The city breathed in perpetual twilight. There was no sun here, no dawn to gild the spires or noon to cast honest shadows—only the umbral glow of bioluminescent sigils snaking up ferrocrete towers, and the cold, static stars of neon bleeding into a sky of eternal velvet. Ancient stone buttresses, carved with forgotten gods, groaned under the weight of crystalline data conduits and throbbing arterial pipes that pulsed with stolen light. The air tasted of ozone, damp stone, and a metallic hint of something older than the foundations.
People moved through the grand boulevards and cramped arterial alleys with a languid, unhurried grace. Their complexions were the colour of cathedral marble and moth-wing, luminous in the artificial haloes cast from above. Smiles, when they flashed, were sharp and deliberate, a glint of polished enamel that caught the low light like splintered crystal. Conversation was a murmur, a susurrus that seemed to siphon sound rather than create it, leaving pockets of profound silence in its wake.
The darkness was not an absence, but a presence. It pooled in the lee of cyclopean arches, clung to the gargoyles staring sightlessly from hybrid rooftops, and seeped from the very cobblestones underfoot. It was a rich, nourishing dark, a velvet shroud that made the manufactured illumination seem like a timid afterthought. This was a world that had turned its back on the sun and, in the profound silence of its eternal night, had learned to thrive in the exquisite chill of its own making.
The crowd gathered before the Sentinel Gate was a sea of hushed desperation, a living tide of pale faces tilted toward the only source of true order in the sprawling, anarchic dark. The Gate itself was a monument of impossible scale, forged from a single sheet of void-black adamant, a metal whispered to be older than the eternal night itself. Across its seamless face, sigils of containment and exclusion glowed with a sullen, deep violet light, shifting like slow-beating hearts.
Before it stood the sentinels, a line of impassable silence. Their armor was a brutal marriage of the archaic and the hyper-advanced: polished black carapaces that resembled the chitin of some colossal insect, articulated with joints of humming blue plasma. Over their chests and shoulders lay segmented plates of a darker, non-reflective material, etched with the same ghostly sigils as the gate. Their helms were smooth, featureless obsidian save for a single, vertical slit where a crimson sensor-light pulsed in time with their breathing. They held no obvious weapons, but the air around them crackled with latent, lethal energy.
The murmuring of the crowd—pleas, bribes, curses swallowed half-formed—died to an absolute stillness as the central sigil on the gate flared. A seam, impossibly fine, appeared in the adamant, and from it, she emerged.
She did not walk so much as she unfurled, a stain of deeper darkness against the gate. Her gown was black, not the absence of light but its consumption, a fabric that seemed to drink the ambient glow of the city. Upon her brow rested not gold or jewels, but a crown of twisted, blackened thorns, each tip gleaming with a captured pinpoint of cold light. Her skin was the pallor of a creature that had never known anything but starlight and artifice, making the scarlet of her smirk a shocking, violent punctuation.
It was that smirk, constant and knowing, that held the crowd more than the crown or the gate. It was the smirk of someone privy to a cruel and private joke. And around her hung an aura that warped perception; the very silence felt heavier, the air tasted sharper, and the immense, crushing weight of the eternal night seemed to bow toward her, acknowledging a deeper, more potent darkness. She surveyed the hopeful, hungry faces with a gaze that seemed to strip them bare, her sharp teeth just visible behind her smile, as she prepared to speak a word that would be either salvation or doom.
She raised her hands, a slow, deliberate gesture that seemed to gather the very silence around her. Her voice, when it came, was not loud, yet it carried to the farthest edges of the crowd, smooth as polished obsidian, each word a perfect, enunciated drop in a pool of quiet.
"Behold this gathering," she began, her crimson smirk softening into a serene, commanding curve. "A multitude of wills, of wants, of whispered hopes. You stand at the threshold of harmony, yet you do so as a cacophony. True harmony is not a gift the city gives. It is a symphony we compose together. It requires the surrender of the single, discordant note to the grandeur of the whole. It is the alignment of every purpose, every breath, every beat of your hearts, with a greater, singular design."
Her words wove through the air, subtle and potent. The last vestiges of murmuring ceased. Faces that had been etched with anxiety and cunning went slack, eyes fixed upon her with a rapt, glassy intensity. It was as if her voice bypassed thought and spoke directly to the core of them, a hypnotic melody promising order in exchange for will.
"Cooperation is not a request," she continued, her gaze sweeping over them, sharp teeth glinting. "It is the foundation. It is the unbreakable adamant from which our peace is forged. From the highest spire to the lowest crypt, we are one organism. And an organism cannot war with itself and hope to thrive in the everlasting night."
She let the concept hang, a flawless, irrefutable truth in the heavy air. Not a single voice rose in disagreement. Not a single shuffle of dissent broke the stillness. They were caught, utterly, in the velvet snare of her presence and her pitch-perfect logic.
"Now," she said, the commanding edge returning, smooth and final. "You will form a line. A single, ordered line. This is the first note of our new harmony. Let it begin."
She lowered her hands. As one, the crowd stirred, not with the chaotic jostle of before, but with a eerie, synchronized purpose. Bodies turned, steps fell into place, and a perfect, silent queue began to coalesce before the impassive sentinels and the yawning blackness of the Sentinel Gate. No one disagreed. Disagreement was an impossibility. It was a dissonance that simply no longer existed.
The woman, Miranda, leaned close to the lead sentinel. Her whisper was a breath of frost against his sensor-lit helm. "Standard tithe. Have them show their valuables. And tell them to smile. Let us see their gratitude."
The guard gave a single, sharp nod. His amplified voice boomed over the docile line. "You will present all personal valuables for the civic tithe. You will do so with a smile. It is a small price for harmony."
Miranda turned, the train of her void-dark gown whispering across the obsidian plaza, as two sentinels moved to escort her away.
"Miranda!"
The name was a crack in the perfect silence, a raw, desperate shout from the back of the crowd. It was not spoken with reverence, but with accusation.
She did not turn. Not yet.
A man, his face gaunt under the grime, his clothes ragged threads against the pale uniformity of the crowd, pushed forward. His eyes were wide with a horror that seemed entirely his own. "It's a lie! All of it! This 'harmony' is a leash! She doesn't want your cooperation, she wants your surrender! She's stealing your minds while you smile and hand her your treasures!"
He looked frantically from face to glassy face, seeing only placid acceptance. "Don't you see? You're under her—"
His plea was drowned out as three men from the line broke ranks, their own expressions twisting with devout fury. "Blasphemer!" one spat. "The Sovereign's city is the last bastion! The only order left in the dark! You would ruin this for us all?"
Another shoved him. "We have a chance because of her! You speak with the chaos of the outer wastes!"
Like a triggered immune response, the crowd stirred. A clod of damp, filthy earth struck the dissenter's shoulder. Then another hit his cheek. Soon, a pathetic rain of mud and debris was flying at him from the formerly placid line, his words of warning met with the primal anger of those whose sole hope was being threatened.
He raised his arms, sputtering. "You're controlled! Can't you feel it?!"
They refused. They could not. To listen was to admit the terrible fragility of the sanctuary they craved.
It was then that Miranda turned.
The movement was slow, inevitable. The crowd fell silent instantly, their anger freezing into expectation. Her playful, lethal smirk returned as her gaze found the isolated, mud-spattered man. Her voice, when it came, was a melody of gentle, mocking concern that carried to every ear.
"Such a lonely note," she sang out, tilting her head. "So desperate to be heard that he would break our beautiful silence. Poor, discordant thing. You speak of theft, but you are the thief—you tried to steal their peace." She took a single, graceful step towards him, the crown of thorns gleaming. "We do not punish discord here. We… curate it. Sentinels, please escort our passionate guest to the Harmonization Chamber. Let us see if his vibrant individuality can be tuned to a key that benefits the chorus."
Her words were not a command of violence, but a sentence of erasure, wrapped in a smile. As the two sentinels with plasma-humming gauntlets moved toward him, the crowd watched, not with pity, but with a serene approval. The symphony, after all, must be protected from a single, screaming wrong note.
Miranda turned her back on the scene, the man's stifled protests swallowed by the efficient silence of the sentinels. Her duty at the gate was complete; a fresh influx of willing, pliable resources was secured. She had other stages to attend, other instruments to tune.
Her escort, a phalanx of four black-armoured sentinels, formed a moving wall around her as she glided across the plaza towards a waiting vehicle. It was a car of sleek, predatory lines, its body forged from the same void-black adamant as the gate, absorbing the sickly light. It rested on a cushion of silent anti-gravity, humming faintly. A sentinel opened the rear door—a seamless slice that opened like a pupil dilating—and she slid into the plush, blood-red interior.
The door sealed with a sigh. The world outside became a muted tableau through the one-way crystalline glass. The car slid forward, leaving the gate and its hopeful, hapless line behind, moving from the ordered grandeur of the outer rim into the cavernous, towering depths of the inner city. Spires of fused bone and steel pierced the artificial gloom, connected by glowing causeways where sleek transports flitted like silent bats.
As the darkened cityscape flowed past, Miranda's serene mask faded. The smirk dissolved, leaving a cold, porcelain blankness. In the privacy of the moving vault, her true face emerged.
'An orchestra', her thoughts began, 'a sharp, furious counterpoint to the external silence. A perfect, beautiful system. Every note in its place, every instrument yielding to the conductor's will. That is civilization. That is survival. And yet… there is always the one.' The image of the gaunt, shouting man flashed behind her eyes.' The one who insists on blaring his own crude, selfish noise. Who mistakes the symphony for a prison, rather than the only thing keeping the primordial silence at bay. They are a flaw in the composition. An error in the code.'
A low, almost imperceptible tremor ran through the car's frame. The ambient temperature in the cabin dropped several degrees. Frost began to spider-web delicately across the inside of her window.
The driver, a man in a crisp black uniform whose eyes were fixed forward through the cockpit's viewscreen, spoke without turning. His voice was carefully neutral. "Your Radiance? Is everything… aligned?"
The question punctured her reverie. In the reflection of the glass, she saw her own face—pale, severe, furious. She blinked. Slowly, meticulously, she rebuilt the smile, stitching it back into place until it was once again a thing of perfect, placid control.
"Quite alright, Silas," she said, her voice smooth as ever. "A momentary dissonance. It has passed."
But inside, the truth was a colder, lonelier note. 'It hasn't passed. It accumulates. They kneel, they obey, they smile… and it is so terribly quiet. A single note, however perfect, is not a chorus. A conductor without an orchestra is just a woman in an empty hall,' whispering to herself.
Then, it struck her. A spark of genuine, dark delight in the barren landscape of her thoughts. She did not need more obedient instruments. She needed… a duet. Something with a will sharp enough to provide a counterpoint, to make the silence that followed feel earned, not simply enforced.
"Silas," she said, her voice now bright with playful purpose. "Change of course. Do not take us back to the Spire yet. Let us take the scenic route. The River District, I think."
In the reflection, she saw his shoulders tense almost imperceptibly. "The River District, Your Radiance? That is… that brushes against Maelstrom territory. Their operations are… unruly. Your security detail would prefer a more controlled route."
Miranda let out a soft, genuine laugh, a sound like shattering crystal. "Oh, Silas. You worry too much. I own the Maelstrom. I simply allow them to believe they are unruly. It keeps their instincts sharp. Now, drive. I wish to see how my more feral pets are behaving this evening."
She settled back into the seat, watching as the ordered civic towers gave way to a more jagged, organic skyline. Here, the buildings were older, cracked, slathered with bioluminescent graffiti that pulsed like gangrenous veins. The air, even through the filters, seemed to carry a heavier, more visceral scent—of rust, stagnant water, and hot metal. The symphony here was in a different key, but the conductor, she mused with a restored, venomous smile, was still the same. She just needed to find the right player to listen for her baton.
Silas guided the black convoy through a labyrinth of decaying architecture, where the civic glow-strips were shattered and replaced by the flickering, unreliable light of grafted chemical lanterns. The air grew thick with the scent of fermented algae, ozone, and hot, un-filtered waste. In the shadows, children—pale, sharp-eyed creatures of the eternal night—played their vicious games. Miranda watched, a faint, anthropological interest on her face, as a pack of them expertly relieved a stumbling figure of a sparking power cell before vanishing into a sewer grate. It was a feral, ugly melody, but it was alive.
The vehicles came to a silent halt before a squat structure of fused rubble and rusted iron beams. A single, blood-red neon sign sputtered the word "Nadir" in a jagged script. This was the place.
Before her sentinels could deploy, Miranda's voice cut through the comms. "I go in alone." A chorus of static-filled protest erupted. "Your Radiance, the threat assessment—"
"Silas," she said, her tone leaving no room for the guards.
In the driver's seat, Silas let out a near-silent sigh. He had seen this before. He knew the cost, and the rare, terrible joy it brought her. "Stand down," his voice crackled with authority to the detail. "Form a perimeter. No one enters. No one leaves without her word."
The lead sentinel gave a stiff, disapproving nod, but the black-armored figures took positions in the gloom, becoming one with the shadows, their sensor lights dimmed to a faint ember glow.
Miranda pushed the heavy, scarred door open. A small brass bell, hopelessly anachronistic, gave a frail ting above her.
The interior was a cave of warm, smoky light and deep shadow. The air was rich with the smell of synth-whiskey, ozone, and something uniquely, defiantly organic—perhaps real yeast, perhaps old paper. A man stood behind the bar, his back to her, wiping a glass with a cloth.
He heard the bell, and without turning, began the automatic greeting. "Welc-"
He turned. The words died in his throat. The glass and cloth fell from his hands, hitting the polished bar with a dull thud before rolling into the sink with a clatter.
His skin was not pale. It held the faint, warm echo of a peach tone, a ghost of a sun his bloodline had never truly known but somehow remembered. His hair, a tousled mess of dark chestnut, fell over sharp, wary eyes the colour of old whisky. He wore a simple, long-sleeved white shirt, untucked over black pants, the fabric clean but worn. He was an island of faded colour in a sea of monochrome.
"We're closed," he finished, his voice flat and hard, all pretended warmth gone.
Miranda's smile was a slow, wicked bloom in the dim light. She glided forward, the hem of her consuming black gown whispering against the sawdust-strewn floor. Every other patron, a handful of grizzled, hard-eyed figures hunched over their drinks, had frozen. They didn't stare; they deliberately looked away, down, anywhere but at her. They knew what her presence meant.
"So cold, Lucian," she purred, reaching the bar and resting her pale fingertips on its stained wood. "After all we've shared. After all the duets we've performed. One might think you weren't happy to see me."
The man, Lucian, didn't move. His jaw was tight. "What we shared was you pulling the strings and me dancing until I bled. This is my place. My silence. You don't belong here, Miranda."
"My silence," she corrected gently, her sharp teeth just visible. "I simply allow you to curate this little corner of it. This charming… dissonance." She looked around, her gaze lingering on a patched wall, a handmade shelf of real books. "It's quaint. It almost smells like a memory. But we both know the only reason this bar still stands, the only reason your heart still beats its warm, rebellious little rhythm, is because I find it… amusing."
Lucian finally met her eyes, his own blazing with a hatred that was the most alive thing she'd felt all night. "What do you want?" Her playful smirk softened into something more contemplative, more genuinely curious. "Why, Lucian," she whispered, leaning in slightly. "I'm feeling a bit lonely. And I've come to listen to the only other person in this city who isn't afraid to sing out of tune."
The silence after her snap was profound, broken only by the shuffle of departing patrons and the distant, fading echo of the bell. Lucian didn't watch them go. His focus was on the dark wine, a liquid so deep it seemed to swallow the lamplight, as he poured two fingers into a fresh glass.
"You're bad for business," he stated flatly, placing the glass before her.
"I am the business, Lucian," she corrected, her voice a soft melody in the empty room. She picked up the glass, swirling the obsidian liquid without drinking. "Your little syndicate runs guns, information, and fear because I allow it. You could have palaces. Instead, you choose to… play bartender. It's beneath you."
He leaned against the back counter, arms crossed over his untucked shirt. "It's honest work. Unlike you, I don't get a thrill from turning lives into ledger entries. Or ending them."
A genuine, rich laugh escaped her, echoing off the bottles. "Oh, your precious innocence. It's your most charming fiction. You think serving poison in glasses is morally superior to serving order from a throne? We both deal in necessities, my love. Yours are just… smaller."
The last of the outside noise faded. They were truly alone. Miranda traced the rim of her glass with a pale, pointed fingernail, the faint ting a punctuation in the quiet.
"I miss it, you know," she murmured, her voice dropping to a confidential whisper. "The warmth. The vitality. The… sweetness of true human blood. Everything now is so synthetic. So cold. It sustains, but it does not… sing."
Lucian said nothing, his back to her as he meticulously dried a glass that was already clean.
Driven by a need to shatter his stoicism, she glided from her stool. Her movement was silent as she circled the bar, coming to stand behind him. He stiffened but did not turn. Slowly, she wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek against the warm, tense plane of his back. Her voice was a breath against the thin fabric of his shirt.
"It was like sunlight given form… a burst of life on the tongue. I can almost taste the memory of it when I'm near you."
He stood rigid in her embrace. "Is that it, then?" he asked, his voice stripped of all emotion. "The grand reason? You keep me like a vintage bottle in your cellar? Let me run your underworld just so the blood stays spiced with ambition before you finally uncork me?"
Her arms tightened slightly. For the second time that night, the perfect, practiced smirk on her face wavered and died. The question echoed in the hollow space inside her. Why?
It wasn't just the blood. The blood was a memory, a craving. He was… a feeling. A discord so beautiful it ached. He was the only one who looked at her not with worship or terror, but with clear, unvarnished hatred—a passion so intense it was its own form of intimacy. Was it love, this desperate need to possess and be challenged? Or was it just the ultimate lust—a hunger for the one thing her power could not truly command?
The hesitation stretched, thin and fragile as a spider's silk. In that silence, the truth was too vast, too vulnerable to examine. It was easier to retreat into the predator's role, the simple, brutal calculus of hunger.
She felt him waiting, felt the heat of his life through his shirt. The lie was a cold stone in her throat.
"Yes," she whispered finally, the word soft and deadly against his back. It was the answer he expected. The answer that kept the dangerous, beautiful distance between them intact. She released him and stepped back, the smile returning to her face like a shield sliding into place, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. "You are my rarest vintage, Lucian. And a wise collector never drinks her last, best bottle on a mere whim."
Lucian's small, self-loathing chuckle hung in the air, sharper than any shard of glass he'd ever swept away. "Yeah. I am yours... right, Miranda?"
'No'.
The thought was a silent detonation in the cathedral of her certainty. Her smile, that finely-wrought mask, trembled on its hooks.
He looked at her, and on his face—a face that remembered sunlight—was a smile of pure, acid resignation. "Right, Miranda?"
'I am a spider. He is the fly. The geometry is simple. The outcome is ordained.' This was the scripture of her existence. Right, Miranda?
Her smile vanished. It didn't fade; it was extinguished. And with it, the very atmosphere in the bar seemed to leach of all warmth, as if her emotional core had been a hidden furnace and was now a dead star. The chemical lanterns guttered. Frost raced anew across the bottle behind the bar with a sound like tearing silk.
What was this man to her? Not a resource. Not a vintage. He was a question she had spent decades refusing to articulate. A paradox made flesh: the only one who saw the spider and pitied it, even as he was trapped. To feel something for a mortal was the ultimate absurdity, a symphony written for an instrument that would inevitably shatter. She felt… nothing. That was the only safe answer. The only immortal answer.
Right, Miranda?
The silence stretched, cavernous and accusing. For the first time in a century, words failed her. The conductor had lost the score.
Instead of answering, she lifted the glass of night-black wine. She looked at her reflection in its impossible depths—a pale, crowned ghost—and then she drank. She drank it not with her usual predatory grace, but in one swift, desperate tilt of her head, a mortal gesture of seeking oblivion. The liquid was cold, complex, bitter. It tasted of the void between stars.
She set the empty glass down with a sharp click that echoed like a verdict. Without a glance back, she turned and walked toward the door, her gait no longer a glide but a hurried, almost mortal retreat. The train of her gown, which usually flowed like spilled night, seemed to snag on the rough floorboards.
Her hand was on the cold iron of the door handle when she stopped. She did not turn. Her voice, when it came, was stripped of all its layers of velvet and venom. It was quiet, flat, and final.
"Bye, Lucian." Two words. A mortal farewell. Not a command, not a promise, not a threat. An ending.
She pulled the door open. The frail bell gave its same, meaningless ting. Then she was gone, swallowed by the eternal dark outside, leaving only the deepening cold and the echo of her absence.
In the sudden, hollow silence of the Nadir, Lucian stood motionless. The smile had long since bled from his face. He looked at the empty glass on the bar, then at the closed door. A strange, profound stillness settled over him, as if a constant, painful pressure he had lived with for years had abruptly ceased, leaving only a vast, unfamiliar emptiness in its wake.
Something had died. In her, as she fled the one truth she could not dominate. And in him, as the last, foolish ember of hope guttered out in the cold draft from the door.
Outside, Miranda stepped into the waiting car. She did not speak. Silas, seeing her face in the rearview—a face of marble and shattered glass—asked no questions. The convoy lifted silently into the gloom, leaving the feral district behind.
The chapter closed not with a clash of wills or a grand pronouncement, but with the quiet, devastating sound of two hearts, in their own monstrous ways, turning to stone. The symphony played on, but in that moment, the conductor and her most cherished instrument had both gone profoundly, irreparably silent[1]
[1] I hate how now i have to use instrument analogy throughout the entire book coz of this first chapter. Damn it!