Curiosity is a slow poison in Echelon, but ignorance is a bullet to the back of the skull. I don't open the package. Not yet. Not where its revelation could be another ripple on a lake they've just started monitoring. I carry its impossible warmth, its silent, sigil-marked accusation, deeper into the city' forgotten marrow.
I descend three more levels, past the drainage tunnels, into a stratum of pure silence. Here, the constant hum of the metropolis is a distant, muffled rumor. The air is tomb-cold and still, tasting of iron and abandoned ozone. My destination is a relic: a pre-Consolidation data-relay room, sealed off decades ago when the centralized Neuro-Nexus rendered its server banks obsolete. The door was welded shut, but time and corrosion had eaten a seam. I've known about this place for years. My private sanctuary. My tomb, if it ever came to that.
No cameras. No wireless signal can penetrate the lead-lined walls and the foot-thick ferrocrete. Just the skeletal remains of dead servers, their casings festooned with dust-web tapestries, and the profound, deafening silence of a place the city has chosen to forget.
This place is invisible. It is the only true quiet left in the world.
I slide through the corroded seam and into the dark. The faint, greenish glow of my implant's low-light assist paints the room in ghostly outlines. I slump against the cold wall, the package heavy in my lap. I breathe, not for calm, but to force the rhythm of my heart to slow, to push the electric fear out of my lungs. I let the city's noise—both physical and psychic—fade from my awareness. Here, I am off the grid. A statistical zero.
My implant's visual feed is still a mess of static snow, a temporary blindness induced by the magical discharge. A side-effect, a scar on my own hardware. Another invisible mark added to my growing list of liabilities.
I look down at the package. In the green gloom, it's just a dark slab. Small. Deceptively simple. Too small, too contained, to warrant the city-wide tremor it just caused. My fingers trace the matte-black surface, feeling the subtle, raised edges of the Corporate shielding layers—and beneath them, the deeper, finer groove of the etched sigil. The touch sends a jolt of recognition through me, a resonance in my bones.
This isn't new magic. It's not the wild, unstable stuff of back-alley sorcerers. This is old. Pre-Corporate. From a time when the art had rules, schools, lineages. It's not decorative. Not a crude symbol of rebellion.
It is functional. A lock. Or a key.
My fingers hover over the primary seal, a biometric lock that should only respond to the recipient's DNA. It glows a faint, dormant blue.
The whisper returns, seeping up from the quiet places inside me. It's barely audible, thin as smoke.
Open it.
A dry, humorless laugh escapes my lips, the sound alien in the dead air. "You always say that," I mutter to the emptiness within. The shadow at my feet, a pool of deeper darkness in the dark, stirs. It doesn't just wait; it leans toward the package, restless, impatient, like a hound catching a scent.
There is no choice. To not know is to be a pawn. To know is to be a target. But at least a target can run.
I press my thumb against the seal. There's no click, no mechanical release. Instead, the blue light flares, scans, then dissolves with a sound like cracking ice. The layers of composite casing unlatch silently, peeling back like the petals of a black metal flower.
The moment the inner chamber is exposed, the room changes.
The dead, still air becomes thick, charged, like the atmosphere before a lightning strike. My skin prickles. Across the room, the carcasses of the dead servers—their power supplies gutted, their motherboards fossilized—emit a low, resonant hum. It's not electronic. It's a vibration in the metal itself, a sympathetic song. Thin cracks in the ceiling, through which a sickly neon glow from some distant, functioning level always seeped, now darken. The light doesn't just dim; it's sucked toward the open package, bending and warping as if passing through a lens of pure hunger.
Inside the case, cushioned on a bed of inert grey foam, lies a book.
Not a data-slate. Not a crystal storage unit. Not anything synthetic.
Paper.
Real, woven-cellulose paper. The scent hits me—aged leather, dry vellum, ozone, and something else, something verdant and wild that has no business existing this deep in the steel and permacrete.
My pulse jackhammers against my temples.
Paper is contraband in Echelon. It is heresy. It cannot be tracked, remotely edited, or instantly deleted. It is permanent. It is a memory the system cannot control. Possession alone is a Black-level offense.
But this… this is something else entirely.
The cover is bound in leather so black it seems to drink the faint green light from my vision. It is warm, not from the package's insulation, but with its own latent energy. Across its surface, silver-white symbols—the same language as the sigil—crawl and shift. They aren't static impressions. They move, slithering like serpents, rearranging themselves in subtle, complex patterns when my gaze wavers, as if alive and aware.
Embossed at the center, burned so deep into the hide it seems part of its very substance, is a title. The words are in High Script, a language of ceremony and power, dead for a century.
NEON GRIMOIRE
The air leaves my lungs in a silent rush.
I don't remember learning to read High Script. I don't remember being taught the glyphs of practical thaumaturgy. Yet, my eyes parse the title not as foreign shapes, but as understood meaning, as innate as knowing hunger or thirst. The knowledge is just… there. A submerged memory, triggered.
The moment my fingertips, trembling slightly, make contact with the cover, the world dissolves.
Pain, white-hot and precise, lances up my arm, not damaging nerves, but excavating them. My vision is overwritten. Not by darkness, but by light—blinding, panoramic memories that are not my own.
I see cities, but not Echelon. Cities of crystal and living wood, where light comes from floating orbs and streets pulse with ley-line energy. I see magic not as a hidden, furtive thing, but as architecture, as art, woven openly into the fabric of life. Then, the fire. Towers of pure logic and grey alloy rising amidst the greenery, cold and sharp. I see the fall. Not with bombs, but with silence. A great, smothering quiet that drains the color from the world, that severs the connections, that cages the wild energies. The memory ends with a profound, echoing hush, the sound of a world being muted.
I gasp, wrenching my hand back as if burned. The phantom cityscapes fade, leaving afterimages on my retinas and a throbbing ache in my soul.
The book doesn't fall. It hangs in the air, suspended an inch above the open case.
My own shadow, pooled around me, reacts. Tendrils of darkness peel away from the floor, coiling up toward the floating Grimoire instinctively, sinuously. They don't threaten it. They approach it. They move with a recognition that bypasses my conscious mind, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. The shadow recognizes a master. Or perhaps, a key to its own cage.
"So it's true," I whisper, the sound raw in my throat. The corporate history feeds, the sanitized lessons—all lies. "They didn't destroy it."
The realization is a tectonic shift in my understanding of the world. The Corporates didn't erase magic. They couldn't. Something this fundamental, this tied to the world's bones, cannot be unmade. So they did the next best thing. They contained it. Bottled it. Buried the primers, the manuals, the maps. They made the art forget itself.
The Neon Grimoire snaps open of its own volition.
Ancient, thick pages flip with a sound like rustling wings, moving too fast to read, a blur of intricate diagrams, flowing script, and shifting, prismatic illuminations. They stop abruptly.
On the left page is a complex, nine-pointed sigil within a circle of thorns. On the right, a line of text glows with a soft, silver fire.
But I don't read it with my eyes.
It burns itself directly into the visual cortex, bypassing optics entirely, a line of cold flame in the darkness of my mind:
RESIDUAL BEARER DETECTED.
COMPATIBILITY: CONFIRMED.
SYSTEM DESIGNATION: ANOMALY PRIME.
I stagger to my feet, my back hitting the cold server rack. The label isn't on the page. It's in my head.
"No," I say, voice low and fierce with denial. "I'm not your 'Prime.' I'm a courier. A ghost."
The Grimoire doesn't argue. It simply floats, the open page pulsing gently.
Then, the room shakes.
It's not a physical tremor. It's deeper. A convulsion in the city's nervous system. Far above, through layers of steel and suffering, I feel it—a silent, digital scream tearing through the Neuro-Nexus. It's not sound; it's pure, agonized data. Alerts cascading in a torrent, prediction models fracturing like glass, the seamless web of control snagging and tearing.
They found it.
The lockdown isn't for me. Not for the courier, the anomaly.
It's for the book.
My implant, already damaged, suddenly explodes. My visual field is obliterated by a screaming cascade of warnings, overlapping, flashing, unreadable in their panic.
>>LOCKDOWN INITIATED: SECTORS 7-THROUGH-12-DELTA
>>CORPORATE SECURITY RESPONSE UNITS DEPLOYED. CLEARANCE: OMEGA.
>>THREAT LEVEL CLASSIFICATION UPDATED: BLACK. REPEAT: BLACK.
Black-level.
Exterminatus. They don't send peacekeepers or investigators. They send sanitizers. They will seal the sector and scour it clean with plasma and focused resonance beams until nothing, not even bacteria, not even a memory, remains. They will burn the data and the reality it describes.
The Neon Grimoire slams shut with a finality that echoes in the bones of the dead room. It drops, not floats, into my waiting hands. It is immeasurably heavier now, dense with purpose and peril. It feels less like an object and more like an organ—a new, essential, and terrifying part of my own body.
The whisper that has lived in my skull for years is gone. In its place is a voice. Clear. Unmistakable. My own, yet not.
RUN.
I don't hesitate. I shove the warm, leather-bound weight into my inner coat, its presence against my chest a second, unnatural heartbeat. I am moving before the thought is complete.
As I scramble back toward the corroded seam, the walls around me begin to glow. Not with light, but with a network of hot, orange lines—power conduits, long dormant, now flooding with catastrophic energy as the Corporates reroute everything to seal the tomb. The city is transforming around me, from an organism into a prison, from a home into a crematorium. Hatchways slam shut in the distance with the sound of forging steel. The air begins to taste of ozone and panic.
So this is why magic is rare.
Not because it faded from the world.
Because anything powerful enough to remember the world before, powerful enough to change the world now, was hunted down, captured, and locked away in places like this…
…waiting.
Waiting for a key.
Waiting for a bearer who could survive long enough to find it.
Waiting for me.
And now, with the Grimoire's awakening scream echoing in the data-streams, Echelon doesn't just have an anomaly to hunt.
It has a name to put on the termination order.
ANOMALY PRIME.