The night on the Surface was not a curtain; it was a lid.
Kaelen lay on his back in a shallow depression beside the ancient road, shivering. The temperature had dropped to 4 degrees Celsius. The damp cold of the soil seeped through his ruined coat, settling into the fractures of his ribs like a slow-setting mortar.
He was not sleeping. Sleep was a vulnerability he could not afford in a territory he did not understand. Instead, he was watching the sky.
In Sector 7, the sky had been a myth—a layer of impenetrable smog illuminated from below by the chemical glow of the vats. Kaelen had seen star-charts in the archives, dusty scrolls depicting the "Thirty-Three Heavens," a complex geocentric web of constellations said to represent the pantheon.
He looked up now. The thick, biological fog of the crash site had dissipated in the western wind, leaving a patch of clarity directly overhead.
He counted.
One. A faint, sickly yellow pinprick near the zenith. Two. A red cinder, pulsing slowly like a dying coal. Three. A cluster of three, huddled together as if cold.
He scanned the entire dome of the visible night.
Eleven.
There were only eleven stars.
Kaelen frowned, his breath pluming in the dark. The charts demanded thirty-three. The mathematics of the celestial sphere required thirty-three anchor points to maintain the lattice of the heavens. Without them, the geometry of the sky was unstable.
"Where are the others?" he whispered.
He traced the gaps between the visible stars. Vast, empty stretches of black where gods should have been.
Hypothesis A: Atmospheric blockage. Hypothesis B: They have moved. Hypothesis C: They have gone out.
He focused on the eleven that remained. They didn't twinkle. Stars in an atmosphere should refract light, causing a shimmer. These burned with a static, unmoving intensity. They looked heavy. They looked low.
Kaelen felt a prickle of unease that had nothing to do with the cold. These weren't guardians watching over the world. They felt like eleven eyes that were squeezed shut, refusing to look down.
The Eleven Slumbering, he named them in his mind.
He pulled the Ledger from his belt. It was too dark to write, but he traced the cover with his thumb.
Variable: Celestial failure. The sky is broken.
He sat up. The movement tore a gasp of pain from his throat, but he swallowed it. He needed to move. The cold was becoming a narcotic, urging him to lie back down and join the stars in their sleep.
He stood, leaning heavily on the rebar cane he had scavenged. He looked West.
The road stretched out before him—grey paving stones vanishing into a wall of fog. It was the only straight line in a world of curves and chaos.
Kaelen began to walk.
The transition from the forest to the lowlands was gradual but undeniable. The towering fungal spires of the previous day receded, replaced by a landscape of scrub brush and twisted iron-wood trees that grew low to the ground, their branches sweeping the earth like brooms.
The biology here was hostile in a different way. It wasn't the aggressive, carnivorous hunger of the deep woods. It was defensive. Everything had thorns. Everything had shells.
Kaelen stopped to inspect a bush bearing what looked like berries. They were blue, clustered tight against the stem.
He didn't touch them. He hovered his hand over them, checking for thermal radiation, for movement.
Audit: Color: vibrant (warning sign). Texture: Hard, chitinous.
He used the tip of his knife to press against a berry. It didn't squish. It crunched. A puff of yellow dust exploded from the fracture.
Spores.
Kaelen recoiled, pulling his scarf up over his nose.
"Trap," he rasped. "Everything is a trap."
He continued walking. His hunger was a sharp, twisting knot in his gut. The nutrient bricks from the crash were gone. He was running on reserve fat and sheer stubbornness.
He needed protein.
An hour later, he found it. Or rather, he found what remained of it.
Lying across the center of the road was the carcass of a creature. It was large, perhaps the size of a draft horse, but its anatomy was a fever dream. It had six legs, hooves cloven into three toes. Its hide was a mixture of fur and what looked like overlapping plates of slate.
Kaelen approached it with his knife drawn, waiting for it to twitch.
It was dead. Cold.
He knelt to examine the kill. He needed to know what killed it, so he didn't make the same mistake.
The creature's throat had been torn out. But there was no blood. The wound was dry, cauterized. Around the edges of the tear, the flesh had turned to grey dust.
Void-Touched, Kaelen realized. Something drank the life, not the blood.
He looked at the meat of the flank. It was untouched by the predator.
Is it safe?
He cut a small strip of flesh from the thigh. The meat was dark, almost purple. It smelled of iron.
He held it to his nose. It didn't smell rot-sweet like the water. It smelled like venison.
Kaelen took a risk. He touched the meat to his tongue.
It burned slightly, like pepper, but didn't numb his mouth.
"Acceptable," he muttered.
He spent the next twenty minutes carving strips of meat from the carcass, working quickly, his eyes darting to the fog every few seconds. He didn't cook it—fire was a beacon. He wrapped the raw strips in a piece of plastic he had salvaged, shoving them into his pouch next to the Resonance Core.
He felt like a parasite, stealing crumbs from a table set for monsters.
I am a scavenger, he reminded himself. Scavengers survive the apex predators by being smaller.
He stood up, wiping his bloody knife on his trousers.
As he turned to leave, he saw something glinting in the dirt beside the carcass.
He picked it up.
It was a coin.
Kaelen stared at it. It was heavy, minted from gold that had been debased with lead. On one side, a profile of a king he didn't recognize—a severe face with a crown of thorns. On the other, a symbol: A tower with a single eye at the top.
The White Spire?
He looked at the coin, then at the road leading West. This animal hadn't just died here. It had been carrying something. He looked closer at the carcass. remnants of a saddlebag, dissolved by the same force that killed it.
This wasn't a wild beast. It was a pack animal.
Someone was using this road. Someone was moving goods.
"Commerce," Kaelen whispered.
The word gave him more strength than the meat ever could. Commerce meant trade. Trade meant needs. And Kaelen was a man who knew how to fulfill needs.
He pocketed the coin. It was his first Asset in Aethelgard.
The fog thickened as the day wore on. Visibility dropped to twenty meters. The road began to descend, sloping gently downward into a valley.
Kaelen walked in a bubble of silence. The whispering of the trees had stopped, replaced by a low, damp stillness.
He came to a bridge.
It was a massive structure of black stone, spanning a gorge that disappeared into the fog below. The river beneath—if there was one—was silent. The architecture was cyclopean; blocks of stone the size of wagons had been fitted together without mortar.
But the bridge was blocked.
In the center of the span stood a structure. A tollbooth, perhaps, or a guard post. It was built of iron, rusted to a deep, flaky orange, shaped like a gargoyle's mouth.
Kaelen stopped at the bridgehead.
Tactical Analysis: Chokepoint. No alternative routes visible. Structure status: Dilapidated.
He could turn back. But turning back meant the forest. Turning back meant the mimics of Oakhaven.
He walked forward. His boots rang on the stones. Clack. Clack.
He reached the booth. The door hung open on one hinge.
Kaelen peered inside.
It was empty of life, but full of ghosts. A desk, rotted and collapsing. A chair overturned. And on the wall, a calendar made of slate with chalk markings that had been burned into the stone.
The date was set to Year 89 of the Silence.
Kaelen touched the slate. 89. He didn't know what year it was now. In Sector 7, they counted cycles, not years.
On the desk, amidst the debris, lay a scroll.
Kaelen's heart skipped a beat. A record. Data.
He picked it up. The vellum was brittle, but the ink was black and thick.
He read the last entry. The handwriting was jagged, frantic.
Day 4 of the Fog. No travelers from the West. No travelers from the East. The Lanterns are dying. I can hear the scratching under the bridge. They aren't rats. They sound like children. I am going to close the gate. I am going to wait for the Sun.
The entry ended there.
Kaelen looked at the ink. It was older than he was.
"He waited for the sun," Kaelen whispered.
He looked out the broken window of the booth at the grey, sunless sky.
"Poor calculation."
He rolled the scroll and shoved it into his belt. It was history. History was heavy, the Archivist had said. But Kaelen collected weight.
He crossed the bridge. He listened for the scratching the toll-keeper had mentioned. He heard nothing but the blood rushing in his own ears.
The scratching had stopped a long time ago. Or perhaps the things under the bridge had simply grown up.
Beyond the bridge, the road widened. The paving stones became more regular, less cracked.
And the air changed.
The sweet, rotting smell of the biological forest began to fade. It was replaced by something acrid. Something metallic.
Kaelen stopped and sniffed.
Charcoal. Brimstone. Old blood.
It was the smell of a forge. It was the smell of the Black City.
He quickened his pace, ignoring the protest of his ribs.
He crested a rise and saw it.
It wasn't a city. Not yet. It was the outskirts. The graveyard of a citadel.
Stretching out before him in the gloom were miles of ruins. But these weren't overgrown temples or biological mimicries. These were bastions. Watchtowers. Armories.
They were gutted. Roofs caved in. Battlements crumbled. But they were built of granite and iron. They followed the laws of geometry. Square angles. Straight lines. Walls built to keep things out.
Kaelen felt a tear leak from his eye. He wiped it away furiously.
"Geometry," he breathed.
He walked down into the ruins.
As he moved through the skeletal remains of what looked like a garrison district, he realized something disturbing.
The ruins were not empty.
They were inhabited. But not by people.
Everywhere he looked, the stone was trying to heal itself. But not with moss. With iron.
A wall that had crumbled was patched with jagged sheets of rusted metal that looked like scabs. A tower that had split was bound together with massive chains that hummed with a low, dissonant vibration.
It was a war of attrition between the entropy of the Void and the stubbornness of the architecture.
And in the center of the road ahead, standing like a sentinel, was a statue.
It wasn't a machine. It was a construct.
A massive suit of plate armor, ten feet tall, forged from black iron that seemed to absorb the light. It stood frozen mid-stride, a halberd gripped in gauntlets the size of anvils.
Kaelen walked up to the giant. He placed his hand on the cold iron of its leg.
Material: High-Carbon Steel. Craftsmanship: Masterwork. Status: Inert.
He looked up at the helmet of the construct. It was a closed visor, a grill of vertical bars.
And etched into the chest plate was a symbol.
It was the same symbol he had seen on the coin. The Tower with the Eye.
But underneath it, someone had painted a new symbol in red paint. A circle with a line through it. Zero.
"The Void," Kaelen muttered.
He looked past the construct. The road continued through the ruins, leading toward a wall of black fog in the distance that obscured the true city.
He felt a sudden, feral urge to hide.
This place wasn't safe. It was a battlefield. The coin, the toll booth, the construct—they were clues to a civilization that was holding on by its fingernails.
But clues were assets.
Kaelen took a step back from the construct. He heard a sound.
Grind.
It wasn't a gear turning. It was stone rubbing against iron.
He froze.
He looked at the construct's visor.
A faint, red light ignited deep within the helmet. It wasn't an electric bulb. It was a flame. A witch-light.
Mana source detected, his mind supplied, though the terminology was foreign. Category: Necrotic.
The construct didn't move fast. It moved with the geological slowness of a glacier. The head turned. The neck joint screeched—the sound of metal that hadn't moved in a century.
"Halt," a voice whispered.
It didn't come from the helmet. It came from the air around them. It sounded like dust falling on a coffin lid.
"State... your... covenant."
Kaelen threw himself backward.
The halberd slammed down where he had been standing. It struck the paving stones with a force that shook the ground, cracking the granite.
Kaelen rolled to his feet, obsidian shard out, panting.
The construct raised the halberd again. It moved jerkily, as if the spirit inside was struggling to puppet the heavy metal.
"The... Toll... is... blood," the dust-voice whispered.
Kaelen backed away. He looked at the massive, lumbering suit of armor. It was slow. It was heavy.
Tactical Analysis: Speed: Low. Reach: High. Weakness: Joints.
But Kaelen didn't fight. He was the Unit of One. He couldn't afford a scratch, let alone a blow from a halberd.
He turned and ran toward the deeper shadows of a collapsed armory. He needed high ground. He needed a wall at his back.
He sprinted through the ruins, the heavy footsteps of the Iron Sentinel thudding behind him like a slow heartbeat. Thud. Thud. Thud.
He dove through a window, tumbling onto a floor covered in shattered shields. He scrambled into the dark corner, holding his breath.
The footsteps stopped outside.
"Hiding..." the voice whispered, echoing through the stones. "The... rats... are... hiding."
Kaelen pressed his hand over his mouth. He looked at the 11 stars above, visible through the broken roof.
"You aren't watching," he accused them silently. "You're hiding too."
He waited in the dark. He was Kaelen. He was the Auditor. And he had just rung the bell to the Black City.
He realized then that he wasn't seeking civilization. He was seeking a different kind of monster. One that built walls instead of webs.
And he hoped, desperately, that they were hiring.