The silence in the ruined armory was not empty; it was pressurized.
Kaelen huddled in the corner, wedged between a rack of rotting spear-shafts and a pile of damp, moldering tapestries. His breath shallow, he counted the seconds between the heavy, grinding footsteps of the Iron Sentinel outside.
Thud. (Pause: four seconds). Thud.
The construct was patrolling. It wasn't hunting with the biological fervor of the wolf-thing in the forest, nor the frantic desperation of the Rime-Weaver. It hunted with the inevitability of a clock. It was a mechanism of the Old Laws, enforcing a perimeter that had long since crumbled.
Kaelen pressed a hand to his side. The makeshift bandages were holding, but the dull ache in his ribs had evolved into a sharp, biting fire with every inhalation. The temperature in the armory was hovering around 3 degrees Celsius. He could see his breath puffing out in the gloom, a rhythmic signal he tried to suppress.
He needed better equipment. The obsidian shard was a good knife, but it was a tool for murder, not defense. He was soft. Biological. He needed a shell.
He scanned the room in the dim light filtering through the high, barred windows.
Most of the metal here had succumbed to the "Rust"—the deep, orange cancer of Aethelgard. Swords were fused into scabbards; chainmail had dissolved into piles of red dust. But in the center of the room, half-buried under a collapsed table, lay a shield.
Kaelen waited for the footsteps to fade. Thud... Thud.... Thud.
Silence.
He crawled out from his hiding spot. He moved across the stone floor, wincing as the grit crunched under his boots.
He reached the shield.
It was a heater shield, forged from a dark, heavy metal that resisted the rust. It was cold to the touch—colder than the air. He brushed away the layer of grey dust coating it.
Faintly, etched into the surface, was a heraldic crest. It wasn't the Tower with the Eye. It was a star. A single, eight-pointed star, surrounded by a circle of thorns.
Kaelen looked up at the patch of sky visible through the window. He counted the stars again.
Eleven.
He looked back at the shield. The star on the crest matched the position of the red cinder—the second star he had counted earlier.
"The Red Cinder," Kaelen whispered. "You were their patron."
He picked up the shield. It was heavy, the leather straps on the back dry and cracking, but serviceable. He slid his left arm through. The weight pulled at his fractured ribs, but it also offered something he hadn't felt in days: a wall.
He was no longer just meat. He was plated.
He checked his Ledger.
Day 18. Location: Outskirts of the Black City. Asset: Iron Shield (Heraldry: The Second Star). Status: Trespassing.
He moved to the door of the armory. The road outside was empty of the Sentinel, though deep gouges in the paving stones marked its passing.
Kaelen stepped out.
The ruins of the garrison district gave way to a desolate expanse of open ground before the true walls of the city. This area, Kaelen realized, was a "kill zone"—a flat, featureless plain designed to offer no cover to an invading army.
But the army that had come here hadn't marched on the ground.
Kaelen lay prone behind a low ridge of rubble, scanning the massive black walls through his cracked spyglass.
The architecture was defensive, but the geometry was wrong.
In a normal fortress, the battlements faced outward, toward the horizon. Here, the crenellations were angled upward. Ballista mounts, rusted and empty, pointed almost vertically. The arrow slits were cut to allow archers to fire at the sky.
"They weren't fighting neighbors," Kaelen breathed, the realization chilling him more than the wind. "They were fighting the heavens."
He lowered the glass.
The city walls were built of basalt, glistening with moisture. They rose a hundred feet into the smog. There was a gate—a massive maw of iron and timber—but it was sealed. Not just locked, but fused. Molten lead had been poured into the seams, sealing the doors shut.
Quarantine, his Audit supplied. Or a tomb.
He scanned the base of the wall.
He saw movement.
Not the Sentinel. Not a beast.
People.
Or things that had once been people.
They were gathered near the base of the wall, perhaps a dozen of them. They wore rags that matched the grey of the earth. They moved slowly, shuffling through the mud. They were scavenging, digging into the piles of refuse that had been thrown over the walls centuries ago.
Kaelen watched them. They didn't speak. They didn't look at each other. One of them found something—a bone, perhaps—and began to gnaw on it.
The Silent, Kaelen named them.
He needed to get past them. He needed to get inside that wall. The Black City was the only structure large enough to contain answers. The coin, the logbook, the Sentinel—all vectors pointed inside.
But the gate was sealed.
He scanned the perimeter again. To the north, the wall met a river of sludge—industrial runoff mixed with the biological ooze of the forest. The river flowed under the wall through a series of iron grates.
Drainage.
It was a classic vulnerability. But in Aethelgard, a vulnerability was usually a mouth.
Kaelen holstered his knife and adjusted his shield. He began to crawl toward the river.
He moved slowly, timing his movements with the shifting of the fog. He kept his eyes on the scavengers.
As he drew closer, the smell hit him. It wasn't just sewage. It was the smell of incense. Old, stale incense, mixed with the copper tang of blood.
He reached a pile of debris fifty yards from the group. He froze.
One of the scavengers had stopped digging. It—he—stood up.
He was emaciated, his skin grey and flaky like ash. He had no hair. Across his chest, carved into his flesh, was a symbol. A circle.
The scavenger looked up at the sky. He opened his mouth.
Kaelen expected a scream.
Instead, the man simply exhaled. A long, rattling breath that seemed to empty his lungs completely. He stood there, mouth agape, staring at the empty space where the missing stars should be.
He was praying to the silence.
Kaelen felt a wave of nausea. This wasn't madness. Madness was chaotic. This was a structured, ritualized despair.
Indefinite Madness, the lore he had read in the archives spoke of this. The belief that one is already dead.
Kaelen crept past them. He didn't want to engage. He was a variable they wouldn't understand. A variable that still wanted to live.
He reached the river of sludge. The bank was slick with black oil.
He slid down into the muck. It was freezing—perhaps 2 degrees. The cold bit through his boots instantly.
He waded toward the wall. The grates were massive iron bars, spaced six inches apart. Too narrow for a man.
But the third grate from the left was bent. Something massive had tried to force its way out long ago, bending the bars outward.
Kaelen squeezed through. The metal scraped against his shield, screeching softly. He paused, heart hammering.
Outside, the scavengers didn't react. They were too busy staring at the nothingness.
Kaelen pushed through.
He was inside.
The interior of the Black City was not a city. It was a machine that had died mid-cycle.
Kaelen emerged from the drainage tunnel into a vast, subterranean canal. The ceiling arched high above, lost in gloom. Walkways lined the canal, built of the same dark stone as the walls.
He climbed out of the sludge, shaking the filth from his boots.
It was quiet here. A tomb-like silence that pressed against his eardrums.
He walked up a set of stairs to the street level.
He expected ruins. He expected collapsed buildings like the outskirts.
Instead, he found preservation.
The buildings here were intact. Tall, narrow structures with steep roofs and narrow windows. They crowded the cobbled streets, leaning over the alleys like conspirators. The architecture was severe—gothic arches, gargoyles shaped like screaming faces, iron fences topped with spikes.
But everything was grey.
The stone was grey. The wood was petrified grey. Even the moss growing in the cracks was a pale, dusty grey.
It was as if the color had been drained out of the world to pay a debt.
Kaelen walked down the center of the street, shield raised.
He saw no bodies. That was the first anomaly. In a city this size, sealed from the outside, there should be corpses.
He approached a storefront. The glass was gone, but the sign remained: Apothecary.
He stepped inside.
The shelves were lined with jars. Kaelen picked one up. It was sealed with wax. Inside, floating in murky liquid, was a human finger.
He put it down.
He moved to the counter. A ledger lay open there.
Kaelen felt a kinship. A ledger.
He opened it. The pages were brittle.
Year 88. Month of Frost. Stock: 3 vials of Null-Oil. 1 jar of Leech-Dust. Sales: None. Notes: The tithe collectors came today. They took the last of the grain. They say the High Keep needs it for the Ritual. They say if we feed the Void, it will sleep.
Year 89. Month of Rain. Stock: Empty. Sales: Empty. Notes: They sealed the gates. We are trapped with It. The hunger is starting. I look at my neighbor, and I do not see a man. I see meat.
The entries stopped.
Kaelen closed the book.
"They ate each other," he whispered.
He looked around the shop. There were no bones.
"Or something else ate them."
He left the shop. He needed to get to high ground. He needed to orient himself.
In the center of the city, rising above the grey rooftops, was a citadel. It was a massive, brutalist structure of black iron, spiked like a crown of thorns.
And floating above the citadel, tethered by massive chains, was a shape.
It was a sphere. A geometric perfection of obsidian, perhaps fifty feet in diameter. It hovered silently, darker than the sky behind it.
Kaelen stared at it.
The Void Intercepts, the lore whispered.
This sphere wasn't a ship. It was a manifestation. A drop of the Void that had dripped into the world and refused to evaporate.
And the chains... the chains were pulling it down.
"They didn't seal the gates to keep the Void out," Kaelen realized, looking at the chains that anchored the sphere to the citadel. "They sealed them to keep it in. They caught it."
He felt a sudden, terrifying shift in his understanding of Aethelgard.
The people here hadn't just been victims. They had been jailers. They had tried to trap a god, or a piece of one.
And they had failed.
Kaelen backed into the shadows of an alley.
He checked his Ledger.
Objective: The Black City. Status: Infiltrated. New Variable: The Tethered Sphere. Hypothesis: The God is not sleeping. It is captive.
He needed to get to that Citadel. If there was power in this world—power strong enough to bind a piece of the Void—it was there.
But as he looked down the long, grey avenue leading to the center, he saw them.
Patrols.
They weren't Iron Sentinels. They were clad in the black robes mentioned in the Bestiary. Their faces were hidden behind masks of porcelain—blank, white, smiling faces.
They carried lanterns that burned with a cold, blue light.
Cultists.
But they didn't walk like men. They glided. And behind them, floating on tethers of shadow, were shapes that defied geometry. Small, shifting polyhedrons of darkness that clicked and whirred.
Null Geometers.
Kaelen pressed himself against the cold stone of the wall.
He was the Unit of One. He was the Auditor.
He watched the patrol pass. He counted their numbers. Four robes. Two geometries.
He waited for them to turn the corner.
He didn't run. He didn't hide. He began to stalk them.
Because the apothecary's ledger had mentioned a "High Keep." And if Kaelen knew anything about administration, the High Keep was where the books were kept.
And he had a sudden, burning need to see the balance sheet of a city that tried to imprison a god.
He gripped his shield. He gripped his obsidian shard.
The fear was still there, cold in his gut. But the curiosity was hotter.
He stepped out of the alley, following the blue light of the lanterns deeper into the casket of iron.