Vespera, Lower District – The Iron Warrens
The first thing Silas Vorne tasted was blood.
Not his own.
Hers? His?
The metallic tang swam beneath his tongue, thick, warm, wrong. His throat clenched as he coughed, air dragging into lungs that felt borrowed,burning with every breath like a bellows fed too long. His hands scrabbled across a floor slick with oil and something darker.
The room--no, a closet--reeked of rust and burnt aether. The walls were thin, their insulation long since eroded. Through them, he could hear gears grinding in weary rhythm, layered beneath shouts in a language unfamiliar and yet… understood.
Transmigration.
The word slipped cold and clean into his mind, too precise to be his own thought. He'd dismissed it once, back in the lecture halls of Earth, filed under "occult curiosities" and discarded with a skeptic's shrug.
Now here he was: alive in a stranger's skin, inside a stranger's hell.
The body's memories crackled through him like a broken film reel:
A name, Kael.
A gaunt reflection in a grease-smeared mirror.
Brown eyes dull as ditchwater. A scream in the dark.
A hand with too many fingers pressing cold brass to a throat, then oblivion.
Silas pushed himself upright, new limbs trembling with the effort. The small chamber around him was a mechanical graveyard: torn clockwork spiders sprawled like broken insects; a shattered cogitator screen hummed faintly with dying light; and sprawled in the corner--
A corpse.
His corpse.
Kael's body slumped against the wall, throat neatly slit, eyes milk-glazed. Identical to the one Silas now inhabited. Two matching corpses, one breathing.
The paradox rang in his skull like a cracked bell.
Something gleamed in the dead man's hand-- a brass ocular lens, ornate and blood-slick. Silas pried it loose. At his touch, the metal grew warm, and faint runes shimmered across its surface:
ⵊⵍⵍⵓⵙⵀ ⴽⵓⵎⵎⵉⵜⵀ
The symbols were alien. But Kael's mind-- now tangled with his own-- whispered the meaning like a forbidden prayer:
Gods' Cipher.
A sudden hammering at the door shattered the stillness.
"Kael! You done skulkin'? Syndicate's here for their cut!"
The voice was rough and female, every syllable sharpened by streetborn scorn. Silas froze, heart thudding as he pressed the lens to his eye and peeked through a narrow crack in the door.
A woman waited outside, broad-shouldered in a stained leather smock, her left arm a whirring, mismatched prosthetic of bone-white brass. Behind her, the Iron Warrens spread in all directions like a corroded wound: tangled pipes dripped steam, gaslamps flickered with coughing light, and bodies pressed past each other in a ceaseless churn beneath a sky the color of ash.
A child peddled glowing vials of aether-blood from a stained wooden tray. Nearby, a preacher in a cogwheel hat howled of divine reckoning and rust-born sin. And deeper still-- in the alley's throat-- something moved: a shadow that bent wrong, angles stretching too long, too sharp, too eager.
Silas swallowed hard.
Societal hierarchy. Leverage points. Survive first. Dissect later.
He wiped the blood from his hands onto Kael's shirt, summoned the corpse's habitual slouch, and twisted the latch.
The door creaked open.
"Took you long enough," the woman muttered, giving him a once-over. "Syndicate's enforcer's downstairs. Says you missed three aether quotas. You planning to donate your bones to the furnaces, or what?"
Silas lowered his gaze. "I… got distracted. A new project. One meant for the Syndicate's eyes only."
Her prosthetic claw snapped close to his cheek, a blur of gears and menace.
"Don't feed me that garbage, Kael. You've been muttering about ciphers and Archivists for weeks. You ain't chosen. You ain't cursed. You're just another crank in a city full of 'em."
But Silas heard it then, the fear behind the contempt. Kael had known something. Something dangerous.
"Give me an hour," he said, voice cracked, desperate. "Tell the enforcer I've got a prototype. For her."
The woman's eyes narrowed. She hesitated, then spat to the side. "You've got one hour. Then I drag what's left of you down myself."
She turned and stomped away, vanishing into the chaos.
Silas exhaled. Too easy.
But below, down in the street, the unnatural shadow moved again.
A child stood at the alley's edge. Her face was pale, eyes too large. She smiled up at him-- a jagged thing, a crescent of too-white teeth in too-black gums. Her lips didn't move, but somehow, he heard her:
"Tick-tock, liar."
Silas went still.
He had mimicked Kael perfectly-- the slump, the accent, even the tremor in his hands.
Unless…
The lens pulsed hot in his palm.