Mo leaned back against a stack of rusted shipping crates, pulling a crumpled cigarette from his pocket. He struck a match against the metal, the small flame dancing in the rain. He took a long drag, his eyes staring at nothing as the smoke curled around his face.
"James," he said, his voice raspy and low. "You ever stop to think about why these things exist? Why this whole continent is just one big, festering wound?"
I stayed silent, wiping the grit off the slide of my Gear Six.
"My grandma," Mo continued, a dark smile pulling at his lips. "She used to sit me down by the hearth. She was old, older than the city walls. She told me stories about the Queen. Not the 'Mother of the People' bullshit they teach in the Academy. The real shit."
Mo closed his eyes, back in that drafty shack, listening to a woman who had seen too much.
"Listen close, boy," his grandmother had whispered. Her hands were gnarled roots, clutching a tattered shawl. "The Queen is a parasite feeding on us since the first sunrise. Before the Gears, before the engines, there was magic. It was a terrifying thing, and she owned every drop of it."
She described a world without walls. A world where the sky was clear and the land didn't try to eat people. But the Queen—the Witch of Time—got bored. She wanted a world that lasted forever, a kingdom she could never lose.
"She ripped a hole in the fabric of the world," the old woman hissed. "She wanted to bottle time, to keep her beauty from fading. When she reached into the void, something reached back."
The first Stormbeast was summoned. It crawled out of a rift in the center of the old capital—a mass of white light and screaming shadows. It lacked a face, just a thousand mouths tearing into the priests standing around the altar.
"I saw it," she'd said, her eyes wide and glassy. "I saw high mages turned into red slush in seconds. Their spirits were sucked out of their chests like smoke, and the Queen stood there. She watched as the beast ripped the heart out of her own father, the King of Magic, and she smiled."
The blood from that first slaughter stayed wet. It seeped into the ground, poisoning the wells and the trees. Every drop of blood spilled by a beast became a seed. That's how the rifts started. The Queen let them happen. She realized that as long as the world was terrified of the Storm, they would crawl to her for protection.
"She gave us the Gears to 'save' us," Mo's voice drifted back to the present. He flicked a clump of ash into the puddle at his feet. "But Grandma said the Gears are just another way she keeps her hooks in. Every time you sync, you give her a little piece of your mind. She created the monsters, James. She created the fear. And now she's sitting in that Southern Fortress, watching us kill each other while she stays forever young."
Mo took another drag, his knuckles white as he gripped his rifle.
"We're not fighting a war, James. We're just part of her garden. And she's about to start pruning again."
Mo spat a yellow glob of phlegm into the gutter. He flicked the glowing ember of his cigarette into the dark.
"Grandma said the first Gear was made in a pit," Mo muttered, his voice dropping an octave. "The Queen had her smiths chain down a Storm-Alpha—a mountain of scales and hate that had leveled three cities. They started cutting."
He described the scene like he'd been there. The smiths used chisels made of blessed silver to peel the living plates off the beast's spine. The creature roared until its vocal cords shredded, spraying the walls with black bile. They took the central nerve cord, a pulsing, white-hot cable of raw energy, and fused it with a rod of cold iron.
"The head smith tried to pick it up," Mo said, a grimace on his face. "The second his hand touched the hilt, the energy surged. It cooked him from the inside. His eyes turned into liquid and ran down his cheeks like wax. His skin charred black and peeled off in strips, but his hand fused to the metal. He died standing up, screaming with lungs that turned to ash."
That was the Primal Gear. It was a jagged, ugly thing that hummed with the scream of a dying god. It needed a host to burn through. The Queen took it from the smith's dead fingers and used it to cleave the rift in half.
"She called it the 'Soul-Breaker,'" Mo whispered. "It was the strongest thing ever built. It turned a thousand Goliaths into dust with one swing. But the Gear had a mind of its own. It got tired of being a tool. During the Great Collapse, the Gear ate its user—the First Captain—and vanished into the rifts."
Mo looked at the Gear Six in my hand and laughed.
"Now we use these toys. We use Gear Nine and think we're gods. But the Primal Gear is still out there somewhere, buried in a pile of bones, waiting for someone to touch it. It's the only thing that can kill the Queen. And it's the only thing that'll kill you if you find it."