Under the vast expanse of the cracked sky, broken buildings loomed like the jagged teeth of some ancient horror. Amid the ruins of a long-dead city, a young boy stood alone.
His raven-black hair drifted like ash in the wind, matted with dust and dried blood. Skin once fair was now smeared with soot and grime, as though the war had tried to erase him too. He wore a tattered coat several sizes too large, the fabric clinging to his thin frame like a shroud. A worn, faded eye patch covered his right eye,leather fraying at the edges, stained dark with time. Faint scars traced his cheeks and hands, silent echoes of pain endured without witness.
His brown eyes, dull and lifeless like burnt autumn leaves, stared at the horizon. No fear. No anger. No sorrow. Only the stillness of someone who had seen too much to feel anything anymore.
Kael slowly lifted his gaze to the fractured sky, where an enormous slit-pupiled eye stared back at him,the Eye of Unmaking. Its pallid light hung like a sickness over the land. Some days the whispers curling into his thoughts were louder than others. Today, they were a low, hungry hiss.
A gnawing in his stomach answered it. Hunger, sharp, constant, a familiar companion. The ruins were growing leaner, picked clean by those stronger than him. The Burdened. The ones with power.
He had seen one of them once, a woman who could pull whispers from the dead, finding supplies by listening to bones. Kael found rust and dust. Power was survival, and he was powerless.
His fingers twitched at the edge of his sleeve. Beneath the worn fabric, something itched against his wrist. A mark. A promise. Or a curse.
He couldn't afford another day of failure. The Eye's whispers were getting harder to ignore. Sooner or later, they found a crack in everyone.
His eyes narrowed. Something sharp flickered beneath the dullness.
"I'll find one today," he murmured.
He needed a relic. And he needed luck.
Purpose was a heavy coat to wear. Kael pulled it on and started walking. His steps were soft through the rubble as he made his way toward the North Market, where informants gathered like carrion feeders in a graveyard. Hope was a dangerous currency, but he was already bankrupt.
The market was a clutter of makeshift stalls huddled beneath a collapsed overpass. The air stank of rust, rot, and desperation. Kael kept his head down, scanning the broken concrete. Forgettable, like always.
He was about to turn away when a voice slid out from a narrow alley.
"You're looking."
It wasn't a question. Kael froze, hand drifting to the sharpened pipe hidden in his belt. Slowly, he turned.
A man stood there, pale and thin, cloaked in patchwork rags. His eyes gleamed, sharp with knowledge no one in these ruins should have.
"The clans picked the reliquaries clean," the man rasped. "They hoard the good stuff. Leave the scraps for Dormant rats like us."
Kael didn't answer. He didn't need to.
The man stepped closer, glancing over his shoulder like someone expecting ghosts.
"But I've heard a whisper," he said. "An old reliquary. Untouched, far as I know. Problem is, no one goes near it anymore."
For the first time, something flickered in Kael's face. He stared at the man, unblinking. "Why?"
The man smiled, a sharp, crooked grin, teeth broken like shattered relics. "Because those who go in don't come back. And if they do, they're not the same."
Not the same.
The phrase ran a cold thread through Kael's spine. Not fear, recognition. That's what they said about the ones who stared at the Eye too long. That's what he feared he was becoming.
And yet, that was exactly the kind of desperate chance he needed.
"What do you want?" Kael asked, voice quiet as a blade.
The man's grin widened. "Hehe... now we're talking. Simple, really—I'm an informant. What I want is knowledge."
"Knowledge. About what?"
"The reliquary," the man said, leaning in. "There's been talk among the Rats about a magical scroll. Government wanted it for a long time, but something about it scared them. They failed."
"You know a lot," Kael said carefully. "But if the government, with all its might, couldn't claim it, why do you think I could?"
The man's gaze flicked down to Kael's right hand, hidden beneath his sleeve. He smirked. "You're special, aren't you? No Dormant should have a crest on their hand, and yet, here you are."
Kael tensed. In one smooth motion, he drew the sharpened pipe, pressing its jagged tip against the man's throat.
"How do you know about the mark?" he hissed, voice cold as frost.
"Now, now, no need to get violent," the man said lightly, showing no fear. "I told you—I'm an informant."
"You're awfully confident for someone with a blade to their neck. Why shouldn't I kill you right now?"
The man's grin widened, teeth jagged in the half-light. "That's because you don't know who I work for."
Kael said nothing. The sharpened pipe didn't waver.
"They call us Rats," the man continued. "Information networks, old as the wars, older than the cults. You think the Burdened are the only ones surviving by teeth and claws? We don't deal in relics. We don't wage war over sanctums. We deal in secrets. And if you so much as scratch me..." His voice lowered. "The others will come for you. We don't send curses or madness. We just make sure no one remembers you were ever here."
A cold certainty in his tone made Kael believe it.
Kael sighed through his teeth and lowered the pipe. His fingers ached from gripping it too hard. "You're risking a lot for a tip," he muttered. "And if I don't come back? What use is that information to you?"
The informant chuckled softly. "Sharp. That's good. Makes me feel better about investing in you."
He reached into his coat and pulled something out, a thin, rusted medallion bound in old copper wire, faint inscriptions circling its edges like worn teeth. "It's called a Relay," the informant said. "Old tech, mixed with things better left unexplained. Activate it before you go in. What you see in that reliquary, I see."
Kael frowned, suspicion flaring in his tired gaze. "That's a lot of risk for a suicide mission."
"Maybe," the informant said, eyes glinting, "or maybe I know something you don't. Either way, I win."
Kael didn't like this. But desperation didn't leave room for clean choices. His fingers closed around the Relay. It was warm, like it had been waiting for him.
"Fine," Kael said quietly. "But if this is a trap—"
The informant raised both hands, smiling like a merchant selling broken promises. "If it was a trap, you'd already be dead."
Kael's grip tightened on the Relay. His suspicion hadn't faded.
"What's the name of this reliquary?" he asked.
The man's smile flickered, like he almost didn't want to answer, but then he leaned closer, his breath carrying the scent of rust and ash.
"They call it The Hollow Crown."
Kael frowned. "Never heard of it."
"You wouldn't have," the man whispered, eyes glinting. "It's been buried beneath whispers older than this ruin."
Kael studied him for a long moment. "Where?"
The man's grin stretched wider. "North edge of the city. Beneath the bones of the cathedral."
Something in his tone made Kael's stomach twist. Not fear, recognition, as if something unseen had just shifted behind the sky itself.
Beneath the bones.
Something about that sounded wrong.
The man leaned closer, voice soft as a blade sliding from its sheath. "You should know… things don't just die there. They remember."
Kael didn't flinch. But for the first time, something cold slid beneath his skin—not from the Eye above, but from the weight of something older.
He slipped the Relay into his pocket. It felt heavy, as if it carried not just metal, but history. And betrayal.
He didn't trust the man.
But he needed the lead more than he needed trust.
Tomorrow, he would enter the reliquary.
Tomorrow, something was going to break.
And maybe... it would finally be him.
Later that night, Kael sat alone in the hollowed shell of a burned bus. The Eye's pale glow bled through the shattered windows, turning rust into bone and ash into frost. The wind moaned through the frame like a dying animal. Tomorrow, he would go to the cathedral. Tomorrow, he would either awaken or die.
The cold metal beneath him pressed sharp through his coat. It reminded him of the shelter.
He had grown up beneath the ruins, raised by the hum of broken generators and the soft glow of failing bulbs. There were others, caretakers, scavengers, forgotten children like him. They vanished, one by one. Some to hunger. Some to sickness. Some to the Eye.
He remembered one boy who stopped sleeping, who started speaking in voices not his own. One day, the boy walked barefoot into the deep tunnels, smiling, never seen again. No one spoke his name afterward.
Kael survived by becoming forgettable before death noticed him. He starved his wants, quieted his breath, ignored the aching pieces of himself that still hoped.
The last to leave was a woman named Ash. Maybe his sister. Maybe not. The night before she vanished into the hollow, she had taken his hand.
He remembered the heat of her palm, the sting of sharp flint, the warmth of her blood mixed with the soot on her fingers as she pressed a crude symbol into his wrist.
"This is the price of survival, Kae," she had whispered. "Don't let them take it from you."
He never knew what the mark truly was. But it had saved him. There were moments when death should have taken him. Moments when monsters closed in. Moments when madness curled around his throat like smoke. Something inside him flared and beat it back.
He should have died. But he was still here.
Why? Why him? Why had she done it? Was she still alive out there, somewhere, past the bones of the world?
His gaze drifted to the cathedral in the distance, jagged and broken against the horizon.
Those who went in didn't come back the same.
Good. He was tired of being the same.
Tomorrow, he wasn't just hunting for a relic. He was hunting for a ghost. And if that meant walking into something that could unmake him, so be it.
He would burn before bending.
And if the flames took him, so be it. Better to be ash on his own terms than a shadow on someone else's.
The place he was heading wasn't salvation. It was a Tier Zero reliquary, the kind people whispered about and didn't finish their sentences. These places weren't sanctuaries. They were remnants of old wars, fractures of reality itself, filled with echoes of madness and remnants of the Defiled.
For a Dormant like him, it was a death sentence.
But Kael no longer cared. Sure, he wanted to live. But he wasn't afraid of dying either. Not when he had nothing left to lose.
He pulled the Relay from his coat, staring at it. It pulsed faintly, as though breathing.
Wait.
His brow furrowed.
Why do I have this?
He didn't remember taking it. Or who gave it to him. Just that… he was supposed to use it. At the cathedral. For something important.
The memories clung like fog ,there, but impossible to hold. A conversation half-remembered, like a dream breaking apart under morning light.
"What am I doing?" he whispered.
The Relay gave no answer. Neither did the Eye above.
Kael shoved it back into his coat and leaned against the rusted wall of the bus, heart beating a little faster than before.
Something was wrong.
But the feeling passed,slipping from his mind like water through cracked fingers.
And the Eye kept watching.