The first thing Elias noticed was the weight.
Not figurative—actual mass settled into his limbs as if someone had poured iron into his bones. His chest rose too slowly; when he swallowed his throat clenched and returned a voice that felt borrowed—low, rough, threaded with gravel.
He opened his eyes. Candlelight ripped across his vision in ragged bands. Iron sconces lined a vaulted stone chamber; damp air tasted of incense and old metal. He tried to sit and the world tilted. His balance was wrong: he lurched, arms scrabbling for purchase. When his palms met the floor the slap sounded too loud.
His hands were not his.
They were bigger—knuckled and scarred—calluses catching the candle-gleam. Fingers bore thin white rakes, like ropeburn or wire. He flexed them; the sensation lagged by a fraction, a puppet jerk after the string had been pulled. A hot, electric prickling crawled up the back of his skull. For a moment he felt like an actor who'd woken in someone else's costume.
Memories rose in thin shreds—catalog numbers, yellowed folios, the slow ritual of closing a museum. Elias: name intact. Ordinary. Careful. A clerk of other people's pasts.
Then heat—smoke and a door he hadn't reached.
He found, by touch, a sigil on the inside of his wrist: a tiny crown split cleanly down the middle. It throbbed, a pulse beneath skin. When his thumb brushed the carved groove a vision slammed through him—one sharp, impossible second.
A hall of shattered banners. Men shouting. A gaunt face under a cracked crown, eyes gone flat with fatigue. A breath drawn without hope. The image vanished as quickly as it came, leaving a metallic tang on his tongue and a sadness so sudden his knees buckled.
He tried to speak—just to anchor himself—"Books…," he murmured, meaning the order he'd left behind, the folio he hadn't labeled. The sound that left his mouth was not the soft librarian timbre he expected. It was hoarse and weighted, like a soldier calling a name across a ruined courtyard. The contrast startled him so badly his hands shook.
Candles guttered.
A figure stepped from the corridor's shadow: tall, wrapped in a heavy hooded cloak, presence calm and economical. Where he passed, the stones bore rings and eyes carved into them—less ornament than warning. A dull metal badge at his breast caught the candlelight: an eye encircled. Rain clung to his cloak as if he had walked through weather that never died.
He did not speak immediately. He studied Elias the way someone might read a ledger with a smudged entry, then flicked back his hood with a small, human gesture. He moved with a practiced economy—no flourish, but not without motion.
"You are awake," he said, voice dry, not theatrical. He tapped the cracked crown on Elias's wrist with a gloved finger. "Good. Waking in the vaults is inconvenient."
"Who are you?" Elias croaked. His voice still felt like an instrument retuned for other hands; it surprised him with its depth.
The man's mouth hinted at a smile that didn't reach his eyes. He stepped closer, fingers trailing briefly over a rune on the wall as though checking the grain of an old book. "Names matter less than function. For now—remember that you have a mark." He spoke the last as if ticking an item on a list. "A cracked sigil. It will show you pieces of what it remembers. It will take other things in return."
A distant noise answered—a rhythm of heavy boots on stone, measured and fast. It was not the casual patrol of city watch; its cadence was precise and inevitable. The cloaked man's posture tightened in a flash.
"We must go," he said, urgency sharpening his tone. He moved with brisk hands, snatching up a strip of dark cloth and wrapping Elias's forearm to partly obscure the sigil. "They come for marks. We don't linger."
"Who—" Elias started.
"Collectors," the man cut in. The single word landed like a verdict. "People paid to take what people should have forgotten. They take names, reliquaries, and—if a mark sings—those who wear them." He glanced toward the corridor, jaw setting. "We have little time. We move now, before the third set of steps."
The sigil pulsed again beneath the cloth. This time the pulse brought not only memory but feeling: a single bleeding thread of emotion—regret so deep it pressed on his chest like hands. For a dizzy second Elias understood, with a clarity that felt invasive, the burden of a ruler who had kept his crown by breaking others: a hollowed patience, a tiredness of soul that smelled of old wine and cold stone. The feeling left him breathless.
The cloaked man steadied him with a firm hand at the elbow, the grip practical, not pitying. "Hold to me," he said. "Listen: learn names, measure curiosity. Curiosity is a useful tool. Untempered, it gets you killed."
They moved, Elias more by following than intent; the stranger's stride was efficient, pulling Elias through the vault doorway and into a wedge of wind that smelled of the city.
Velverin lay below, cruelly beautiful.
Elias had seen skylines in memory—his harbor town's neat roofs and a curved quay—but Velverin's silhouette argued with geometry. Towers leaned at impossible angles; iron bridges arced like ribs between battered spires; gaslanterns hummed with a greenish flame. The moon hung swollen and bruised-purple, its light turning wet stone to the sheen of burnished metal.
From the maw of the city a new sound rose and settled into Elias's bones: the hiss of steam—sharp, mechanical—threaded with a distant, tinny melody that might have been a song if it had not been so obviously manufactured. The tune slanted off-key, a mechanical lament, and under it the constant clatter and murmur of lives folding into itself: carts, voices, the whispered slap of someone closing a ledger on a secret.
Figures moved beneath the bridges—merchants with patched coats, clerks with satchels, and men who kept their faces turned from doors. Velverin breathed around them, an architecture of wrong angles and lit canals, and the city's sounds wrapped Elias like a hand.
The cloaked man released his hold, then squeezed Elias's shoulder in a quick, almost brotherly gesture. "Walk steady," he said, voice low. "Keep your wrist hidden. Names are counted here, and the wrong one on the wrong list brings people."
Boots behind them grew louder—closer, methodical. The cloaked man cast a glance over his shoulder, then pushed Elias toward the underpass where shadows pooled like waiting things.
He paused at the lip of the vault and spoke, softer now, as if sharing a margin note. "You will be shown things. The sigil is a mirror that remembers. But mirrors also reflect a cost. Learn slowly. Breathe. Do not let your curiosity run ahead of your feet."
Elias looked down at the wrapped crown under the cloth and felt its faint pulse through the bandage—like a heartbeat that wanted to be heard. He flexed his strange hands, tasting the aftershadow of the soldier's rasp he'd made earlier, and tried to breathe in a world that smelled of steam and something resembling song.
Velverin met them with its hissing and its mechanical hymn—welcoming them into a city that kept its histories behind iron and sealant. As they ducked into the living ribcage of streets and bridges, the sound of boots turned into a chase: inevitable, patient, and now very close.
Elias stepped forward. The cracked crown throbbed. Behind the hiss and the song, Velverin watched, and for the first time since waking he understood the price of being noticed.
Welcome, the city seemed to say in its steam and keys, to this beautiful, dangerous hell.