When the Night Bell rang for the first time, the entire Skycast City shuddered like a giant beast rudely awakened, its iron bones humming in a low tremor that travelled with the sound.
Dooooong—
The heavy toll spilled down from the upper-tier temple district, pouring past noble towers and prayer halls, riding countless suspension beams and hanging bridges as it crashed through the mid-tier, and finally tumbled into the Rust Street slums and the ruined pipeworks below.
The copper lamps on the walls flickered. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, fine as woken dreams.
Doors along Rust Street slammed shut one after another, the clatter of bolts and chains rising and falling in a scattered rhythm. Children were yanked inside by their mothers. Old people, hands shaking, scratched crude prayer sigils onto doorframes and muttered over and over the clause from the Basic Covenant that every mortal could recite by heart:
"After the third toll of the Night Bell: if the Name is in the room, the soul is in the room. If the Name is not in the room, the soul returns to the Abyss."
That was the Iron Law of the Night Bell.
By the second toll, the street was almost empty.
Dooooong—
All Names not in place would, at the third toll, be automatically written into the Lost Clause. Which meant that anyone still wandering outside, as far as the contract records were concerned, would become a "permissible-to-disappear object"—missing, dead, sacrificed, cleaned up… whatever happened to them would no longer require any accountability.
The abyssal mist-sea boiled beneath the city. Viscous fog, like some living thing, reached upward through broken drain holes, sliding along metal walls in slow, questing streams. The air of the lower tier was wet and metallic; every breath tasted like biting down on a rusted blade.
Beside an abandoned drainage shaft, four figures in patched, old-pattern plate did not run for shelter. Instead they pressed deeper into the shadows, waiting for the after-ringing of the second toll to drain out of their skulls.
Their armor had once been the holy silver–inlaid plate of temple knights. Now it was roughly overpainted in black, the emblems of some High God scraped almost beyond recognition, leaving only circles of scar.
"Last confirmation." The one in the lead pushed his helmet back a little, exposing half his face.
It was a face that had been scraped raw countless times by blades and by doctrine. Fine lines fanned from the corners of his eyes. A burn scar scored his left cheekbone, running from the outer corner of his eye all the way to his ear. Tiny silver splinters were lodged along the scar's edges—shrapnel from a Covenant Chain exploding when it broke.
"Before the third toll, we have to get the child out of the main lower trunk." His voice was low. "Otherwise it won't just be our Names getting written into the Lost Clause. The remnants of our old covenants will all auto-trigger for settlement."
He kept his voice down, but a lifelong habit of giving orders edged it with iron.
One of the other knights, broad-shouldered and hulking, licked his cracked lips and forced his voice low: "Garth, you sure… that thing is worth us breaking the Iron Law of the Night Bell again? We've already been struck out of the Divine Covenant. One more step, and it's straight into the Abyss."
"We already have one foot in the Abyss." The man called Garth gave a brief smile, colder than the mist-sea. "And he is the only hand reaching out to pull us back."
He did not say "the baby". He used a more ambiguous "he".
On the right, the youngest knight tightened his grip on his chain mace, throat dry. "But… making a deal with the Shadow, what kind of clause is that even going to be written into? None of us knows."
"That's an Ambiguous Clause," the fourth knight said. He was thin, his voice hoarse and soft, like someone long used to whispering in prayer rooms. "An Ambiguous Clause doesn't necessarily mean malice. It's just… outside the language your current theology recognizes."
Garth raised a hand, signalling them to be quiet.
There was still a sliver of time before the third toll.
He lowered his head and looked at the inside of his wrist. A faint black mark circled it—not a burn, not ink, but a thread-fine black line, as if someone had written a string of letters beneath the skin with an impossibly thin needle, the writing's shape constantly shifting.
He had been branded with it at dusk, after his first contact with the Shadow beneath an abandoned temple.
Ambiguous Clauses weren't written on paper, nor uploaded to any visible Covenant Chain. They existed only in flesh, and in certain crevices that were "permitted to exist." Protection and shackle, both at once.
Garth drew a breath of cold air laced with rust and fog and pressed his hand to the rim of the shaft.
"Down."
He jumped first.
Darkness fell from the mouth of the shaft like a dropped sheet, swallowing them and their battered plate whole. The shaft wall was as cold as a corpse. Moisture slicked the rungs of the iron ladder, beading into droplets that pattered steadily downward. With every level they descended, the bell's sound was muffled a little more, replaced by the dull thunder of water deep in the pipes and by—deeper still—a faint whispering.
Not human voices. Not the liturgy of any known god.
It sounded like tens of thousands of severed Covenant Chains rubbing against each other in the abyssal mist-sea, shard grinding against shard, making a soft, hissing rasp that knitted into sentences in a language no one could understand.
The young knight's palms were sweating. He edged closer to Garth's back. "Captain… 'it' is watching us."
"No. It's watching him." Garth didn't look back. "And don't call Him 'it'—unless you want that word to be the basis of a clause with you as the subject."
The young man snapped his mouth shut so fast his teeth clicked.
By the time they hit the ground, the pre-tremor for the third toll was already rolling through the metal layers.
Beneath their feet ran an inspection walk outside the main sewer trunk. The pipe overhead was as thick as an upside-down street, its outer shell covered in maintenance sigils from long ago, many half-fallen away to expose dull metal beneath. Water thundered by within, bearing down the sewage of the upper residential blocks, the wash water from prayer halls rinsing away blood, and, every so often, items "covered by Dissolution Clauses" that got flushed down with everything else.
Farther ahead lay a dead branch pipe leading toward the outer wall above the Abyss; farther below was the mist-sea itself.
"The Shadow's Domain is near here." The thin knight looked up, the wet gleam on the pipes reflecting in his eyes. "The Shadow said it can only appear where the 'visible clauses' no longer apply."
"In other words, where the Covenant Chains are at their thinnest." Garth's reply was flat. "An area once classified as 'waste zone'."
Waste to the gods. The only habitat the Shadow had.
At that moment, the third toll came early.
Dooooong—
This one felt like it struck bone directly.
The pipe walls quivered. Somewhere in the distance, a set of safety chains rattled, and several loose maintenance plates shook free and clanged to the floor, throwing up brief sparks in the dark.
"Shit, the bell's early today—" the young knight swore.
"The Night Bell's schedule isn't written for us to see." Garth cut him off. "Swallow that filth in your mouth, unless you want it added to a Confession Clause."
He took a step forward.
As his foot came down, the dead-black shadow at the end of the walkway suddenly bulged, as if stabbed from within, swelling into an irregular protrusion.
It wasn't a solid thing but a darkness denser than the dark around it, so deep you could see something slowly writhing inside—a kind of… blankness.
The temperature plunged. Even the fog edged away.
"You're late," a voice said from within the shadow.
It was neither male nor female, neither distant nor close. It felt instead as though it had slipped out of some crack in each of their hearts—as if every "shit", every "waste zone", every "it" that had just flashed through their minds had been spoken by it, not by them.
The thin knight's shoulders jerked. He involuntarily took half a step back.
Garth tightened his grip on the broken chain in his hand—the last piece he'd smashed off his old plate. It had once bound him to a High God; now it was only a jagged length of chain. He tucked it back at his belt and lifted his gaze to the shadow.
"By decree of the Covenant Council, all transactions must be conducted after the clauses are confirmed." He made his voice as level as it had once been in the temple negotiation chambers. "Where is the child you mentioned?"
"On the way." The shadow seemed to laugh, without a trace of amusement. It was more like the faint eddy made when water curls past a stone. "Your High God is currently executing a 'polluted sample disposal clause'. I am merely… digging a hole in the shadow of that clause."
The water in the main pipe above them surged louder for a heartbeat.
All four lifted their heads.
Along one otherwise unremarkable stretch of metal shell, a ring of hair-thin black lines silently spread from a seam. Like an invisible hand was slowly tearing the pipe open along the join.
Garth saw more than the black lines.
For an instant, he seemed to see through the metal, to something else: strand after strand of pale-gold light wrapped around the outside of the pipe like vines, binding the pipe and all the buildings above it together.
Covenant Chains.
Any clause involving "disposal", "dissolution", "removal of ominous signs" would be recorded on that chain. Every time something was flushed down to the abyssal mist-sea, it would flare.
Right now, where the black lines were spreading, the pale-gold light was being pressed almost to darkness, on the brink of snapping.
"It's eating the clause," the thin knight whispered.
"No," the Shadow corrected. "I am eating only the edges. The main course is still with your High God."
As it spoke, a very fine, distinct scraping began inside the pipe overhead.
Not water—something dragging through metal.
A metal pod, slightly larger than a baby, separated from the inner wall of the pipe and slid noiselessly along the black ring, heading toward the "hole" just torn open. Its surface was carved with dense dissolution sigils, each one representing some fully legal and morally "unassailable" cleanup procedure—
[Polluted Sample][Incomplete Individual][Deviant Form][Unnamed]…
The last line was shrouded by a film of shadow, hiding whatever was written there.
The young knight's Adam's apple bobbed hard when he saw the pod. "This is… what they call a 'polluted sample'?"
"Don't say 'they'," Garth said quietly. "We used to be 'they'."
The Shadow slipped neatly in after him: "You used to be silver nails on that chain. Now you're nails that've been pulled. Perfect tools for me to pry with."
The pod eased to a stop at the edge of the torn gap.
Beyond the gap, the mist-sea's cold breath surged up, like a vast mouth gaping under the city, tongue almost touching the pod's shell. The pod shivered slightly, as if it, too, could sense that one more inch meant eternal dissolution, and tried to inch back by instinct.
The Shadow chose that moment to push.
A nearly invisible black filament snaked out, coiled around one of the sigils on the shell, and gave a delicate tug. The glyph representing "total dispersal, no need to record" split down the middle. Pale-gold light burst from it and flickered. The entire Covenant Chain gave a faint shudder.
Garth and the others all felt a tightening in their chests—that was their leftover covenants recoiling in primal fear.
"The clause has been altered…" the thin knight's lips had gone white. "This isn't just heresy, this is—"
"No god is watching here," the Shadow said softly. "Only you, and me, and a child who does not yet have a Name."
The pod's lid snapped open of its own accord.
A chill colder than the mist-sea washed out, slipping into the cracks of their armor, sinking into bone. It was something no god had yet named.
A small body lay curled in a tight ball among torn cloth and talisman paper.
He was far too quiet for something that had just been stolen from a death list. He didn't cry. He didn't even thrash the way instinct should have made him. He simply curled, small and smaller, like a seed abandoned in a metal shell.
He was naked, bare skin against freezing metal. That skin wasn't the ordinary pink of a newborn. It was covered in fine, dark patterns. The markings radiated from the center of his chest, spiderwebbing over collarbones and shoulders, coiling all the way down his limbs. Each stroke looked like a fragment of some ancient script, or like clauses broken apart and stitched back together at random.
The young knight couldn't help but suck in a breath. "Those are… forbidden sigils."
"Fragments of a World Rollback Protocol," the Shadow said mildly. "Of course, your theology has no such term."
Garth stared at the child's chest.
There, one mark was deeper than all the rest, almost cut into bone. Three interlocked rings, with a broken line through the center. At the break, a hair-fine gap—as if a stroke had been snapped apart halfway through.
"You said…" Garth's throat tightened. "You said he was a key."
"I said he was the only hand you can grab," the Shadow corrected. "As for the key—that was carved by your High God, not by me."
As it spoke, the pattern on the boy's chest gave the faintest tremor, like a reflex to the voice, as if it understood something.
"Time is short." For the first time, a hint of urgency slipped into the Shadow's tone. "All the Covenant Chains are looking this way. You can't see them, but they've already begun recording this 'anomalous handling process'. In your terms—"
It paused, as if rummaging for an unfamiliar word. "—a 'precedent' is being established."
Garth lifted his hand.
He could feel the Ambiguous Clause on his wrist burning. Black lines crawled along his veins, up into his palm, condensing into a formless mark. It wasn't any god's emblem, but a shape of… pure blank.
"What do you want?" he asked.
He knew. There were no free "holes".
The mist-sea roiled not far beneath them. All the bronze lamps in the city had been snuffed out. The bell's after-echo rolled between the metal layers, mingling with the lower, blurred hissing from the Abyss, like a parchment being slowly torn apart.
The Shadow was silent for a moment.
"You pulled nails don't have much left to give," it said at last, slowly. "Your Names are struck out. Your covenants, severed. Your merits, erased… you have only one thing left."
Garth frowned. "What?"
"Your blankness." The Shadow's smile was almost gentle. "Give me the next ten years—not your lives, not your souls, but all the un-written possibilities within those ten years. You may live, die, repent, sink deeper… everything that has not yet been carved into the Covenant, I take."
The young knight's face went chalk-white. "Then are we… still free?"
"'Freedom' is just the word your theology uses to pretty up 'predictable clauses'," the Shadow said softly. "I'm offering you more than they ever did."
Garth closed his eyes.
Images flashed through his mind: prayer halls swallowed by flame; comrades sprawled on the steps, burned through by divine light; the Covenant Council chamber with its chains hanging high overhead; the grand clause behind the High God's statue, the one that declared "eternal obedience"… and, once, at midnight, the glimpse he'd had from a high temple window, looking down at the children of Rust Street—Names written into the Basic Covenant, never once looked up again.
Since those ten years had been stolen from the ruins to begin with, what right did they have to be stingy?
"All right." He opened his eyes. They were colder than before. "Ten years."
The Shadow sounded satisfied. "Done."
In that instant, the cold draft in the pipe suddenly stilled. Like some enormous presence had held its breath.
A line unseen by human eyes slid from the Shadow and brushed Garth's wrist. The black mark there flared, like a drop of ink in water, seeping through his limbs in a heartbeat. There was no pain, only the sense that something loose and hazy inside him—unmade choices, untaken paths, tomorrows that hadn't happened yet—had been lightly plucked and drawn away along that line.
"Your turn," the Shadow said, looking at the other three. "Or you can leave now."
Nobody moved.
The thin knight slowly extended his wrist. "Count me in."
He reached into that deeper black. Something cold and soft closed around his skin, like an invisible handcuff snapping shut.
"The hell with it, I wasn't going to live ten years anyway." The young knight's hand shook, but he thrust it in.
The hulking knight swore under his breath, then stuck his arm out too. "We die, we die together."
"Excellent," the Shadow murmured. "Then this precedent will have four co-signers."
The moment the deal was sealed, the gnawed Covenant Chain above them convulsed.
A spear of blinding light burst from the seams of the pipe, flooding the inspection walk in white. Garth flinched up an arm on instinct—old training told him this intensity of divine light only appeared when a "world-grade clause" was making some kind of response.
The child in the pod finally made a sound.
Not a cry—only a thin, soft intake of breath.
His chest heaved. The deepest glyph there seemed shoved from within, flaring with a twisted, dark red. Every other pattern across his body dimmed at once, as if devoured by that one sigil.
Garth heard—or imagined he heard—a giant mechanism click somewhere above.
The sound wasn't from any visible chain. It came from the bones of Skycast City itself.
High in the upper-tier temple district hung a Covenant Chain not open for mortal viewing. It spanned the dome, stretching from the High God's brow all the way to the black wall behind the council hall. Most of the time it gleamed faintly, no more than a silent Milky Way.
It was the World-Scale Covenant Chain, bearer of the lowest and heaviest clause of the Basic Covenant—Eternal Obedience.
Now, that chain gave a tiny jerk.
A hair-fine, almost impossible little "branch clause" sprouted somewhere along its length, like a needle pointing the wrong way, forcing itself out against the flow of all existing clauses.
An old priest dozing in the temple jerked awake and stared up at the dome, his eyes nearly popping from their sockets. He opened his mouth to shout, but some unseen force flattened his voice into a rasp. No sound would carry.
In the deep pipes, Garth had no view of the dome. All he felt was a sudden, heavy weight of heat in his arms.
He reached down and lifted the small curled body out of the pod.
The boy's skin was as cold as stone fresh from water, but the dark rings on his chest burned almost hot enough to brand. The heat bored through the seams of Garth's armor. Instinct screamed at him to drop the child.
"Hold on," the Shadow's voice drifted from very far away. "From now on, he no longer belongs to that Chain."
"Then who does he belong to?" the young knight blurted.
The Shadow did not answer.
On the child's chest, the blazing sigil trembled between divine gold and abyssal black, as if choosing something nobody else could grasp. Then, suddenly, it shifted from red to a strange pale grey. All its strokes drew inward, folding into a pinprick point embedded in the boy's breastbone.
At that exact moment, the newborn branch on the World-Scale Covenant Chain snapped back into the main trunk, as if terrified of being seen.
The lights in the temple went out. The old priest collapsed back into his chair, shaking all over, unable to remember a thing.
In the abyssal pipes, the Shadow let out something like a relieved sigh. "The clause is written."
"Where?" Garth asked quietly.
The Shadow smiled. "Where no one can ever read it."
Its outline was thinning, like ink that had sat too long under a lamp and was finally fading.
"Take him," it said. "Remember our precedent. In ten years, I'll come review it."
"Where do we go?" the thin knight looked down the black passageway. "Up there is a Covenant that'll strike our Names. Down there is mist that'll dissolve our bones."
Garth held the child tight. His old burn scar throbbed under the heat.
He lifted his head and looked toward a faint point of light farther along the tunnel—another maintenance ladder leading back to Rust Street. The light was dim, a dying candle, but it was the only visible exit.
"Same as before," he said softly. "We crawl back up through the cracks no one wants to look at."
He turned and started toward that light.
Behind them, the mist-sea rolled, as if laughing without sound—or waiting.
None of them noticed the faint flicker in the mark on the child's chest, the one that had folded into a point.
That tiny glimmer didn't break the skin, but it speared through metal layers, ruined pipes, and brick walls, racing along some invisible track all the way to the upper temple district.
It brushed, ever so lightly, against the World-Scale Covenant Chain—then shrank back again, as if it was nothing more than a reflexive reply:
I'm still here.