The blue light of the lanterns did not illuminate the street; it anesthetized it.
Kaelen pressed himself into the recess of a bricked-up doorway, his breathing synchronized to the rhythmic clack-hiss of the patrol passing meters away. The cold of the stone seeped through his coat, through the bandages, and settled into the marrow of his fractured ribs.
He watched.
There were four of them. The Cultists. They wore the black robes mentioned in the bestiary, fabric that seemed to absorb the ambient gloom rather than reflect it. They moved with a gliding gait, their feet hidden beneath the heavy hems, giving the impression that they were not walking on the cobblestones but hovering an inch above them.
But it was the things tethered to them that made Kaelen's Audit glitch.
Null Geometers.
They were shapes. That was the only word his mind could supply. Polyhedrons of absolute darkness, roughly the size of a human head, floating at shoulder height behind the cultists. They were tethered by chains made of grey smoke.
They clicked. Tik-tik-tik-tik.
It sounded like the cooling of an engine, or the mandibles of an insect. Every time they clicked, their shape shifted. A cube became a pyramid. A pyramid became a dodecahedron.
Kaelen squinted, trying to track the transformation.
Error.
His mind couldn't follow the transition. One moment it was shape A, the next it was shape B. There was no intermediate state. They were skipping frames of reality.
Variable: Non-Euclidean entities, Kaelen deduced, clutching his shield tighter. They operate outside standard spatial dimensions.
The patrol stopped at an intersection twenty yards ahead. The leading Cultist raised a hand. The limb was pale, gaunt, the fingers abnormally long.
He pointed to a drain grate in the gutter.
One of the Null Geometers drifted forward. The smoke-chain extended. The dark shape hovered over the drain.
Tik-tik-tik.
The shape inverted. It didn't just turn inside out; it pulled the space around it into itself.
A sound rose from the drain. A whimper.
Then, a stream of grey vapor—faint, struggling—rose from the darkness of the sewer and was sucked into the Geometer. The entity pulsed once, turning from a sphere to a jagged star, and then returned to its master.
Collection, Kaelen realized. They are harvesting.
But harvesting what? There was no steam. No heat. No biological matter.
The patrol moved on, turning a corner toward the towering bulk of the Citadel.
Kaelen waited for the count of sixty. Then, he peeled himself from the wall.
He moved to the drain. He knelt, checking the grate. It was cold. Colder than the surrounding stone.
He touched the metal. A layer of frost had formed on the bars.
Thermal energy? No. The vapor hadn't been hot.
He looked down the street where the patrol had gone.
"They are skimming the dregs," he whispered. "Collecting the residue."
He followed them.
The deeper Kaelen moved into the Black City, the more the architecture began to scream.
In the outskirts, the buildings had been functional—warehouses, barracks. Here, in the residential rings, the buildings were desperate.
He passed a row of townhouses where the windows had been bricked up, not with standard masonry, but with mismatched stones, furniture, and even—Kaelen stopped to verify—human bones fused with mortar.
They hadn't been trying to keep thieves out. They had been trying to keep the sight of the sky out.
He saw symbols carved into the doorframes. Not the orderly numbers of Sector 7. These were spirals. Hundreds of them. Scratched into the wood with fingernails or knives.
The madness of the enclosed, Kaelen analyzed. Without the celestial reference points, the mind loses its ability to orient. It spirals inward.
He reached a plaza.
It was vast, paved with slate. In the center stood a statue, but unlike the Iron Sentinel in the ruins, this one was not a machine.
It was a depiction of a family. A mother, a father, a child.
They were carved from grey marble. They stood huddled together, looking up.
But their faces were gone.
They hadn't been broken off. They had been smoothed away. The stone where their features should have been was polished to a mirror sheen.
Kaelen approached the statue. He stayed low, using the plinth as cover.
The patrol was here.
They stood in a circle around the statue. The four Cultists raised their lanterns. The blue light washed over the faceless stone figures.
The Null Geometers detached from their tethers. They floated up, circling the heads of the statues.
Tik-tik-tik.
The air in the plaza grew heavy. Kaelen felt a pressure in his ears, like descending too fast in a lift.
The lead Cultist began to chant. It wasn't a language Kaelen knew. It sounded like grinding stones.
"The... face... is... a... lie..." "Identity... is... a... debt..." "We... pay... the... silence..."
The Null Geometers began to spin. Faster. Faster. Until they were a blur of black motion.
And then, Kaelen saw it.
A mist began to bleed from the stone statues. Not from the surface, but from the concept of them. A grey, translucent haze that looked like the memory of the people the statue represented.
The Geometers drank it.
The statue changed.
Kaelen watched in horror as the marble grew dull. Pockmarks appeared. Cracks spiderwebbed across the father's shoulder. It wasn't weathering. It was instantaneous aging. The statue was losing its structural integrity because the Cultists were stealing the idea that held it together.
Entropy harvest, Kaelen's mind reeled. They are eating the history.
The chant ended. The Geometers slowed, returning to their polyhedral shapes. They looked... fuller. Heavier.
The Cultists bowed to the ruined statue.
"The... debt... is... serviced," the leader rasped.
They turned and glided away, heading toward the massive iron gates of the Citadel.
Kaelen remained hidden until the blue light faded.
He stood up and walked to the statue. He touched the father's arm.
The stone crumbled under his finger. It turned to fine, grey dust.
Kaelen looked at the dust on his glove.
"Void Ash," he whispered, recognizing the substance from the Bestiary. "It's not just the remains of monsters. It's the remains of reality."
He understood now. The city wasn't preserved. It was being slowly, methodically digested. The Cultists weren't maintaining it; they were rationing it. Feeding the Void bit by bit to keep the Tethered Sphere above the castle from waking up fully.
"A controlled demolition of a civilization," Kaelen muttered.
He looked toward the Citadel.
If they were harvesting history to feed the beast, then the High Keep—the administration center—would be the larder. That was where the records were.
And Kaelen needed records. He needed to know when the math changed.
He bypassed the main gates. A direct approach against Geometers was a suicide calculation.
Instead, he found a service entrance.
It was a narrow archway tucked behind a buttress, marked with a faded symbol: a quill and a gear.
The Scriptorium.
The door was wood, rotted soft. Kaelen used his obsidian shard to pry the lock mechanism. It gave with a wet crunch.
He slipped inside.
He was in a hallway lined with alcoves. The air was dry here, artificially so. It smelled of vellum and dust.
He moved silently, shield raised.
He entered a main chamber.
It was a library. But it was wrong.
The shelves stretched up into the darkness, forty feet high. But they weren't filled with books.
They were filled with scrolls made of metal. Thin sheets of lead and copper, rolled up and stacked by the thousands.
Kaelen approached a shelf. He pulled out a copper scroll. It was heavy.
He unrolled it.
Etched into the metal were names. Thousands of them.
Citizen 455-A. Baker. Deceased Year 90. Citizen 455-B. Cobbler. Consumed Year 91. Citizen 456-A. Guard. Tithed Year 91.
Kaelen ran his finger over the etched names.
"Metal records," he noted. "Because paper rots. Because the Void eats the soft things first."
He moved deeper into the room. In the center, there was a massive desk. Sitting at the desk was a figure.
Kaelen froze.
It was a Skeleton. One of the Tier 1 threats from the Bestiary.
But this skeleton wasn't a warrior. It wore the tattered remains of a scribe's robe. A quill—dry and brittle—was fused to its finger bones.
It was slumped over a massive book.
Kaelen approached cautiously. The skeleton didn't move. It lacked the Necrotic witch-light in its eyes. It was truly dead.
Kaelen looked at the book beneath the skeletal hand.
This book wasn't metal. It was bound in skin. Pale, grey skin.
Kaelen swallowed his revulsion. He gently lifted the skeletal hand aside. The bones clattered lightly.
He read the open page.
Year 1 of the Silence. The Stars have blinked. Not out. Just... shut. The signals from the Spire have ceased. The Paladins report that the holy light burns, but gives no heat. The King has ordered the sealing of the gates. We have trapped the Shadow in the sphere. We think we can starve it.
Kaelen turned the page. The skin crackled.
Year 10 of the Silence. We were wrong. It does not starve. It feeds on us. It feeds on the walls. It feeds on the memory of the sun. The Arch-Mages have devised a solution. A Tithe. We must feed it voluntarily. If we give it the dregs, it will not take the foundation.
Kaelen turned another page.
Year 50 of the Silence. There is no sun. There is only the preservation of the grey. We have forgotten the names of the stars. There are only Eleven left in the sky, and they are hiding. I have begun to etch the names on copper. My mind is failing. I look at my hand and I do not know if it is mine.
The entries became erratic after that. Scrawls. Spirals. Then, nothing.
Kaelen looked at the date of the final entry.
Year 99.
He looked at the calendar on the wall. It was a mechanical device, frozen in rust.
It read: Year 112.
"Thirteen years since the last record," Kaelen whispered. "Thirteen years of automated harvesting."
He looked around the silent library.
This was the tragedy of Aethelgard. It wasn't a war. It was a slow suffocation. They had tried to bargain with entropy, and entropy had simply amortized the cost over a century.
He felt a sudden, crushing weight. He was an Auditor. He dealt in finite numbers. This... this was a debt that could never be paid.
Objective: Knowledge. Status: Acquired. Conclusion: The City is a farm. The people are the crop.
He needed to leave. He needed to find a way to the surface, away from this tomb.
But as he turned to go, he heard it.
Tik-tik-tik.
It came from the shadows of the high shelves.
Kaelen looked up.
Floating near the ceiling, obscured by the gloom, was a Null Geometer. But this one was larger. Much larger.
It wasn't a simple polyhedron. It was a shifting, chaotic mass of angles that hurt his eyes to look at.
And below it, clinging to the shelves like a spider, was a Flesh-Mason.
Kaelen had read the name in the Bestiary, but the reality was worse. It looked like a man who had been turned inside out and then rearranged by a madman. Extra limbs fused to its back. Tools—chisels, hammers—grafted directly into its bone.
It was repairing the shelf. Or rather, it was altering it. It was scraping names off the copper scrolls and welding them shut.
Erasing history, Kaelen realized. Making room for the silence.
The Null Geometer pulsed. It sensed him.
A beam of dark, anti-light swept across the floor.
Kaelen dove behind the desk.
Heart rate: 160. Stealth Probability: Low. Combat Probability: Zero.
He looked at the skeleton next to him.
"Sorry, friend," Kaelen whispered.
He grabbed the heavy, skin-bound book. He grabbed the copper scroll.
He needed a distraction.
He reached into his pouch and pulled out the strip of strange meat he had scavenged from the road beast.
He threw it across the room. It landed with a wet slap against a stack of scrolls.
The Null Geometer spun. The Flesh-Mason shrieked—a sound of grinding bone—and skittered toward the noise.
Biology was always the weakness. Even void-twisted biology was hungry.
Kaelen bolted.
He ran from the Scriptorium, back into the alleyway. He didn't stop. He ran until his lungs burned and his ribs screamed.
He collapsed in a narrow passage between two tall, windowless buildings.
He clutched the book to his chest.
He was trembling. Not just from exertion.
He had seen the face of the enemy. It wasn't a monster. It was a system. A system of erasure.
He looked up at the slit of sky above the alley. The 11 stars looked down, indifferent.
Kaelen opened the book again to the first page.
The Stars have blinked.
"I will open them," Kaelen swore. It wasn't a hero's oath. It was a threat. "I will audit this entire damn city, and I will find the error."
He shoved the book into his belt.
He looked toward the Citadel again. The Tethered Sphere hung there, drinking the city dry.
He couldn't fight it. Not yet.
But he knew what it ate. It ate memory.
And Kaelen was the one man in Aethelgard who refused to forget.
He stood up. He adjusted his shield.
"Next objective," he whispered. "The High Keep. I want to see the contract."
He moved deeper into the shadows, a ghost in a city of phantoms, armed with a shard of glass and a book of the dead.