The rain had thinned by morning, turning into a low mist that clung to the skeletons of Ironspire's factories. It softened nothing. If anything, it made the city feel older—like something that should have died but didn't know how.
Kael walked the edge of the junkfields alone. His shift hadn't started yet, but he needed to move. Sitting still made the whispers louder. Not the system's—those had quieted since yesterday—but something older, something in the city itself. Breathing through the pipes. Watching through rusted grates.
The sky above was stained ochre and violet, a false sunrise filtered through ash clouds and steam. Far above, massive elevator chains clinked as they hauled freight to the upper levels—those glittering tiers of Ironspire that Kael would never see except when they broke and fell.
He stopped near a ditch filled with shattered constructs—old patrol units from the war era, tangled with barbed wire and cracked armor plates. Their power cores had long since been drained, but Kael felt like they were still guarding something. Watching.
He crouched, brushing dirt off a rusted helmet with the sigil of the Fourth Guild etched into its brow. A forgotten regiment. No one spoke of the old guild wars anymore. It was easier to pretend they'd never happened.
But Ironspire didn't forget.
By the time Kael returned to the sorting line, the others were already grumbling through their labor. Garron kept glancing at him from across the yard, arms crossed, jaw tight. He hadn't approached Kael since yesterday. That silence said more than words.
Kael liked silence. You could think in it.
He worked without looking up, hands moving through the wreckage, sorting glass shards from copper wire, organic waste from scrapsteel. His gloves were little more than cloth strips, and the acidic residue burned into his skin, but he didn't flinch. The pain was just background noise now.
Above him, a pipe groaned. Steam hissed out in bursts from somewhere deep in the factory's belly. The Sorting Tower loomed behind the field—a spire of black iron and gear-laced balconies. That's where the upper enforcers operated. The ones with steam rifles and reinforced lungs. Machines more than men.
He'd never been inside. No one from the waste line had.
Kael looked down at his bracer—the bronze shell now fused into his forearm. It no longer glowed as brightly, but he could feel it there, humming under the skin like a second heartbeat.
Internal core stable.
Neural feedback: normalized.
The system rarely spoke now unless prompted. As if waiting. Watching how far Kael would fall before it offered a hand.
He didn't ask it anything.
He was tired of asking.
That night, after curfew, Kael slipped through the back gate of the scrapyard. No alarms. No spotlights. The guards hadn't patrolled this far in months. Too many "accidents" in the tunnels.
Beyond the fence, old iron stairs led downward into a sector lost to most of the city. They called it the Gutter Rows—collapsed corridors of the first machine age, buried when the factories grew too fast to care what they crushed.
Kael had never been down here before.
He didn't know why he came.
Maybe it was the silence.
Maybe it was the pull in his chest—the subtle nudge of the system guiding him like a marionette string tied around the soul.
The tunnels were damp, choked with vines and rust-stained pipes. Broken lanterns swayed from overhead cables. Somewhere in the dark, steam vents hissed like serpents. The scent of oil was thick enough to taste.
He passed a wall covered in old propaganda posters. Faded faces smiled beside slogans like "The Future Runs on Your Labor" and "Serve, Build, Endure."
Kael tore one down. The wall behind it had a sigil burned into the stone—an inverted gear with a single, staring eye.
He didn't recognize it. But it stared back.
Deeper in, he found it—a forgotten chamber lined with gears taller than houses. Machinery groaned in half-life, still turning after who-knew-how-many decades. In the center stood a stone archway, its frame webbed with copper filaments and old runes, long corroded.
Not a door. A gate.
And it was humming.
Kael stepped closer. The air changed here—colder, heavier, thick with static. His skin prickled. The light from the bracer on his arm flickered as if sensing something it didn't understand.
Unidentified tech signature detected.
Chrono-layer disruption: minor.
This structure predates guild standardization protocols.
Kael reached out and touched the metal.
His mind split.
He saw visions. Flashes. Cities on fire. Smoke rising from towers of brass and glass. Ships falling from the sky. And something buried—beneath the stone, beneath the steel—watching.
He staggered back, chest heaving.
The gate didn't open. But it knew he was there.
New node mapped.
Classification: Unstable Artifact Site.
Kael sank to the floor, hand shaking. His breath came in ragged gasps, but he laughed—a small, choked sound. Not because it was funny. Because it wasn't.
The world was bigger than anyone in Ironspire wanted to admit. Older. Angrier.
And he was tangled in it now.
When he finally returned to the surface, the sky had gone completely black. A few towers still flickered with light, but most of Ironspire slept. The city didn't dream.
Kael did.... And his dreams were full of machines that bled.