Consciousness returned in layers.
First: cold, seeping up from damp earth into bare
skin.
Second: pain, gravel biting into his back.
Third: smell, wet stone, ozone, the cloying
sweetness of alchemical waste.
The man who knew himself as Lev opened eyes that
did not feel like his own.
Quiet, came a thought from a deeper place. This is
too quiet.
It was Lev's thought. The archivist's ghost, now
haunting another man's body.
The pearlescent fog diffusing the nascent light
suggested a pre-dawn hour. A crumbling slab of concrete nearby, its rebar
bursting forth like rusted veins, spoke of structural fatigue and long neglect.
This was the Ballast. The name surfaced with cold
clarity. The immense cityscape below, a canyon of impossible architecture where
crystalline spires pierced a bruised sky, was Aethelburg.
Cold.
It was the first thing he knew. Cold earth beneath
him. Cold air above. Cold seeping into bones that didn't feel like his.
He sat up. Gravel bit into his palms. His hands, long-fingered,
pale, strong, trembled slightly.
Not my hands, Lev thought from somewhere deep
inside.
But the body stood anyway. It looked down a
scree-covered slope toward a city of impossible spires. And it began to walk,
because standing still felt more like dying.
A soft exhalation took form in the cold air, a
vocalization to test the integrity of this new reality.
"I am here."
His mind processed the
scree slope not as a landscape, but as a set of variables: the average size and
angularity of the stones, the moisture content of the soil, the optimal path
for minimizing energy expenditure, and the acoustic signature.
The fog peeled back,
revealing the city's edge. Not a gateway, but a wound.
Here, the air tasted of
coal-smoke and burnt ozone. Sounds resolved from a roar into distinct miseries:
a merchant weeping as he smashed his own data-slate against a wall; children
scratching at a dead Glimmer-dispenser; a single, unending scream from a high
spire.
No guards came. No
enforcers. The silence where authority should have been was louder than the
screaming.
His new mind categorized it
all. But Lev's old heart counted the wounds.
One. Two. Three…
He paused at the periphery,
his new eyes scanning, categorizing.
A man in the tattered robes
of a merchant caste stood in the middle of a thoroughfare, methodically
smashing his own data-slate against a wall, over and over, weeping as he
chanted a list of forgotten debts.
A group of children, their
eyes wide and vacant, huddled around a non-functional public Glimmer-dispenser,
scratching at its metal shell as if seeking a memory of comfort. From a
towering residential spire, a single, sustained scream echoed, uninterrupted.
There were no enforcers, no attempts at order.
The authority had been
psychological, and it had vanished.
The first coherent data
stream was auditory. Two scavengers argued near a collapsed conduit, their
voices sharp with a panic that had curdled into rage.
"—you took the larger
portion—"
"—the regulator's
patrol is shifting, we have a seven-minute window—"
He moved on, a ghost
navigating the breakdown. He identified a potential information hub not by a
sign, but by its anomalous traffic pattern. This recessed doorway showed a
statistically significant frequency of use for its apparent dereliction.
He moved through the
dysfunction, a ghost absorbing the city's collapse. A scavenger, her knuckles
scraped raw and glittering with embedded crystalline dust, shoved past him,
snarling at her partner.
"Move your feet, you lazy
keth! Or are your Stone-born bones finally turning to gravel?"
The partner, a hulking man
with skin the color of weathered granite, spat a wad of phlegm that sizzled
where it hit a leaking conduit.
"My blood's as old as the Citadel's
foundations. It's your line that's thin as watered-down Glimmer." He hefted a
chunk of rubble in a hand that seemed carved for the purpose, the tough, radial
patterns of his calluses mirroring the stone itself.
The shack's curtain was
worn smooth in one spot. A hand, pulling it aside, day after day.
He pulled it now.
Inside, a woman hunched
over a data-slate. Silver hair shorn on one side. Fingers moving fast. She
didn't look up.
"If you're selling, I'm not
buying. If you're buying, I'm out of stock."
Then she glanced at him.
Her professional mask
didn't crack, it exploded.
Eloria's eyes widened as
her breath caught. Her hand flashed to the counter, grabbed a polished obsidian
cube, and hurled it at his face.
"Get out!"
His hand moved without
thought. It caught the cube in mid-air, the impact a dull thud against his
palm. He didn't flinch. He didn't blink.
He analyzed.
"Your fear is specific," he
said. "You recognize this face."
The object, a polished
obsidian cube, tumbled through the air. His new mind calculated its trajectory,
mass, and rotational velocity in a microsecond. No flinch came from him.
His hand snapped up, not
with blurring speed, but with an absolute economy of motion, intercepting the
precise point in space-time to catch it without a sound. The impact was a dull,
final thud in his palm.
He looked from the cube in
his hand to her face, analyzing the cause-and-effect relationship. Her act of
violence was a rich data source: her fear was not generic, but specific. She
recognized him. And what she recognized was a threat that warranted immediate,
violent expulsion.
Placing the cube gently on
a nearby crate, the action was unnervingly calm.
"Explain," he
said, his voice syntactically perfect, prosody null.
Eloria stared, her chest
heaving. The professional calculation returned to her eyes, overlaying the
terror. She was reassessing. The thing she feared had not reacted with expected
violence. It had reacted with... analysis.
Her gaze intensified,
focusing on him. Carrotcall's Guild was active.
"The Scapegoat's
Guild," she breathed. "Quiescent. Fused with an unknown signature. It
is implausible that anyone could endure it unless… They are a member of the
Oedipus Dynasty."
"Explain 'Scapegoat's
Guild'," he requested.
Her composure cracked
again. "You ask me? You, who wear its architecture like a second
skeleton?" She took a sharp step back. "There is no possible way you
are unaware of his identity. You are Lucian Oedipus or his ghost."
The name landed in the
silent space of his mind. It triggered no memory, no echo of recognition.
"Your premise is
flawed," he stated, the words clean and precise.
"I possess no knowledge
on 'Lucian Oedipus'. Your reaction provides the primary evidence for the
designation's significance. The 'Scapegoat's Guild' is a constant you perceive.
I am the variable. Your logical conclusion should be that I am a new entity, or
that 'Lucian Oedipus' has been fundamentally altered. Not that I am feigning
ignorance."
Eloria's eyes widened
further. The horror on her face deepened, not from the threat of a king, but
from the implications of his cold, flawless logic. A king could be reasoned
with, appealed to, or feared. This was something else.
"Altered?" she
whispered. "Shattered, more like. He broke the throne. He severed the
covenant that bore the empire's pain and instead of continuing a legacy, he
threw himself off a one-kilometer-high building to die, the ultimate act of
selfishness.
"Now that pain is loose.
It's in the Glimmer in their veins, in the Aetherium itself. The city is not
rioting. It is... unlearning sanity. And you... You are the source of the
silence at the center of the storm."
She looked at him, truly
seeing him now not as a man, but as a walking cataclysm.
"If you are not him,
then what are you?"
His light hazel eyes held
hers, devoid of answer, containing only the question itself.
The silence in the shack
stretched for a three-count too long. Eloria's sharp eyes, which had widened in
terror, now narrowed in reassessment. The thing wearing Lucian Oedipus's face
had not threatened her. It had… processed her. It was a paradox, and paradoxes
were a form of currency.
Her posture shifted from
defensive to analytical. She was a woman of sharp, practical angles, her
tarnished-silver hair shorn close on one side, the rest in a severe plait.
"You don't know," she
stated, the realization settling not as fear, but as a business calculation.
"Carrotcall doesn't lie. You have the Scapegoat's Guild woven into you, but
you're accessing it like a child with a masterwork sword. You're a blank slate."
She gestured at his bare feet, his rough-spun trousers. "And a poor one. You
need information. I sell it. But your face is a liability that gets us both
killed. So we talk."
Eloria stared, her
merchant's mind recalibrating. "You truly are a blank slate. Carrotcall
doesn't lie. You have the Scapegoat's Guild woven into you like a second
skeleton, but you're holding it like a child who found a masterwork
sword." She circled him, her gaze sharp. "Fine. Basics. What's your
Caste?"
He just looked at her, his
expression unreadable.
"Stars above. Caste.
The station you're born into. Menial, Merchant, Soldier, Emperor. It's in the
blood, the bone. It's what you are." She snapped her fingers. "Now,
your Guild. The power you use. Is it a bloodline Spark? Did you buy it? Or..."
her eyes narrowed with grim suspicion, "...did you take it from a
corpse?"
"I do not know these
terms," he stated.
Eloria barked a short,
humorless laugh. "Of course you don't. You're a ghost with a king's keys.
This will be expensive."
She paused, letting him
absorb the brutal simplicity of it. "My Guilds are for finding and knowing.
Runrabbit finds any physical object. Carrotcall lets me see the Guilds in
others, their Caste and Class. Right now, I see a dynasty's curse inside a
shell with no king. It's… unstable."
Finally speaking, his voice
remained a quiet, calibrated instrument.. "You say I am Lucian Oedipus."
"I say you have his power,
practically identically his face, and his catastrophic timing, all in a
slightly taller body. The man who was Lucian Oedipus shattered the imperial
covenant and threw himself into the sky. He is the reason the city is
screaming."
The man possessed a beauty
that could, in the uncertain light, be mistaken for a woman's. But this was a
misreading, a failure of perception in the same vein as Eloria's initial
diagnosis of him as a ghost or a shattered king. Where Lucian's features had
been a study in imperial severity, all sharp angles, raven-dark hair, and a
gaze like polished obsidian, this face was its spectral counterpart.
She leaned forward, her
voice low and intent. "But you? You stand there and count the threads in your
trousers to keep from drowning. So, I'll ask the question you can't. If you are
the Emperor, why do you feel like a ghost?"
A fracture, subtle but
profound, showed in his composure. The analytical stillness broke for a single,
raw instant. His eyes, a clear and light-filled hazel, lost their focus,
looking at something internal and terrifying.
"I am not a king," he
whispered, the words fraying at the edges. "I am… a count. Of breaths. Of
threads. A curator of a quiet room." The confession was torn from a place
deeper than memory, a foundational truth of a self that was not Lucian. He
looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. "This body is wrong.
This power is a noise. How can I be a man who broke the world when I feel like
a man who was broken by it?"
Not "who am I?"
but "What am I, when my soul and my flesh tell two different, terrible
stories?"
Eloria watched the fracture
in his composure, her merchant's mind calculating the cost of his existential
debt.
"That," she said quietly, "is a more expensive
question. But for now, the price is getting you off the street." She moved to a
grimy window, peeling back a corner of the shutter.
"Your face is a beacon. And beacons attract
every kind of pest in a collapse."
She pointed into the
chaotic street. "See them? The ones not screaming?"
Following her gaze, he saw
that amidst the wailing and the catatonic, a few figures moved with a different
purpose. Their eyes were not glazed with remembered pain, but sharp with athe
look of a convert discovering a cruel, but clear, doctrine.
But his focus snagged on a
different sight, a devastating echo that bypassed his analytical mind and
struck a chord of pure, somatic recognition.
A woman was hunched in a
doorway, her grimy blanket drawn to her chin, her hands lying open and upturned
in her lap. The posture was a replica of the one that lived in his bones, a
symbol of total surrender, of empty offering. A preview of the absolute zero of
human need.
An impulse, vast and
irrational, overrode all other processes. It was not the cold calculation that
had guided him off the hill. This was a deep, compelling need to act, to fill
those empty hands.
"Wait here," he said, his
voice losing its sterile quality, gaining a faint, unfamiliar urgency.
Before Eloria could
protest, he was out the door and moving through the chaos with that same
preternatural economy of motion. He did not fight the current of panicked
bodies; he navigated it like a fish, arriving at the woman's side.
He had nothing to give, no
food, no coin so he found himself kneeling. But the impulse remained. He
reached out and simply closed one of her hands, his own large, pale fingers
covering hers for a moment in a gesture of futile, human solidarity.
It was nothing and it changed
nothing. But as he stood and turned back, he found Eloria staring at him from
the doorway, her expression unreadable.
When he re-entered the
shack, the air had changed, the dynamic had shifted.
"You moved like a king,"
she said, her voice low. "But you knelt like a sinner seeking grace. Which is
it?"
Looking at his own hand,
the ghost of the woman's touch remained on his skin. The two impulses, the cold
architecture of Lucian's power and this deep, empathetic compulsion, warred
within him, not as a memory, but as a fundamental schism in his present self.
"I am not Lucian," he
stated, the certainty solidifying.
"I have his… tools. But not
his will." He looked up, his clear hazel eyes meeting hers. "The man who broke
the world is gone. The man who was broken by it is also gone."
He made a pause, the final
piece of the equation clicking into place, a self-assigned designation to fill
the void.
"What remains requires a
new name. You will call me Lucio."
"The man who broke the world is gone," he said.
"The man who was broken by it is also gone."
"Then what's left?"
Lucio met her eyes. "A question. And a current to
steer."
Outside, another scream cut through the dusk.
Closer this time.
Eloria's gaze sharpened. "First lesson: that face
doesn't stay hidden. We have until morning before someone sells you to the new
regime. Maybe less."
She tossed him a grimy blanket. "You exist in that
corner. You move when I say. And you tell me everything you remember."
Lucio caught the blanket. His fingers traced the
weave. Two hundred and thirty-seven threads per square inch.
Fourteen heartbeats.
Three exits.
One face that could get them both killed.