The wind cut across the bridge like it wanted him gone. Tyler moved down the slope toward the underside—an empty stretch of concrete where the cold collected like dust. A few broken bottles lay against the wall. Someone had sprayed old graffiti over a faded slogan. The ground felt harder than he remembered.
He sat with his back against a pillar and pulled his knees to his chest. The cold bit straight through his clothes; he hadn't worn anything warm enough for winter. He didn't care. He didn't even feel it fully yet.
"Great," he muttered. His voice cracked. "Perfect place to die, Tyler. Five stars."
No one laughed. Not even him.
He rubbed his forehead hard, as if pressure could stop the flood of thought rushing up behind his eyes.
"If I had power… just a little… I could've done something."He didn't know who he was talking to. Maybe himself. Maybe the empty night. Maybe the gods people kept praying to.
"I could've helped Dad. I could've gotten the job. I could change… something."
He dragged in a shaky breath and let it out slowly.
"But power?" He scoffed. "Right. Power's for politicians and their children. Not for guys like me."
The cold settled deeper into his hands. He stared at them.
"Look at this world," he said, louder now, voice bouncing under the bridge. "Corruption everywhere. Hospitals begging for bribes. Offices begging for bribes. People tearing each other apart over Ignaros and Veyra and Solaris and Lunara—like any of those gods are listening."
He laughed—a short, bitter, humorless sound.
"They're not listening. No god is listening."
His voice rose again, sharper.
"SOLARIS? Sitting up there basking in light while we work ourselves to death?"
"VEYRA? Teaching 'discipline' while half the schools can't afford electricity?"
"IGNAROS? Preaching strength through struggle while people struggle until they break?"
"LUNARA? Balance? Balance where? Where is the balance in ANY of this!?"
His breath hitched, and the words spilled out faster.
"You're all useless. All of you! If you exist—if ANY of you exist—you're useless!"
His chest tightened. His throat burned. The cold crawled deeper, numbing the anger but not silencing it.
"I swear… if I had even a fraction of power…"His hands curled into fists."…I'd fix this place myself."
He leaned his head back against the pillar, eyes stinging.
"Forget waiting for gods. Forget prayers. Forget 'hope.' If someone gave me power—real power—I would change this rotten country faster than any of your temples or politicians ever have."
His voice shook, but not with fear.
"I'd do it. I'd actually do it."
The wind answered him with a hollow whistle.
Silence settled again.
Then something inside him began to slip—like someone loosening a knot behind his ribs. His vision blurred around the edges.
"Damn… I'm tired…"His fingers twitched. He felt his limbs getting heavier. The cold wasn't outside anymore; it was moving inside him.
He tried to straighten up, but the world tilted sideways.
"Guess… I'll just… rest for a bit…"His eyelids drooped. The darkness pressed closer.
"Just for a minute…"
The last thing he whispered—barely breathing the words—was:
"If someone… anyone… is listening… give me power… I'll trade whatever you want…"
His head slid sideways. The cold wrapped around him like a closing hand. The world snapped out
He woke to a silence that was not the hospital's mechanical silence and not the city's indifferent murmur. This silence had weight and texture; it pressed against his ears like velvet. For a slow, uncertain heartbeat he could not tell where he was. The bridge, he realized—no, not the bridge. He tried to lift his head and the motion came with the wrongness of someone lifting a hand in a dream and finding it heavy.
A single candle burned somewhere far ahead, a small, steady sun in a place that did not belong to streets and neon. The light it threw was warm in color—old-gold—and it woke a part of his eyes that had long been living under winter's gray. The air smelled faintly of wax and something like myrrh, a smell his childhood had never taught him to name.
He rolled onto his back without thinking and felt beneath his shoulders not the coarse concrete of the bridge but cold stone so smooth it might as well be polished bone. The cathedral—he thought the word and it landed like a pebble in a pool. He tried to register the building's scale and failed because his head swam with a soft ringing. The ceiling arched up into a darkness studded with candles and stained glass he could not quite see. Shadows gathered in the vaults, long and patient, like animals that had been waiting for him to arrive.
Slowly, as if waking with great care, he raised his hand and saw the faint reflection of blue in his palm where candlelight touched skin. For an instant he wondered at the way his skin shone, then realized the blue was in his eyes—no, not just in them. There was a cool silver motility, like dust in moonlight, swirling in the depths of his irises. He blinked and the sparkle did not leave.
Panic tried to inhabit him like a new disease. He pushed himself up and found the motion awkward. Around him the cathedral breathed—a low, shifting sound of something living in the stone. Figures moved in the periphery: a solitary person at the far end kneeling, a procession of shadows gliding like a slow river. Someone chanted low words that trembled at the edge of understanding.
"Where am I?" Tyler asked into the cool air, and his voice sounded small in the vast place. It echoed and came back thin and strange.
A figure detached itself from the darkness and walked toward him. The movement was measured, like a man who has practiced walking in silence his entire life. The person wore a robe darker than the surrounding shadows; the fabric drank the little light and left the figure a silhouette that might have been cut from the night itself. As the figure approached, Tyler could see the outline of horns—no, not horns in the childish mythic sense, but a curved, subtle growth in the shadow that framed the head. His breath hitched.
The figure stopped at a respectful distance, hands folded where the robe met. A face emerged slowly from the shadow: sharp cheekbones, eyes like chips of clear stone that reflected the candlelight. His face was older than the city's wrinkles, something that had learned to map time on bone. He did not speak at first; he watched Tyler with a stillness that felt like a question made of patience.
"W-where am I?" Tyler tried again. His teeth chattered a little; the cold from outside the bridge seemed now only part of the story.
The figure inclined his head, the movement deliberate and slight. The robe rustled like leaves in a wind no one else felt. When he spoke, his voice was not loud but it carried in the church-like hush.
"You are where bargains are remembered," the man said.
Tyler's throat closed. The words were not exactly English—there was a timbre to them that suggested old wood and contract ink—but they landed clear enough.
"Bargains?" Tyler echoed, each syllable brittle.
The stranger's eyes did not blink. "Yes," he said. "You came with a wish, boy. Some doors open only when a life gives away its weight."
Tyler's head swam with that soft, sudden incredulity people reserve for impossible things. A laugh—or the shape of a laugh—escaped him, low and humorless. "I… fell asleep," he said. "I was cold. I—" His voice tried to gather the rational world again—hospital, money, forms—but the cathedral seemed to swallow each item and return it smaller, less substantial.
The man in the robe inclosed a smile that was almost a place in memory. "You fell from despair," he corrected softly. "And the chord that holds you was plucked."
Tyler's mind scrambled for sense. He pushed himself to stand, gripping at a column. The stone was cold and carried the faint echo of hands that had touched it a thousand times. He tried to count the distance between here and the bridge, tried to recall the sound of the city, the taste of the flatbread. The memories felt like photographs left in water.
"Who are you?" he asked. It was not only curiosity. It was survival. Names made things real.
The man's face softened, then changed to something like amusement. "Names are expensive," he said. "Names mark what you own. I do not sell names lightly."
A small unease crawled up Tyler's spine. He had the brittle certainty children accrue when told both truth and lie by an adult in the same breath. This figure—this man—felt ancient and patient and utterly uninterested in the ordinary bureaucracies that killed men in Darsen City. He felt as if he belonged to a ledger beyond mortal columns.
The man stepped a pace closer and the candlelight etched the hollows of his face. He raised a thin hand and in it rested a small slip of something—the color of old parchment. Ink ran across it in a script Tyler could not read, but the paper carried gravity. He could feel it in his chest like a bruise.
"You asked the world to change," the man said quietly. "You asked for a weight to be lifted."
Tyler's mouth opened and closed. The absurdity of the moment—the cathedral, the man, the parchment—might have been a dream. But the way his heart thudded in his ribcage was stubbornly, painfully real.
"What do you want?" Tyler asked before he could stop himself. The voice came out raw.
The man's eyes moved to Tyler's. For the first time there was a glance that felt like measurement. "A bargain," he said simply. "Two favors for five centuries. Or—" His voice lowered, and the candlelight swallowed his next words so that they were unable to here "a single wish for the whole."
The words were a particular kind of wrongness, a sliding of a scale that should not exist. Tyler felt the language like cold iron against his ribs.
"Five centuries of—what?" Tyler breathed, the syllables absurd, the math impossible.
The man smiled in a way that did not reach his stone eyes. "Of ownership—of the thing that weighs you beyond the living. A currency the world does not trade in public."
Tyler's breath died inside him. The cathedral's hush seemed to lean in. He thought of Silas—his father's hand—and whatever it meant to surrender. He thought of his mother's face at the desk and the officer's casual demand for coin. He thought of the attendant's low voice in the job interview building and the small humiliation of being asked to pay for a chance to work.
Everything the city had forced him into seemed to line up like a row of dominoes leading to this doorway.
He swallowed and found his voice thin as thread. "You… you can't mean that. That's—" He could not find the right words. "That's not possible."
The man's expression remained uncluttered. "Possibility is a grammar only the desperate learn," he said. "You are not the first to come here. Nor the last. The difference is what you are willing to hand over."
Tyler's hands trembled. A thousand small resistances rose like brittle alarm bells in his body—fear, disbelief, the urge to run. He wanted to step back, to find the city's indifferent neon and climb into a life that was only hard and not undone by bargains he could not fathom. But the city had already broken something inside him, and the thought of going back to his mother with paperwork and a week of delay felt like dragging her to a slow, nameless funeral.
He found his voice again, quieter, a man speaking to the world through the cracks of his own sorrow. "What would you give me?" he asked, though he was already half-afraid of the answer.
The man laid the parchment on the cold stone before him, and as he did the candlelight seemed to gather, focusing like a lens on the paper's ink. The script glimmered faintly—letters that were almost legible, almost promise.
"You may ask for the power to see and move the minds of others," the man said, the words a bluntness that made Tyler flinch. "And for the speed of skill to fill the hollow of your life. Two gifts. Five centuries"
The cathedral held its breath.
Tyler's heart hammered so loud that he could feel the rhythm in the soles of his feet. The world had shifted under him. He felt the impossible hinge opening. He thought of his father, of the forms and the officer's offer, of the attendant's petty appetite for a bribe, and something inside him—small, precise, and furious—woke like an engine coughing to life.
He did not answer. He could not yet. But something in the inner fold of his chest tightened into a promise he had not known he could make.
A faint smile ghosted across the man's lips—an expression not unkind but not friendly either. "Decide, child," he said. "The night is patient."