved."
He took out a thick, folded piece of Aether-Parchement—a material once used for official documents due to its incredible longevity. Now, it was just blank, heavy paper, but Torvin always carried it. He had inherited it from his grandmother, who insisted it was a "touchstone" to the true history.
He was tracing the complex curves of the ceramic diagram onto his notepad, comparing the pattern to a faint, barely visible watermark on the Aether-Parchement, when the high-pitched whine snapped.
The sound cut out instantly, replaced by absolute, sickening silence.
The Siphon died, plunging the Forbidden Wing into crushing darkness. Torvin froze, not daring to breathe. This wasn't a flicker—this was a total localized outage, worse than the standard blackouts that plagued the Root Cities. Even the emergency conduits were silent.
This is it, he thought, adrenaline surging. This is the big one.
He fumbled in his utility belt for a glow-stick, his fingers sticky with fear and the dust of the ancient hall. As his hand closed around the plastic tube, a cold, static electricity crackled through the air.
And then, his grandmother's worthless piece of Aether-Parchement, which he still clutched in his left hand, began to glow.
It wasn't the chemical light of a glow-stick, but the deep, resonant blue of pure, undiluted Aetheric power. The glow wasn't uniform; it coalesced into sharp, vivid lines. Where before there was only blank paper, there was now a sprawling, intricate image: a Cipher-Map. It was undeniably a map, yet the symbols were fluid and shifting, impossible to trace or photograph. It was a lead, a direction, a pathway out of the archives and into the true world.
Torvin stared at the glowing map, his analytical mind struggling to cope with the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing. This wasn't history; it was destiny.
Before he could process the sheer implication of the discovery, a rhythmic, heavy thud-thud-thud echoed down the main corridor. The sound was too purposeful, too steady to be falling debris. It was the heavy, regulated tread of Archive Security, and they were heading for the Forbidden Wing.
Torvin instinctively pocketed the glowing Aether-Parchement, his heart hammering the rhythm of the approaching boots. He looked at the cracked ceramic plate, the makeshift siphon, and the open notepad. There was no time to pack.
He had just found the key to saving Aethel, and now, he had exactly three seconds to get out.