The road was little more than a scar across the earth—dried mud, broken carts, and bones half-sunken into the dust. Gold walked it barefoot. The wind tasted of copper and old ash.
He hadn't spoken to anyone in days.
After the village burned, after the Pact carved itself into his soul, silence became his companion. Words required certainty. Gold had none.
He didn't remember who he was. Not really.
He knew his name, or what was left of it. Gold. A name not born but branded. He had memories, but they were loose, brittle things—faces without names, warmth without source. He remembered hands—his mother's, perhaps. A song hummed by a man with tired eyes. A cradle fire on winter nights.
But these memories weren't his anymore. Not fully. The Pact had eaten pieces of them. A trade he never remembered making.
He walked for days, stealing food from abandoned camps and looting corpses where he had to. The land was broken—entire villages emptied, their people taken by conscription or something worse. The Empire was swallowing its borders again. War or something like it always came in waves.
He passed checkpoints manned by iron-clad soldiers bearing sunburst insignias, symbols of the central Empire. They didn't question a boy dressed in ash and silence. Nobody ever questioned the hollow-eyed.
Only once did someone try to stop him—a merchant's guard near the forest edge. He tried to demand travel papers. Gold looked at him, and something beneath his skin shifted. His divine mark glowed faintly, unseen except in the reflection of the man's blade.
The guard stepped aside, pale, muttering prayers under his breath.
Gold kept walking.
---
Far ahead, on the horizon, the Empire rose like a jagged wound against the sky—black towers crowned in smoke, silver spires piercing clouds. That was where answers might lie. Or at least, more lies than the ones he carried.
He tightened his cloak and pressed on.
Behind him, the wind carried a whisper. A voice only he could hear.
> "You are less than what you were… but more than they will ever be."
Gold didn't answer. Not yet.
Alright—here's the next part of Chapter 4 as Gold enters the Empire's outskirts and begins to see the contrast between his world and theirs.
The gates of the outer district weren't gold-plated or carved with holy scripture—they were steel and silence, watched by guards in mirrored helmets who didn't speak unless spoken to. The wall was thirty feet high, layered with sigil-plates and enchantment wards that pulsed like veins beneath its stone.
Gold stood in line among farmers, beggars, broken soldiers, and wide-eyed pilgrims. All of them hoped for something inside.
He didn't.
When his turn came, he handed over a half-charred token he'd pulled from the ruins of his village—a birthmark coin, issued to every borderborn child by local scribes. The guard scanned it with a glyph-glass, a circular lens that hummed as it read hidden runes.
The guard squinted. "No last name?"
Gold met his eyes. "It was taken."
The man hesitated. Then shrugged, stamping it. "Outer district only. No magic use. If you're caught casting without sanction, you'll be gutted and branded. Next."
Inside, the Empire stank of life.
Not the slow, muddy pulse of his village, but a fast, overcrowded breathless chaos. The streets overflowed with voices—market stalls shouting prices in ten tongues, beggars flashing cursed trinkets, sanctioned mages selling bottled fire or memory-ink.
Glyphs glowed on stone walls. Monks floated mid-air, chanting over chalk diagrams. Automaton sentries patrolled alleys with echoing thuds of metal limbs. Children played in magic-enhanced pools while their parents whispered about quotas and taxes.
Gold's eyes flicked between faces. So many people, all unaware of the bones that paved the Empire's rise.
He found a place to sleep under the collapsed wing of a broken cathedral. No one asked why. The city didn't care who you were, only what you could pay—or what you could give up.
That night, Gold dreamed of fire again. Of hands reaching out from behind the veil, clawing for his soul.
And beneath it all, that voice again.
"You do not belong to them. You belong to us."
He woke with blood in his mouth and the taste of forgotten names on his tongue.
The entrance wasn't marked.
It never was.
Gold followed the scent of burnt salt and old metal through the alleyways of the lower sprawl. Past a shrine defaced with inked eyes. Past a crying girl who never blinked. Past walls etched with a symbol he couldn't read but felt—a symbol that pulsed in sync with the thing inside him.
He found the door behind a butcher's stall. A wooden plank, painted black, with a single rune carved deep into its center: "Vein."
He knocked three times.
Then once more.
The door unlatched without a sound, swinging inward to reveal a staircase spiraling into the earth.
---
The Black Market wasn't underground—it was beneath.
Beneath the Empire, beneath its laws, beneath even its lies. Here, the forgotten gathered. Warlocks with branded tongues. Disgraced nobles bartering memory shards. Children selling cursed artifacts older than the Empire itself.
Torches glowed with corpsefire. Shadows moved wrong. Smiles here meant nothing kind.
Gold walked in silence. The Pact inside him stirred, whispering.
> "There are pieces of us here. Buried things. Find them."
He passed stalls selling forbidden contracts bound in skin, divine names written backward in glass, bottled ghosts, and Aether fragments—raw essence torn from lesser divine remnants.
One stall in particular pulled at him.
An old woman sat behind a table of bones and glass eyes. She wore no jewelry, only scars. Her gaze landed on Gold like a rusted dagger.
"You've made a Pact," she said, voice dry. "But you've not yet paid in full."
Gold didn't answer.
She smiled, showing missing teeth. "Careful, boy. The Market trades in truth. And truth... always takes something back."
---
At the far end of the chamber, a crowd had gathered around a rising dais. A figure in blood-red robes stood before them, a lockbox clutched in his hands.
"Tonight's auction," the man boomed, "offers a treasure not seen in decades. An Unbound Fragment—a sliver of a dead god's memory."
Gasps. Gold's heart slowed. The Pact within him twitched.
The robed man opened the box.
Inside, floating above black velvet, was a flickering shard of light—no larger than a tooth—humming with sorrow, rage, and time.
Gold stepped forward.
He didn't know why. But something inside him did.
> "That fragment remembers us."
And Gold knew, even before the bidding began, that he wasn't leaving this place without it.
The bidding began.
"Three hundred soulmarks!"
"Five hundred!"
"A thousand!"
Each voice more desperate than the last. The Unbound Fragment pulsed brighter with every shout, sensing its own worth.
Gold clenched his fists. He didn't have soulmarks—didn't even have a name the Market would recognize. But the fragment pulled at him, calling in a language only broken souls understood.
He stepped forward—
—and a gloved hand stopped him.
A man stood beside him. He hadn't been there a moment ago.
Tall. Black coat. Hood drawn low. His presence was... silent, but absolute. As if the shadows parted for him willingly. In his other hand, he held a slender cane topped with a broken ring sigil—a symbol long forgotten by the Empire, but not by the divine.
The man raised a single finger.
The crowd hushed.
"Ten thousand soulmarks," he said calmly.
A heartbeat of silence followed. Then chaos.
"Impossible!"
"That's a lie!"
"Ten thousand?!"
But no one else raised a voice to counter it.
The auctioneer, pale and sweating, nodded. "S-sold! To the gentleman in black."
The fragment dimmed. The crowd dispersed, muttering curses and prayers.
Gold stood frozen.
The man turned to him. Beneath the hood, only a faint smile could be seen.
"You wanted it," he said. "And now you owe me."
Gold narrowed his eyes. "Why?"
"Because I know what you are," the man said softly. "Or more accurately—what you're becoming."
He handed Gold the small lockbox, now sealed.
"Take it. The fragment chose you. But its weight will not be kind."
Gold hesitated. Then took it.
The moment his fingers closed around the box, the Pact in his chest flared, and the air bent.
He saw flashes—ruins of a temple, chains made of light, and a voice screaming his name across time.
Then it was gone.
The man was already walking away.
> "Seek me when the pact breaks you," he called over his shoulder. "You'll know where to look."