Iron Warrens, Vespera – Sundown
The refinery loomed like a rusted leviathan, its chimneys vomiting aether-smoke into the already choking sky. Brass veins pulsed along its spine, glowing with stolen power. Silas adjusted Kael's grime-caked goggles, the lens thudding softly against his chest, his stolen heart.
Mara shoved him forward, her prosthetic claw digging into his shoulder like a warning. "Stick to the vents," she growled. "Overseer's making rounds. You get caught, I'll gut you before they do."
Silas nodded, adopting Kael's familiar slouch, the one that invited disregard. Inside, heat slammed into him like a furnace wall. The air stank of scorched metal and raw aether. Workers shoveled glowing ore into open furnaces, their faces hollowed by exhaustion and exposure.
Kael had worked here once, he remembered that clearly now. Burnt hands. Broken ribs. The foreman's boot coming down.
Silas slipped into a ventilation shaft, its scorched metal biting into his palms. He crawled forward, heart hammering, following the coordinates scrawled in Kael's hidden notes. Valve 7 waited at the refinery's core, half-machine, half-throbbing artery.
The place reeked of betrayal.
Steam hissed from every surface. Valve 7 was a rust-slick nightmare, a knot of leaking pipes and shrieking gauges. He found the correct junction and planted the rigged pressure gauge Mara had given him. It clicked once, then spun wildly, the Syndicate's theft laid bare in numbers.
The lens flared. Runes glimmered faintly across the pipes-- ⵙⵀⴼⵓⵍ. Traitor. Again and again, like a chant. The refinery was speaking, and the message was clear.
Footsteps.
Silas froze, pressed flat against the metal as Overseer Jax stalked past. Her mechanical eye scanned the shadows, pupil dilating with unnatural precision. Behind her, a junior engineer whispered just loud enough:
"The dig-site's consumption rate doubled. The Maw's restless."
The Maw.
Silas's breath caught. He shifted, but something cold kissed his throat.
"Empty man," a voice purred.
The Shadow Child perched above him, balanced on a rusted pipe. Her teeth glittered like broken glass. Her shadow, too long and too alive, wrapped around his wrists like shackles.
"They'll hear you scream," she whispered.
He didn't move. "What do you want?"
She tilted her head, playful. Then she dropped something into his hand-- a Cipher Runes. The Shattered Tower. It pulsed faintly, its ink bleeding upward like smoke.
"Follow the cracks," she sang, before melting into the dark with laughter that echoed long after she vanished.
Silas didn't breathe until she was gone.
He found Mara near the waste chute, stuffing aether vials into her coat from the pressure gauge's reservoir. Her expression was smug, calculating.
"Syndicate'll purge the Overseer by dawn," she said without turning. "You're useful, Kael. For now."
He saw the blood on her claw. Fresh.
"Who'd you kill?"
"The worker who snitched." She didn't bother hiding the grin. "Turns out he knew about your little soul-anchor project."
Silas stiffened. The soul-anchor—Kael's final design, the key to breaking death. Someone had leaked it. Someone close.
"You knew," he said.
"Of course I did," she replied, stepping closer. "Why do you think I kept you breathing?"
Before he could speak again, the refinery howled to life. Alarms shrieked. Red lights strobed through the steam. Overseer Jax's voice crackled from the loudspeakers:
"Lockdown. Someone's poisoned the Maw's feed."
Mara's eyes lit up with fear and rage. She slashed at Silas, her claw catching his arm.
"Run, liar. Or you'll be next on the menu."
He bolted, clutching the wound. Steam turned the air to knives. Workers scattered in blind panic. Sirens mixed with screams. He followed the pipes deeper, slipping past panic and flame until the lens pulsed again—brighter, angrier.
And then he saw it.
The refinery wasn't refining anything. It was feeding something. Human blood diluted the aether. Pipes pumped the mixture toward a massive valve labeled in cold stenciled letters:
TO DIG-SITE DELTA
A man collapsed in front of him, veins blackened by aether-burns. His hands scrabbled at Silas's boot.
"They're feeding it…" the man gasped. "The Maw… it's not… not a machine—"
He crumbled to ash before the sentence finished.
Silas didn't stop running.
By the time dawn bled through the smog, he collapsed near a sewer grate, lungs scorched and mind reeling. He clutched the tarot card in his trembling hand. The Shattered Tower glowed faintly, its inverted spire pointing toward the Sewer Markets.
On the back, a message, written in flickering aether-ink:
Find the Butcher. He knows what Kael bought. —A Friend
Silas stared at his reflection in the dark water.
Kael's eyes stared back.