The night was a twisted knot of shadows as Riven pressed herself against the cold metal wall of a decaying structure. Her breath misted, vanishing into the murk, and the steady hum of breach energy pulsed beneath her boots. Kale's warband had scattered, driven apart by the sudden emergence of a machine-beast from the hollow beneath Sector Twelve. But Riven wasn't thinking about them. Her mind was fixed on the fragments of memory that had surfaced when she touched the runes on the colossus's hide.
The Machine Woman's voice echoed through her skull, a whisper layered with steel and sorrow. The Hollow March has begun.
Riven gritted her teeth and slid along the wall's curve, slipping between piles of wreckage. The scent of rust and old oil stung her nostrils. Somewhere ahead, faintly visible in the breachlight haze, a passage opened downwards—an ancient maintenance shaft, its cover long torn away. She hesitated at the lip, the hum in her bones intensifying. This wasn't just another forgotten tunnel. It was a pathway into the buried veins, the pulse lines beneath the city that once carried not only power but something deeper—scripts that had shaped the world's laws before the fractures.
Her hands trembled as she traced the glyphs etched into the shaft's rim. They resonated faintly under her touch, shifting ever so slightly, as if recognising her presence. Her throat tightened. She remembered this script. It had been carved into the walls of the collapse zone back in her homeland, before everything was lost to the breachstorm. This was no coincidence.
Kale's voice crackled faintly over the battered comm-link on her wrist. "Riven. Status?"
She hesitated, pressing the comm-link's activation pad with her thumb. "I've found a way down. The lines are active here—old scripts, pre-collapse. I think I can follow them."
A pause. Then, "Don't go alone."
"I'm not waiting for backup. They're moving something beneath us. I can feel it." The words were sharper than she intended, but she didn't care. The memory of the Machine Woman's eyes, the void-slick blackness that had met her gaze in that ritual, still burned behind her lids.
She deactivated the comm-link and drew her blade, the edge shimmering faintly in the breachlight. With a deep breath, she swung her legs over the lip and dropped into the shaft. The descent was steep, lined with ancient metal rungs slick with condensation and grime. The further down she climbed, the louder the pulse grew—not just sound, but sensation, a pressure against her ribs and spine that seemed to align with her heartbeat.
The shaft opened into a cavernous space, a hollowed-out section of the city's foundation where great arteries of machine conduits crisscrossed the walls and ceiling. Glowing script ran along their lengths, flaring faintly as Riven's presence disturbed the air. The floor was littered with debris—broken automatons, shattered plating, fragments of forgotten machines. And at the chamber's centre stood a towering form, barely distinguishable in the gloom. It was another colossus, but dormant, its surface inscribed with runes that pulsed faintly with residual energy.
Riven's breath caught. This one was far older than the others she'd seen. The script on its hide wasn't just warning glyphs or containment seals; it was a narrative, a history woven into the very metal. Slowly, she approached, brushing dust from the nearest panel. Symbols bloomed under her fingertips, fragments of words and names she half-remembered from childhood stories. The Fracture of the Sun. The Echoing March. The Hollow Veins.
A voice slithered through the chamber, dissonant and low. "You've come far, Riven."
She spun, blade raised, but there was no one. Only the pulse of the conduits, and the shifting shadows thrown by the faint breachlight. The voice came again, this time from everywhere. "You touched the glyphs. You heard the call. The Hollow March was not the beginning. It was the warning."
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice cracking against the oppressive silence.
A figure coalesced from the shadows—faint, spectral, stitched with breachlight. It was the Machine Woman, her lips still sealed with the thin line of metal, her void-black eyes fixed on Riven's. The voice wasn't hers, not exactly. It was the machine speaking through her, an echo of something older.
"You carry the mark," it said. "The key to the forgotten lines. The Veins will awaken beneath your steps."
"I don't want this," Riven whispered, her knees trembling as the light intensified around her. "I didn't ask for any of this."
The figure tilted its head. "It does not matter what you want. The Veins are stirring, and you are already entangled. You can choose to run, but the breach will find you. Or you can learn to wield its truth."
The chamber shook faintly, dust falling in thin streams from above. Riven clenched her fists. She could feel the breach energy threading through her veins, a sickly warmth that shouldn't be possible. And yet, here she was, standing in a hidden artery of a dying city, facing down the whispering remnants of an ancient machine-god.
She drew a shaky breath. "What must I do?"
The figure's outline shimmered, beginning to fade. "The breach is not a wound. It is a door. Find the next marker. Learn the script. The Veins will guide you."
Before Riven could ask more, the figure dissolved into nothingness, and the chamber's pulse dimmed, leaving only the fading echo of that voice. Alone in the dim light, with the weight of the unknown pressing down, Riven clenched her jaw and turned back to the glyphs. Her blade hummed faintly in her hand, and the pulse beneath her skin steadied.
She wasn't running anymore.