Silas did not believe in miracles. Only in machinery.
Not because Mournevard was a city of gears, not because every street hummed with the metallic pulse of Raymond AORTA's ancient engine. No Silas believed in machinery because machines were honest. People weren't. Not his mother, who smiled too brightly. Not his father, who prayed too loudly. Not his brothers, who pretended not to hear what he heard every night beneath the floorboards.
The heartbeat.
Slow. Metallic. Patient.
Always listening.
Silas heard it from the moment he could stand. It was his lullaby, his warning, his education. It whispered to him not in words, but in intent a pressure in his skull, a command etched into his bones.
By twelve, he already knew what Mournevard refused to accept.
Raymond AORTA never died.
He descended.
Deeper into the gears. Deeper into the city's core. Deeper into the quiet places of a child's mind that could not defend itself.
The First Patriarch. The First Machinist. The man who taught iron to breathe.
Legends said he replaced his bones with brass and steel, that his thoughts merged with the turning gears, that the undercity itself pulsed at the rhythm of his will. That the city did not run on steam alone but on a living mind trapped within it.
Silas learned to live with the sound.
His family did not.
They whispered that he was cursed. Marked. That he listened to something no one dared name. On the coldest nights, when steam swelled the pipes and gears screamed like wounded creatures, they locked him outside.
"Just until morning," his mother would whisper. "Just until he stops hearing."
Silas never stopped hearing.
The night everything changed, Mournevard's fog turned red.
Lamps reflected off the metal veins beneath the streets, bruising the mist with rust-colored light. Silas was sixteen.
Lord Ravien AORTA moved through the district.
He did not walk. He drifted as if the world bent out of his way in quiet reverence. Fog curved around him. Lamps dimmed as he passed. Every buried gear aligned to the rhythm of his step.
Silas felt the city shudder.
The Machine Heart skipped a beat.
Ravien stopped.
Turned his head.
And Silas knew he had been found.
There were no words for Ravien. He was too still. Too perfect. An idea wearing flesh. His presence pressed against Silas' skull like physical weight, bending reality subtly around him.
"You hear it," Ravien murmured.
Silas said nothing. His throat had locked itself shut.
Ravien didn't need an answer.
"The Machine Heart marks few. Fewer survive the knowing." A pause. "And your family do they hear it too?"
Silas swallowed. His voice came out thin. "No."
"A pity."
The words sounded exact. Inevitable. Like the world passing judgment.
Then everything broke.
Ravien stepped forward.
The district fell silent.
The Machine Heart did not speak to Ravien.
It spoke to Silas.
A pressure behind his eyes. A pulse in his throat. An absolute certainty in his bones.
His family would not survive the night.
Not because they had wronged him. Not because he hated them.
Because the Machine Heart demanded silence around its Listener.
And Silas...
Silas obeyed.
He did not use blades. He did not use fire.
He used truth.
He told each of them what lay beneath Mournevard. What the pipes truly carried. What Raymond had become. What Ravien kept alive.
What had chosen him.
Piece by piece, thought by thought, his family broke.
They clawed at their heads. They screamed at empty air. They begged the fog to stop touching them.
None survived.
Silas touched no one.
The world did it.
Mournevard didn't need monsters.
It built them from ordinary people by feeding them truths too heavy to bear.
When the screams faded, Ravien appeared beside him, silent as dew forming.
"There is no guilt," he whispered. "You did not end them. Their minds simply collapsed beneath a weight they were never built to carry. You only offered it."
Silas stared into the fog where his family had vanished.
Ravien's hand rested against his back.
"Come. Your life above ends now. The Heart waits."
Without hesitation, Ravien raised his hand.
Silas was ripped from the cobblestones and hurled into the mouth of the undercity. Air tore apart around him. Steel and stone blurred past. Gears spun like teeth. Steam burned his skin raw.
He struck a platform hard. Bone screamed. Lungs burned.
The Machine Heart pulsed through him.
Testing.
Ravien floated above, untouchable, radiant with demigod power—the living echo of the First Patriarch himself.
And still…
Ravien was small.
From the shadows where frozen gears stood like a cathedral of dead gods, a figure emerged.
No footsteps.
No disturbance.
The world itself stepped aside.
Silas knew him before his mind could form the thought.
Raymond AORTA.
Impossibly tall. Impossibly precise. Impossibly terrible.
Brass and bronze glimmered beneath living skin. Furnace-red eyes burned with unreadable will. Power radiated from him like gravity. The undercity bowed every piston, every column, every chamber breathing in synchrony with his presence.
The man who carved life from iron. The mind that turned machinery into divinity.
He knelt.
Cold-warm metal fingers touched Silas' cheek.
The Machine Heart shuddered.
Raymond whispered in a voice older than memory, a voice of grinding gears and impossible vision:
"Not yet."
The world collapsed.
Light imploded. Sound folded backward. Gears screamed in reverse.
Ravien reached out....
And his hand passed through Silas like smoke.
Silas fell.
Not downward.
Backward.
Into himself.
Past machines. Past memory. Past death.
Darkness tore open into breath.
Air burned into newborn lungs.
Cloth wrapped his skin.
Hands lifted him.
Voices wept.
"He's perfect," a man whispered.
Silas tried to scream.
He could not speak.
He could barely see.
The world was vast. Blurred. Suffocating.
A woman cried with joy.
And buried beneath the fog of infancy, a terror settled into his bones as realization struck him:
He was a baby.
Alive again.
Restarted.
Not mercy.
Not a second chance.
A decision.
And in the deepest corner of his new skull, Raymond AORTA's whisper remained:
"Not yet."