The concept of "Morning" in Aethelgard was a lie told by clocks.
There was no sunrise. The horizon simply bruised. The deep, suffocating charcoal of the upper atmosphere lightened to the color of a healing hematoma—a dull, throbbing purple that offered visibility without warmth.
Kaelen watched this transition from the driver's bench of the iron-wheeled wagon. He had been awake for four hours, listening to the Strider-beasts breathe. Their respiration was wet and labored, a sound that reminded him of a bellows pumping mud.
Respiration efficiency: 74%. Fluid buildup in the lungs detectable. Projected failure of lead beast: 6 days.
He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear the grit, but the grit was spiritual as much as it was physical.
They were crossing the Weeping Flats. Here, the ground was not sand or rust, but a vast, flat expanse of salt and silica that had fused together during the first days of the Severance. The ground was white, cracked into perfect hexagons that stretched to the horizon. It looked like a floor tiled by a mad giant.
"It's too flat," Elara's voice drifted up from the bench beside him. She was hugging her knees, staring at the white geometry.
"It's the salt," Kaelen muttered, checking the compass. The needle was spinning lazily—magnetic north was a suggestion, not a law, in this sector. "The oceans boiled off when the atmosphere thinned. This is what was left behind. The skeleton of the sea."
"No," Elara said, shaking her head. "I mean the world. It feels... thin. Like if I scratched the ground too hard, I'd punch through to the nothing underneath."
Kaelen looked at her. The child possessed a terrifying intuition for the metaphysics of the apocalypse.
"That's the Severance," Kaelen said quietly. "You're feeling the lack of a substrate."
He pointed upward with a gloved hand. Not at the horizon, but straight up, into the oppressive vault of the sky.
"Do you know what those are?" he asked.
Elara looked up at the Thirty-Three Dead Stars. They hung there, massive and motionless. They were not points of light. They were immense, distinct shapes—silhouettes of titans curled in fetal positions, frozen in the absolute zero of the void. They blocked out the nebulae behind them.
"The Gods," she whispered.
"The Architects," Kaelen corrected. "People think 'God' means a king on a throne. But they weren't kings. They were the physics."
He gestured to the white flats. "Volatus didn't just rule the sky; he was the concept of buoyancy. Ignis wasn't just a fire god; he was the principle of combustion. When they died, the laws they embodied started to rot."
Kaelen picked up a pebble of salt from the wagon floor. He held it out, then dropped it. It fell, but it fell slowly. Too slowly. It drifted down like a feather, bouncing softly when it hit the wood.
"Gravity is Volatus's corpse," Kaelen explained, his voice devoid of wonder. "It's a habit the universe is trying to break. Fire is colder now than it was a hundred years ago. Steel is more brittle because the God of Binding is rotting in the dark. Every time you breathe, you aren't just inhaling air; you're inhaling the decay of the fundamental constants."
Elara watched the pebble settle. "So everything is broken?"
"Everything is orphaned," Kaelen said. "We are living in a house where the walls have forgotten how to stand."
By midday—marked only by the arbitrary chiming of Kaelen's pocket watch—they stopped to rest the beasts. The salt flats amplified the heat of the ground, creating mirages of shimmering grey water that vanished when approached.
They sat in the shadow of the wagon. Korgath was oiling the joints of his armor. The sound was a rhythmic scrape-hiss, scrape-hiss.
"The rations taste like ash," Vanya murmured, taking a bite of a nutrient brick. She didn't look disgusted; she looked resigned.
"The rations are ash," Korgath grunted. "Compressed fungal blooms grown on the underside of the city. But it's not the food, Elf. It's your tongue."
Vanya touched her pale lips. "I know. The sensation of 'sweetness' is fading. I remember strawberries. I remember the word, and the shape, but I cannot conjure the taste in my mind anymore. It is like trying to remember a color in a pitch-black room."
"That is the Atrophy," Kaelen said, not looking up from his ledger. He was counting bolts again. Six. Still six. "The world is losing resolution. Tastes, colors, emotions. They are all less vivid than they were before the Severance. We are fading out."
"How do you govern a fading world?" Elara asked suddenly. She was looking at Kaelen's ledger. "You count everything. But who counts you?"
Kaelen paused. He looked at the vast, empty white wasteland.
"We don't have a government, Elara. We have a Hospice Care team."
He closed the book with a snap.
"Before the Severance, there were Kingdoms. Empires. They fought over borders and gold. When the sky broke, those things became irrelevant. You can't tax a peasant who has turned to stone. You can't conquer a neighbor when the land between you has floated away."
He drew a circle in the salt with his boot.
"The Arbiters rose from the ashes," he explained. "They aren't kings. They are bureaucrats. Mathematicians of the End. They realized that the only resource that mattered wasn't gold—it was Time."
"The Order of the Grey Horizon," Vanya added, her voice bitter. "They calculated exactly how much food, water, and magic Aethelgard had left. And then they calculated how many people the world could support for another century."
Elara's eyes widened. "And?"
"And there were too many people," Korgath said heavily. "So they stopped the shipments to the outer rims. They let the edges of the map drift away. They consolidated."
Kaelen nodded. "It's called the Triage State. The Silent City is the heart. The Arbiters keep the heart beating by cutting off the limbs that get gangrene. We—Unit Null—we are the scalpel. We go out to the limbs, harvest what's useful, and let the rest rot."
"That's evil," Elara whispered.
"It's arithmetic," Kaelen corrected. "Evil implies malice. The Arbiters don't hate us. They just don't care about us as individuals. To Thravos, you aren't a girl. You are a variable in an equation that keeps the continent airborne for another year. If burning you in a furnace bought the city ten years of stability, he would do it without a second thought. And he would sleep soundly, because the math balanced."
"Do you sleep soundly?" she asked.
Kaelen looked at her. The question was a blade, sharp and clean.
"I don't sleep," Kaelen said. "I audit."
They pushed on. The Salt Flats gave way to the Obsidian jaggeds, a region where the ground had shattered into razor-sharp shards of black glass. The road here was treacherous, a narrow path cleared by centuries of desperate travelers.
To their left, rising from the glass fields, was a ruin.
It was immense—a cathedral the size of a mountain, built of white marble that had not greyed with time. It stood out against the gloom like a beacon. But it was wrong.
The physics of the building were twisted. The main spire bent at a ninety-degree angle, yet did not fall. The flying buttresses floated inches away from the walls they were supposed to support. It was a glitch in reality, frozen in stone.
"The Basilica of Saint Icarus," Vanya whispered, tilting her blindfolded head toward the structure. "I can hear it humming. A hymnal trapped in a loop."
"Don't listen," Korgath warned. "The Cog-Saints say that place is haunted by the Ghost of Geometry."
"Who are the Cog-Saints?" Elara asked.
"The other half of the government," Kaelen said, keeping his eyes strictly on the road. He refused to look at the cathedral. His Audit would try to calculate the impossible geometry, and that way lay madness.
"The Arbiters rule the mind of Aethelgard," Kaelen explained. "But the Cog-Saints rule the body. They are the engineers. The ones who maintain the ventilation shafts, the water recyclers, the tectonic anchors."
He pointed to Korgath's chest.
"They believe that flesh is a design flaw," Kaelen said. "They worship the machine because the machine doesn't feel pain. It doesn't despair. When a gear breaks, you replace it. When a man breaks, he lingers."
"They saved me," Korgath rumbled, tapping his brass lungs. "They took my rot and gave me brass. They told me that the only way to survive the Void is to become as cold as it is."
"Are they right?" Elara asked.
Korgath looked at the twisted cathedral, at the physics-defying spire.
"Look at that temple," the Orc said. "Built by faith. Broken by reality. My lungs are built by math. And I am still breathing."
Kaelen gripped the reins tighter.
"The Arbiters ration our time," Kaelen summarized. "The Cog-Saints ration our bodies. And the Guilds... the Guilds ration our deaths. That is the structure of the world, Elara. There is no King. There is only the management of the decline."
The wagon crested a ridge, and for a moment, the view opened up.
Ahead of them lay the Great Severance.
The road didn't end; it just stopped. The earth sheared off into nothingness. Beyond the edge, there was only the purple haze of the Void, swirling with nebulae of cold dust.
And floating in that void, tethered to the main continent by massive chains of rusted iron the size of rivers, was a fragment of land.
Sector 7.
It drifted lazily, bobbing in the nothingness like a cork in a dark ocean. Lightning arced along the chains, crackling with red energy.
"There," Kaelen said, pointing to the floating island. "The Tectonic Anchor. That's where we're going."
"It's falling," Elara said softly.
Kaelen looked with his Audit.
She was right. The chains were taut. The island was pulling away, straining against its bonds. The gravity of the Dead Stars was winning.
Chain tension: 94%. Structural fatigue: Critical. Time until snap: 72 hours.
"It's not falling yet," Kaelen lied. "It's just heavy."
He snapped the reins. "Move. We have to cross the Chain-Bridge before the wind picks up."
As they descended toward the abyss, Kaelen felt the familiar weight of the Grey Coin in his pocket. It felt heavier now, as if it knew how close they were to the edge of the world.
In a universe where the gods were dead bodies in the sky, and gravity was a failing memory, the only thing that held the world together was iron, blood, and the ruthless arithmetic of men who refused to let go.