The sky above Velkaris wasn't a sky anymore.
It was a scar — stitched shut with iron and humming with unseen pain.
Towers clawed their way into the clouds, impossibly tall, sleek and merciless, spearing the heavens like the fangs of some slumbering beast. Neon sigils slid across their surfaces, casting ghost-light over the streets where crowds moved in tightly packed veins of flesh and fear. Above them, surveillance drones drifted like vultures, silent, patient, eternal.
The capital wasn't a city.
It was a breathing machine.
And I hated how naturally it exhaled.
I kept my head low beneath the heavy black cloak Elira had pressed into my hands hours earlier. The rough fabric scratched against my neck, but it blurred us into the endless tide of bodies—workers, soldiers, merchants—each face erased beneath mirrored Enforcer visors.
Their boots struck the ground in perfect rhythm, a heartbeat of control that pounded against the concrete, over and over, like the ticking of some great clock measuring our worth.
The glyph towers were worse.
Jagged black spires, rising above the streets like knives driven into the earth's spine. Magic wrapped around them in pulsating threads, invisible but suffocating, binding the very air. They didn't just regulate spells. They devoured them, broke them down, erased their meaning before a caster could even whisper a syllable.
Even magic here had a leash.
And that leash choked every breath I took.
The pulse of this city wasn't life. It was domination — cold, methodical, absolute. I could feel it squeezing my ribs tighter with every step forward.
We moved through labyrinthine alleys toward the deeper districts, the scent of ozone and scorched metal filling my lungs.
Elira walked ahead, her steps sure, her eyes calculating.
She knew these streets too well.
Far too well.
The thought scraped across the edges of my mind like a blade.
Trust bends. Trust bleeds. Trust breaks.
Across the main plaza, a projection flared into existence—bright enough to burn afterimages behind my eyelids.
A man appeared.
Sharp features. Silvered hair. Eyes that faintly glowed with the signature lattice of rune-circuits. His robe shimmered with shifting codes, patterns rewriting themselves across the fabric in a slow, sinister dance.
Archivist Veylan.
One of the Concord.
The rulers of Velkaris — not mere politicians, but technomancers who had fused spellcraft and machine law into one seamless, terrible doctrine. Here, every law was not just written. It was cast. Every command wasn't a suggestion. It was a binding spell that wormed under your skin and fastened itself to your bones.
Veylan's magnified voice rippled across the square, washing over the crowds like a rising tide:
"Order is survival. Dissent is disease. The Fracture threatens all. Obedience is the cure."
A hollow applause followed. Reflexive. Programmed. The sound of shackled minds clapping for their own cages.
Far from the eyes of the square, within a stark white-lit chamber inside the Concord's towering Spire, Archivist Veylan leaned over a man strapped to a chair.
The prisoner's body twitched weakly, lines of blood trickling from his nose and ears.
Floating around his head, crimson glyphs spun — Truth Script — an ancient magic perverted into a tool of perfect extraction. No lie could survive it. No memory could hide.
Veylan's voice, low and cutting, sliced through the air.
"Where," he asked, as casually as one might ask for the time, "is the Black Sigil?"
The prisoner choked out a sound between a sob and a scream.
Velkaris outside continued without a ripple, its machine heart untroubled.
Back on the streets, we huddled beneath a crumbling magrail overpass, inside the skeleton of what had once been a café. The stench of damp stone and rust gnawed at the air.
Elira leaned in close, her whisper barely reaching me over the static hum of the city.
"The Black Sigil," she said, voice tight, "isn't your salvation, Kael."
I frowned beneath the hood.
"They're Resistance, aren't they?" I muttered.
Her eyes hardened into something cold.
"No," she said. "They're chaos. They don't want to break the Concord's chains. They want to burn the world that forged them. They want the Fracture to bloom."
I clenched my fists under the cloak.
I didn't want a rebellion built on ash. I wanted truth. I needed answers—needed to stop whatever nightmare was stirring in the shadows, whatever that masked figure from the citadel was about to unleash.
But allies were scarce.
And enemies wore too many faces.
Even hers.
Without meaning to, I studied her again.
How she moved. How she never stumbled where the patrol routes shifted. How she always stayed just outside the sweep of the scanner glyphs, without even slowing down.
Too smooth.
Too prepared.
Was she leading me through the labyrinth...
or into its deepest jaws?
The visions clawed at the edges of my vision again.
A flash—
Velkaris burning.
Towers crumbling into rivers of molten steel.
The city screaming as it tore itself apart.
I blinked it away, but my heart hammered against my ribs like a caged thing.
The city didn't change.
It just waited.
That night, under the fractured neon storms, we slipped into the derelict quarter.
Old Velkaris — the bones of the city before the Concord's rise.
Through crumbling cathedral ruins and half-buried streets, we moved until we found it — a spiral stairwell, lost beneath centuries of dust and silence.
The deeper we descended, the thicker the air grew, heavy with memory and forgotten blood.
At the bottom:
An archive.
No machinery.
No neon.
Only stone.
Only silence.
Scrolls sealed inside rusted iron cases. Walls etched with trembling glyphs, faded from time and sorrow. The smell of dried blood and something older clung to everything.
At the center of the archive stood a slab of marble, black and unyielding.
Elira hesitated at the threshold.
I didn't.
I walked to it.
The surface was engraved with words—carved not by master craftsmen but by desperate hands, each letter gouged deep like a wound:
"To awaken the Fracture, blood must burn... and memory must kneel."
But it was the last thing I saw that froze the breath in my lungs.
At the base of the slab, etched so deep it had outlived kingdoms:
KAEL SOLHART.
Not new.
Not vandalized.
Old.
Centuries old.
I wasn't walking into the future.
I was walking through the ruins of my own past.
"In a world where even memory is shackled, knowing yourself is the greatest rebellion."
— Kael Solhart