The ash fell heavier that night.
Not the usual silver drift that danced like snow through the furnace-choked streets, but thick, wet soot—clinging to your lashes, caking your lips, making every breath a sin against your lungs. In Caligo Verge, it was said that when the ash burned instead of settled, something had been taken... or something had tried to rise.
Beneath a corrugated lean-to behind the scrap-forge, two figures sat by a trembling fire made from stripped wire and splintered crates. One, a boy with hands too small for a wrench but already scarred by rust. The other, an old man whose back was more scrap than bone—his spine twisted by time and accident, goggles fused to his face by melted brass.
The boy spoke first, his voice muffled by a ragged breathing mask. “Is it true?” he asked. “That someone once flew?”
The old man didn’t answer right away. He poked the fire with a copper rod, then leaned back until the gears in his brace clicked softly into place.
"You want sermons, go to the Saints. You want truth?" His voice rasped like a flue pipe warming. "Then shut up and listen."
The boy did.
“His name was Nale Vire. Same blood as yours, if the rumors hold. Born in the slag-wards, raised beneath the bellows, same as the rest of us rustborn. But there was a crack in him—a bright one. Most of us learn to keep our heads down and our hopes lower. Nale looked up."
"They say he found a feather once. Not a bird feather—a flight feather. Copper-veined. Gear-hinged. Fused to bone. Just a shard, half-melted. But enough to make a man wonder.”
"He began building in secret. Twelve years of failures. Steam burns, broken arms, parts that screamed when they should’ve soared. Still, he kept going. Never preached. Never begged. Just... built."
"They called him 'Sky-Touched' behind his back. 'Madman.' 'Tither-bait.' You know the types. But Nale smiled through it. Said he didn’t want to escape—just wanted to rise. Said we were never meant to be slaves to the soot.”
The fire popped. The boy flinched.
The old man chuckled, dry as coal dust. “You scared of a story already?”
The boy shook his head. “What happened?”
"The night he leapt, the Cog Council didn’t send guards. They didn’t scream heresy. They didn’t even look down from their towers. That’s how you know they were scared."
"They let the silence do the work."
"He climbed the Furnace Tower alone—one hundred and eleven paces high. Wings on his back, built from junk and genius. Each feather wired to his nerves. They say when he reached the top, he turned his face to the ash-thick sky and laughed. Not out of joy. Out of defiance."
"And then—"
The man’s voice dropped so low the fire seemed to lean in.
“He jumped.”
“And for three heartbeats, he flew.”
“Not glided. Flew. The wings caught the updraft like sails made of soul. Sparks trailed behind him like stars. He rose above the bellows. Above the smoke. Some say they saw light above the clouds that night—light from a sun we forgot.”
The boy’s eyes were wide behind fogged lenses. “And then?”
“They say the wings burned. They say the sky rejected him. They say his body fell into the Gear Maw and was ground to steam.”
The boy waited.
The man leaned in closer, until the firelight reflected off the cracked brass of his cheekplate.
“But I was there.”
“And no one ever saw him fall.”
And beneath his coat, wrapped in a cloth soaked with grease and years, the old man kept a single copper feather—hinged, curved, and etched with a name.
Nale Vire.
The slag gutters ran black that morning, thick with grease and blood from the night purge.
Weylan kept low in the runoff trough, boots sliding in muck, hands wrapped in waxcloth as he picked through still-warm debris. The bells hadn’t tolled yet, which meant the overseers were either late or dead. He didn’t care which, as long as they stayed quiet.
Above him, the Furnace Tower groaned like it had bad dreams. Sparks rained from its vents—tiny, dying stars. Ash drifted like snow over the iron bones of Caligo Verge, and it would’ve been beautiful if it hadn’t stung so bad.
Weylan paused near a gear-catch basin, pulled back a slab of charred conduit, and found a handful of copper screws twisted like vines. Good salvage. Could trade them for heat tablets or clean oil.
He tucked the screws into his belt pouch and looked up, just once.
The Tower reached into the sky like it wanted to kill God. The top was lost in soot and smog. Weylan stared at it like he always did, wondering what it looked like from above. Wondering if it was true—what the old scrap-scavenger had whispered once, back when Weylan was younger and still pretending not to care.
“He didn’t fall. He was never meant to land.”
He pressed a hand to his chest. Felt the feather beneath his shirt—wrapped in cloth, bound with a wire string.
Copper-veined. Gear-hinged. His father’s, maybe. Or maybe just a myth he kept warm like a second heart.
Weylan climbed out of the trough and ducked behind the crumbling hull of a decommissioned gear hauler. That’s when he heard it.
A click.
Then a whir.
Then silence.
It was coming from the trash berm to his right—a mountain of rusted bot limbs, snapped rods, bent rail tracks, and dead servitors dumped like bones in a mass grave. The sound hadn’t come from above. It came from beneath.
He knelt, brushed aside slag netting, and found it.
A mechanical dog. Small. About the size of a barrel-top. Its brass frame was cracked, one leg missing entirely. The others were twisted like they’d been hit by a furnace cart. Its jaw hung open, teeth clamped on a shattered pipe wrench. One eye-lens glowed faintly, the other was dark. The chestplate was scorched, but not melted. There was a single letter still etched beneath the soot: S.
He stared at it a long time.
It didn’t twitch. Didn’t spark.
But it looked at him. Like it remembered.
Weylan picked it up.
The dog’s body sagged against his arms like a dead thing, but it was heavy—still had its core tank, maybe. Still something inside.
He didn’t know why he carried it back. He didn’t need another project. Wings were already too much. But something about the way it had looked at him made his chest go tight.
So he took it back to the crawlspace under Madre Linn’s shop, and he laid it on a leather sheet like it was a body waiting for judgment.
By nightfall, he had it stripped open.
Its interior was messier than expected—burnt connectors, half-melted sinew tubing, old command nodes rerouted with wax string. It had been fixed before. Badly. But someone had loved it once.
He rebuilt it with borrowed time and stolen parts.
One leg came from a broken pressure latch on a grain vault.
The replacement eye was a glass shard from a Saint’s cracked mask.
He left the voicebox disabled, except for one feature: the backup signal whistle—coded as a bird call.
It took nine nights to finish.
The tenth night, he connected the last coil and whispered,
“Don’t scream.”
He turned the switch.
The hound jerked. Twitched. Then stilled.
One leg kicked.
The eye-lens blinked.
A thin whine began to build in its throat, but it didn’t come out as static or a shriek.
It came out as song—a short, birdlike chirp. High and clear. A signal call from a forgotten war.
Weylan didn’t move.
The dog dragged itself forward. Laid its head against his foot.
Then chirped again.
Then sighed—a real sound, steam-laced and soft.
Weylan reached down and scratched the plating behind its ear.
“You’re a mess,” he said. “Nothing but bolts and hope.”
The dog clicked its tail—a copper hose segment with wires frayed like a brush—and blinked once.
He smiled. First time in weeks.
“Scraps,” he murmured. “That’s your name.”
The dog chirped in approval. Then collapsed into sleep-mode, a low purr cycling through its core.
The next morning, he smuggled Scraps out under his coat.
The overseers didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. Scraps made no noise, just a faint tick with every step.
They worked the line together—Weylan collecting pipe shards, Scraps carrying a cracked washer in his jaws like it meant something.
When the bells rang, and the smoke thickened, and the others dragged their bodies to curfew, Weylan stayed behind.
He looked up at the tower again.
Ash drifted between him and the sky.
The world still stank of metal and old fire.
But Scraps was at his side.
And in his chest, the feather pulsed like it had been waiting.
“Someday,” he whispered, “we’ll both fly.”
He should’ve stopped after the second fall.
But stopping had never felt like freedom.
Weylan gritted his teeth as he rewrapped the splint around his left wrist. The break wasn’t clean—he’d caught the outer beam on the glide attempt and twisted mid-spin. The impact dislocated his shoulder and sent him cartwheeling into a pile of slagstone, where he’d lain gasping for breath as ash settled in his teeth like guilt.
Now he sat in the crawlspace under Madre Linn’s floor again, one wing prototype leaning against the pipe wall behind him, the other crumpled like a snapped bird. Scraps lay nearby, head on his paws, one lens watching.
Weylan hissed as the wire binding cut into his skin.
“Not today,” he muttered, tightening the last knot.
Scraps chirped softly. A questioning tone.
“No, I’m not done,” Weylan said. “Not ever.”
The wing frame groaned as he lifted it to inspect the damage. The copper struts had bent under torque. Too brittle. He needed flexibility, not just strength. Maybe if he added a second piston to the main joint—
“You’ll kill yourself before you ever fly.”
The voice made him flinch. Not because he didn’t recognize it—he did—but because he hadn’t heard it in weeks.
Madre Linn.
She ducked under the crawlspace arch, one eye glowing dimly behind her mono-goggle. The other socket was hollow brass, covered with a stitched leather patch.
She didn’t come closer.
“Your back’s bent,” she said flatly. “And your hand’s useless. I smell bruised ribs. And that thing”—she nodded at the wing—“won’t lift you past the gutter line.”
“I know,” Weylan said, holding her gaze.
Madre sighed. “Then why keep trying?”
Weylan looked at Scraps.
“Because he’s the only thing I’ve ever built that stayed.”
The silence stretched.
She crouched beside him and ran her fingers across the cracked frame. Her touch was rough—blistered from decades of welding, wiring, resisting. She used to be a priest-engineer in the old halls before they burned her schematics and took her husband. Now she fixed what others threw away.
“You need spring steel,” she muttered. “Not pipe scrap.”
“I’ve only got pipe scrap.”
She gave him a sidelong look.
“Then you’ll need painkillers, too.”
The next day, Weylan returned to the slag pits. Arm still stiff. Shoulder bound tight. He carried a new wing frame strapped to his back under a canvas cloak. Scraps padded alongside, nose twitching every few feet.
Weylan didn’t head for the central chute. He detoured through the drain tunnels—a forgotten section of the city that once served as runoff for the old furnaces. Most of it was blocked off now, half-flooded and full of stinking steam.
But he liked it here.
No Saints. No Cog officials. No one telling him what humans were made for.
Just echoes and ash.
At the far end of the tunnel, he found the ledge.
It wasn’t high—maybe twenty feet—but the updraft from the cracked heat vents below gave enough lift for testing glides. He’d practiced here three times before. Failed twice. Landed hard once.
Today, he had a new frame. Lighter. Better balanced. Reinforced struts. He stretched the wings wide, letting the hiss of steam puff against their underside.
Scraps sat on the ledge, tail coiled, chirping once—his usual Are you sure?
Weylan stepped forward.
“I was born sure.”
He jumped.
For three seconds, he glided.
The wings caught the lift. The frame held.
The air felt cleaner here, thinner, like it had never been chewed by fire.
Then the right wing dipped.
Torque imbalance. Too much weight on the secondary strut.
He tilted, spun once—then slammed into the opposite wall, slid down the pipe, and hit the ground in a metal-flavored blur.
When he woke, Scraps was licking his face with a hydraulic tongue that squeaked every few seconds.
Weylan coughed. Groaned. Rolled over.
Nothing broken. This time.
He laughed, a raw sound like a broken gear.
“Closer,” he wheezed.
Scraps chirped sharply, then dropped a small metal piece onto his chest. Weylan blinked.
It was a valve seal—from a high-tension regulator. Not something found in scrap. Not unless it was stolen.
“Where’d you—?”
He stopped.
He heard shouting above.
Clanking. Heavy boots.
Someone had followed them.
Scraps growled—a low, static noise like a leaking piston.
Weylan grabbed the wing frame, slung it across his back, and ran.
The tunnel echoed with alarm bells and angry orders. Someone had seen him leap. Someone knew.
He didn’t care.
Even with the pain. Even with the frame half-broken and blood in his mouth.
He ran because he had tasted sky.
He ran because he had seen what it meant to almost rise.
And somewhere behind him, Scraps howled like a bird caught in a storm.
As transcribed from a rust-leafed page, nailed to the Gear Chapel wall. Year 117 A.C. (After Combustion).
Before there were towers, there were pits.
Before there were clocks, there were chains.
Before man rose, he was broken.
This is the foundation of the Furnace Creed.
From the first breath of steam to the last turn of the gear, we are made to serve.
To question the flame is to insult the Forge.
To climb is to betray the ground.
To build is to presume.
Man is not a god. Man is a tool.
This is known.
The Furnace Creed is not merely belief. It is the architecture of order. It is the heat that drives the heart of Caligo Verge. Without it, chaos. Without it, collapse.
Let all who read this remember:
The Flame is Holy.
Only through heat may man be cleansed of ego.
To sweat is to worship. To burn is to be seen.
The Sky is Forbidden.
What flies must fall.
Smoke rises only to scatter. Wings are for ash, not men.
The Body is Fuel.
Bones are levers. Flesh is insulation.
We are born to break, so that the city endures.
Invention is Heresy.
What the Council has not given, man must not build.
To create outside sanction is to rival the Makers.
Such arrogance is punished with silence.
Ash is Purity.
All things return to soot.
Those chosen to be Tithes must not weep. Their sacrifice feeds the next dawn.
So it has been. So it will be.
Let the gears turn.
The Steam Saints are guardians of this truth.
They do not command. They do not strike.
They appear when faith falters and flame dims. Their presence is correction. Their silence is law.
Saints are not born—they are refined.
Chosen by the Chimera of the Council, they are hollowed by vapor rites.
They walk in robes of scorched red.
They speak only scripture and steam.
Some have no tongues. Some have no hands.
All have no fear.
The Ash Tithes are the highest form of worship.
Once every twelve cycles, a child is taken. Not at random. Not by whim.
By weight. By spirit. By divergence.
They are offered to the Flame Core at the base of the Tower.
Marked in soot. Oiled. Lowered into the burning mouth of the city.
Their cries become part of the city’s rhythm.
Their name is painted in ash on the walls—then washed away before nightfall.
To question the Tithes is to invite ruin.
To intervene is to embrace death.
Those who resist are branded with the False Cog—a broken gear etched into the flesh behind the ear.
These heretics are given to the Gear Maw or sentenced to the pits.
Most do not last long.
Some become Saints.
Fewer survive unchanged.
Beware the Ember.
The one who burns, but does not fall.
The one who climbs. The one who builds.
If he exists, he is not a man.
He is a breach in the creed.
And breaches must be sealed.
Theme: Horror of ritual, powerlessness, and irreversible consequence
The bells rang hollow that morning.
Not the usual rhythmic clang of shiftwork or furnace rotation. This was slower—drawn out like a breath held too long. A different tone altogether.
Tithe-day.
Weylan froze mid-step as the sound echoed down the slag lanes. Around him, other rustborn paused—shoulders stiff, eyes low. No one said the word aloud. No one had to.
Scraps growled, a low steam-hiss from the back of his throat. His tail coiled around Weylan’s ankle like a warning.
It had been six years since the last Tithe. Long enough for children to forget. Long enough for hope to return in small, foolish ways.
Too long.
Weylan reached beneath his coat and touched the copper feather. He didn’t know why. Maybe because it hummed against his chest every time the world turned cruel.
In the Womb Wards—the place where the orphans of failed workers slept in stacked bunks and breathed recycled heat—word spread faster than the ash. A name had been drawn.
Tarn.
Seven years old.
Sickly. Born with a fused lung and a curiosity that annoyed the overseers.
Too many questions.
Too few answers.
A perfect candidate for the flame.
Weylan found him curled in the corner of the storage bay, gripping a rag-doll made from valve cloth and copper wire. Tarn didn’t cry. That was the worst part.
“They said it’ll only hurt for a little,” Tarn whispered. “Then I’ll glow.”
Weylan knelt beside him. His hands shook. Not from fear, but from knowing.
Knowing that no one would stop it.
Knowing that Saints would come, silent and watching.
Knowing that to fight it meant exile. Branding. Death.
He looked at Scraps, who let out a soft chirp and tilted his head.
Weylan stood.
“You trust me?” he asked.
Tarn blinked. “You’re the one who made the flappy things. The bird arms. You fly in your dreams.”
“Yeah,” Weylan said. “But I’m not dreaming now.”
He hoisted Tarn onto Scraps' back, securing him with a length of wire cord across the dog’s plating. Scraps growled once, as if protesting, then understood. He dropped to a low stance, engines humming faintly.
“Get him to Madre Linn,” Weylan whispered. “Go fast. Go quiet.”
Scraps darted off like a fired bolt, tail flashing, disappearing down the underchannel beneath the slag ramps.
The child was gone. Safe—for now.
But the name had already been called.
Someone had to burn.
He didn’t think. He walked.
Right into the center square where the Council’s extraction arms were already lowering the ceremonial cage.
Steam Saints stood in formation—eight of them, faces hidden beneath brass hoods shaped like open-mouthed furnaces. No eyes. No speech. Just the hiss of breath from their mask vents.
The crowd stood back. No one volunteered.
That’s when Weylan stepped forward.
He raised both arms. “Take me.”
A whisper cut through the silence. Not from the Saints—from the crowd. Shock, disbelief.
A rustborn offering himself?
Worse—replacing the chosen?
The lead Saint tilted his head. The hiss of his censer curled like smoke around his feet.
Weylan didn’t flinch.
“I’m of age. I work the slag. I’ve taken the oaths. I am willing.”
The Saints didn’t respond.
The Chimera—half machine, half carriage—rolled forward. A hundred gears whirred beneath its shell. A speaker crackled from its chest like a dying god’s voice.
“Willingness does not change the draw.”
The Saints turned.
One stepped toward him. Lifted his arm.
Branded him with the False Cog.
The pain was brief. The silence after was worse.
“You are Ember,” the machine hissed.
“Burn or be broken.”
Weylan turned. Ran.
Smoke filled the air. Saints gave no chase.
They didn’t have to.
He didn’t return to the Wombs that night. Or the crawlspace. Or the slag pits.
He ran until the tower was only a shadow behind him.
Until the ash couldn’t find him.
Until his breath came in short, painful bursts and his mark still smoked on the back of his neck.
Scraps found him just before dawn, metal paws tapping gently on the stone beside his curled body.
The child was safe.
But the city would not forget.
He had broken the Creed.
And soon, the sky would answer.
The wound behind his ear wouldn’t stop burning.
The False Cog—seared into the skin with a Saint’s iron—still hissed when Weylan moved. He had wrapped it in oilcloth, but the pain kept coming in pulses, like the machine that marked him had left a piece of itself behind.
He hadn’t spoken in two days.
Scraps walked beside him through the underpassages, nose low, tail twitching with tension. His internal light had dimmed to near-black, a signal Weylan had come to recognize: threat nearby. Possibly many.
Weylan stopped at the iron junction where the main steam artery split into three tunnels. No signs. Just pipes, grime, and echo.
Then he saw it.
A gear symbol—etched into the wall by hand.
Not the Council’s gear. This one was cracked through the center, but not the way the False Cog was. This one had roots spiraling from it. Like something growing from the break.
He reached out and touched it.
A lock clicked.
The wall hissed and shifted inward.
A hidden door, pressed between vent shafts and grease drains, groaned open.
Scraps whined once, low and cautious.
Weylan stepped inside.
The room was dim—lit by guttering gas lamps and a few glowing coils. But he could smell the metalwork. Fresh welds. Hot copper. Cool steam.
Madre Linn sat at a long bench, hammer in hand, sparks dancing off her shoulder.
“You took your time,” she said, not looking up.
“I didn’t know where I was going.”
“You did. You just didn’t know what was waiting.”
He stepped forward.
The walls were lined with scrap-built machinery—not decorative. Not forgotten. Functional. Pressure regulators. Rusted exo-limbs. Maps carved into metal sheets. He saw a gear-drive engine with etched names burned into the housing.
Saints didn’t build like this.
This was rebellion. Hidden in plain iron.
“You said you used to be a priest-engineer,” Weylan said softly.
“I lied.”
She turned to him, eye-goggles clicking into focus.
“I was a priest-engineer. Until I built something the Saints didn’t like.”
“What did you build?”
She smiled, teeth like broken gears.
“A question.”
She gestured to a shape beneath a canvas tarp.
“Lift it.”
Weylan stepped forward. Pulled back the cloth.
A wing frame. Smaller than his. Older. But real.
“It never flew,” she said. “Too heavy. Too rigid. But the man who made it believed it could. His name was Vire.”
Weylan’s throat closed. He reached for the frame with shaking fingers.
“Then—”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re not the first. But you might be the last.”
She walked to a panel in the wall and twisted a valve open. A map lit up across the ceiling—not paper, but etched copper wiring, running from point to point like veins.
“These are the nodes,” she said. “Places like this. Five in the Verge. Dozens outside. We call it the Root.”
“The Root?” he echoed.
“Because it grows under the surface. Quiet. Strong. And one day it’ll crack the stone.”
Weylan stood staring.
His wings—still slung on his back, battered, bruised—felt lighter somehow.
“You’ve always known?” he asked. “About me?”
“No,” Linn said. “But I knew the signs. You came back every time broken—but more determined. That’s not survival. That’s faith.”
“Is this a resistance?”
She shook her head.
“No. Not yet. It’s just people who remember what it was like to dream.”
She paused.
“But if you fly, Weylan… that changes.”
He sat down on the floor. Scraps lay beside him, resting his head on Weylan’s leg.
The silence of the room settled around them like ash.
And somewhere in the walls, a gear turned.
Not loudly.
Just enough to remind them: something was waking.
Silma Rae moved like steam in the walls.
She had been part of the Root for nineteen cycles, though no one kept real time anymore. Clocks lied. Clocks were forged by the Cog Council. Down here, they kept time by pressure pulses and the singing of pipes.
She knelt in the access shaft, shoulder pressed to iron, listening to the city breathe.
Three puffs. A pause. Two more. A slow leak downstream.
Not a hazard. Not today.
She moved on.
Her path led beneath the Hollow Stair, where the Saints walked twice a day to survey the factory quarter. Above her, red robes dragged across stone. The soft hiss of censers leaked into the vent like incense from a dying god.
Silma waited until they passed, then emerged from the grating. A quick slide of the panel behind her sealed the opening.
The chamber was small—no bigger than a stall. But in it sat a child no older than eight, rocking slowly with a tool clutched in both hands. A gear lay broken at his feet.
"Fix or fail?" Silma asked.
"Fix," the child said, not looking up.
Silma nodded. That was the oath. All Root youth learned it.
She knelt beside him. Helped him align the teeth.
The Root had been growing since before Silma was born. It wasn’t a rebellion. Not really. It was a memory that refused to die.
Some whispered that the Root began when the first Saint screamed—when the steam rites boiled a young mother’s mind and her child carved freedom into the underfloor with her last breath.
Others said the Root began when the sky dimmed, when the smoke grew too thick for birds to pass, and the city forgot it was once part of a world.
But Silma knew the truth.
It began when someone asked,
“What if we were meant for more?”
She passed through six nodes that day.
The Burned Chapel, where prayers were etched into iron.
The Boiler Tomb, where a man named Iken had died sealing a leak to save a dozen children.
The Gear Library, where old blueprints were stitched into bedsheets, hidden in plain sight.
The Valve Grove, where mothers sang lullabies over humming pipes.
The Ember Hall, where branded ones came to breathe clean for a day.
Each node had different people, but one purpose:
Preserve knowledge.
Protect memory.
Wait for the sign.
It came the next night.
A pulse from Node Five.
One long, two short.
A dead signal code—unused since the Last Ember fell.
Silma froze. Checked the line twice. Then once more.
She couldn’t believe it.
He had survived.
The boy with the wings.
She made her way back to the central hub, faster than she ever had before. Through ducts and coils, across hanging ladders and grease-slick rails. Her joints ached. Her back screamed. But her heart beat like it remembered how to hope.
She reached the Root Core.
There, waiting in the dim red light of the flame coils, stood Madre Linn.
"You knew," Silma said.
Linn didn’t turn. "I guessed."
"He's branded."
"I know."
"He's ready?"
"Not yet."
Silma looked down.
"And when he is?"
Madre Linn finally turned.
"When he rises," she said, "the city will hold its breath."
"And if he falls?"
Linn shrugged.
"Then we build again. But this time, louder."
Weylan didn't sleep much anymore.
The pain behind his ear—where the False Cog had been seared into his skin—had dulled, but it never stopped. It throbbed every time he lifted metal, or thought too long about what he was about to do.
In the Root workshop, beneath the steam junctions and echoing gear shafts, he worked by coillight, his hands blackened to the knuckle. He barely spoke. Madre Linn didn’t press him. She watched from her bench, welding slow circuits into a breathing brace for a child upstairs.
“You don’t ask many questions,” she said once, breaking the silence.
“I’ve already decided,” Weylan said.
She didn’t ask what.
The wings were almost done.
This version was different. Lighter. Stronger. Wiser.
Each strut had been reinforced with salvaged alloy from the Root’s secret stocks—steamsteel, harvested from a pre-Creed turbine long buried beneath the city. The wing membranes were mesh-stretched across copper filament, pressure-tested and tensioned to respond to micro-adjustments through an integrated pulley harness wired to his arms and back.
It wasn’t a dream anymore. It was an answer.
Scraps sat nearby, tail curled around a gear, watching the frame’s shape with tilted-head reverence. He let out a soft chirp every time Weylan tested a joint or locked a hinge in place.
Outside the Root chamber, Caligo Verge still belched smoke and doctrine. But down here, in this hidden place beneath the city’s teeth, something holy was being built from rust and ruin.
On the fourth night, Silma Rae appeared.
Weylan looked up as the courier entered, her boots coated in copper dust, a faint scar running down her cheek where a pipe had burst long ago.
“You’re him,” she said softly, studying the wings.
Weylan didn’t respond.
“I’ve run messages for ghosts, you know,” she continued. “Moved parts across sewers to rebuild things I didn’t believe in. But now I’ve seen it.” She paused.
“We’ve all seen it.”
Weylan tightened a bolt. “Then you know what happens if I fail.”
Silma knelt, eyes level with his.
“Then we build again. Louder.”
That night, Weylan strapped the wings to his back for the first time.
They were heavier than he expected, but balanced. The harness pressed against his spine with a steady pulse. The filament mesh hissed as it moved—alive, responsive, eager.
He stepped onto the lift platform carved from a broken elevator door and gripped the manual crank. The shaft above rose through layers of concrete and rot, sealed by iron blast hatches. Madre Linn handed him a keycard etched with the symbol of the Root—cracked gear, roots spiraling.
“Slide it into the panel at the top,” she said. “That’ll open the access to the upper tower.”
Weylan nodded.
Madre Linn stepped back. She didn’t bless him. Didn’t hug him.
Just said:
“Make them look up.”
The platform rose.
Scraps didn’t follow. He sat at the base of the lift, eyes glowing faintly, tail twitching once.
Weylan raised a hand.
Scraps chirped.
The platform ascended.
The lift shuddered to a stop.
Above him, the Tower groaned—steel cables whining with age and wind. The air up here was different. Thinner. Drier. Almost clean. Weylan stepped off the platform and into the open chamber beneath the launch deck.
There was no ceremony. No guards. No Saints watching.
Just ash whispering across the floor like memory.
Scraps hadn’t followed. Madre Linn hadn’t spoken.
But someone—some Root member he’d never met—had left a gear etched into the wall at shoulder height. Not broken. Not cracked.
Just turning.
Weylan walked the last twenty-two steps to the edge.
This was the place.
This was where his father had jumped—his wings screaming, his dream burning behind him like a falling star.
Weylan stood in the wind, the wings strapped across his back, the harness tight to his ribs. Each breath fogged the regulator valve at his hip. The microboiler inside pulsed, slow and steady, like a second heartbeat.
It wasn’t strong enough to carry him.
But it didn’t have to be.
It was just enough to correct.
He knelt near the ledge, brushing ash away from a carved mark in the floor. A gear, half-faded. And below it, initials burned into stone:
N.V.
Nale Vire.
His father. The Skyburnt. The dreamer who fell.
Weylan bowed his head.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You were almost right.”
He reached to his back and twisted the primer. The pulse chamber hissed awake.
His father had jumped with nothing but belief—
Pure, beautiful, unfinished.
But belief alone hadn’t been enough.
Weylan hadn’t just inherited the dream.
He’d completed it.
His hands had bled for it. His lungs had filled with ash. His body bore the mark of heresy. But in the end—
It was his design that made flight possible.
That was the difference.
His father had risen in faith.
Weylan would rise in balance.
He took a step back.
Felt the wind bite at his boots.
The city below was lost in shadow and smoke, but beyond it—above it—the sky opened like an ancient wound.
No one had seen it clearly in years.
Maybe no one ever would again.
But he had to try.
He ran.
The wings unfolded with a scream of tension and hissed steam. The pressure regulators hissed. The pulley system whined as the frame snapped outward into full span. His boots hit the edge.
And he leapt.
For three heartbeats, nothing.
Then: lift.
Not glide.
Not fall.
Flight.
The air caught the membrane, the chamber pulsed, the pistons engaged. He tilted, corrected, leveled.
The city fell away beneath him.
His back burned. His joints screamed. The wings rattled against gravity and wind and disbelief.
But he flew.
Below, in alleys and chambers and steam-choked lanes, heads turned.
Root couriers stopped mid-run.
Children pointed.
A Saint paused its patrol and looked up—silent, watching.
And in the chapel ruins, someone whispered:
"He didn’t fall."
I. The Root: Silma Rae
She was threading through a vent shaft near Ember Hall when the children screamed—not from fear, but from awe.
Silma pressed her face to the grating and looked up through a cracked glass pane.
And there he was.
A shape.
Wide-winged.
Falling—but not.
Rising.
A bird of brass. A boy of ash.
The breath caught in her throat.
She whispered the phrase they’d passed in code for years, in theory only, never expecting to say it aloud.
“He flies.”
And the copper line she held hummed—every node alive.
A dozen replies blinked down the wire.
We see.
We witness.
We rise.
II. Madre Linn
In the lowest room of her shop, alone in the heat, Madre Linn closed her eyes.
The boilers had dimmed.
The ash had gone still.
And the creak in her bones told her something ancient had shifted.
She had not saved him.
She had given him the chance to save himself.
And that was more.
She poured a flask of old oil into the shrine burner at the back of her chamber—no Saint icon, no Cog sigil. Just a feather, hammered flat and etched by her hand.
"Let them try to chain the sky now."
III. Steam Saint No. 6 – “The Watcher”
The Saint was stationed at the Furnace Square.
His mask hissed with breath. His censor glowed with heat.
He had never spoken aloud in twenty-nine cycles.
When the shadow passed above, he paused.
It wasn’t a bird.
It wasn’t smoke.
It was a shape that matched no Creed, no code, no approved path.
A violation.
A miracle.
His eyes—once human, now sealed behind brass—watched it arc against the sky.
His censor flickered.
He raised his hand to his ear and touched the edge of the False Cog—branded there before his ascension.
For the first time in nearly three decades, he wept.
IV. Child in the Wombs – Tarn
He was supposed to be dead.
The Tithe had called his name. The Saints had come.
But Weylan had sent him away.
He still remembered the way Scraps had run—how his steam-wrapped paws had bounced and hissed, carrying Tarn to safety through tunnels that smelled like rust and prayers.
Now, through a hole in the ceiling—cut once by fire, never repaired—Tarn saw something move in the sky.
He dropped his doll. Crawled to the edge of the light.
"He’s flying," he whispered.
And for the first time in his small, soot-stained life—
He believed the world could be something else.
V. The Council
In the sealed chamber beneath the Tower, the Chimera clicked.
Gears shifted. Copper eyes lit with a sickly glow.
A row of council seats lined the walls—none occupied by faces. Only masks. Blank. Circular. Uniform. Some etched in gold. Others in ash.
A voice cracked from the speaker grille:
“One has breached. Wings unauthorized. Propulsion irregular. Observation protocol initiated.”
No one moved.
The masks remained still.
But one leaned forward.
Its voice rasped through the system like a file against bone.
“Burn the records.
Reinforce the Creed.
Prepare a Saint for war.”
VI. Unknown – Graffitied Wall, Sector 9
Sometime later—hours or days, no one could say—someone found a wall in the outer quarters, marked in soot and oil.
No one saw who wrote it.
But everyone read it.
HE DID NOT FALL.
And beside it, crudely drawn in scorched brass pigment:
A cracked gear
with wings.
The sky wasn’t blue.
It wasn’t gold, or clear, or clean.
It was gray—choked, endless, strangely open.
Laced with ash, licked by updrafts of industrial heat, lit faintly from below by the breath of Caligo Verge’s furnaces. But from up here, above the towers, above the Saints, above the scream of doctrine—it was open.
And he was in it.
Weylan Vire, rustborn, branded, forgotten.
Flying.
Not with grace, not with ease—but with defiance.
The wings hissed and groaned with every adjustment, each beat of air sounding like pain made mechanical. The harness straps bit into his shoulders. The regulator stung against his spine. His hands had long since gone numb. The wind clawed at his coat. Every tendon screamed.
But he held.
He had launched from the highest platform of the Furnace Tower, and now—he was above it. The boiler’s final pulse had given him lift, and now all that carried him forward was wind and belief.
Below, the city was laid bare.
A living scar of soot and stone, stitched with steam lines and vent shafts. The Chapel Spires. The silos. The dome of the Council Core. The gear-mouth gates. He could see the Wombs. The slag fields. The very pipe where he had found Scraps.
And all of it looked… small.
Not meaningless. But sized correctly—as if he were finally seeing the machine for what it was.
And then, it happened.
The Moment Above All Things
The pressure changed.
The noise dropped away.
The wind steadied—and for one impossible breath—
The world went silent.
Weylan hung there, wings wide, balanced on the breath between gravity and faith.
The city faded below him.
No creeds. No Saints. No chains carved into his blood.
Just sky.
Just silence.
Just truth.
And it broke him.
He laughed. A raw sound, half-cough, half-joy.
A sound born from no language—just release.
Real joy.
Not the kind handed out in Creed prayers. Not the kind whispered in the dorms before curfew. Not even the kind he imagined when he’d first dared to build.
This was earned.
“I did it,” he whispered.
Tears slipped free and vanished into the wind.
He touched the copper feather around his neck. Not in mourning.
In recognition.
His father had risen in belief.
Weylan had risen in balance.
The wind didn’t howl.
It sang.
Then—heat. Rising hard from below. An updraft—a roaring breath from the underfurnace vents.
It slammed the right wing, torqued the frame. His body jerked sideways.
Too fast.
He spun once, lost altitude.
Not like this—
He pulled hard on the wrist tethers. The left wing hissed. The right screamed but held. He twisted his hips, shifted his weight, rerouted pressure through the regulator—
The wing caught.
He leveled out.
His chest burned from the effort. His pulse roared in his ears. But he was still aloft.
Barely.
Then he saw it.
Far below—at the edge of the outer district—a spark.
Orange. Arcing upward.
A signal.
The Root.
They had seen him.
They were guiding him in.
He adjusted course.
The boiler was spent. The wings were holding—just—but every second felt heavier. Every correction hurt more. Every gust of wind was now a threat.
Below him, smoke curled like ink in water.
Lights blinked.
People pointed.
Crowds gathered.
Some Saints stood motionless.
One, near the Chapel, knelt.
As he dropped altitude, memories bled into his vision.
Scraps chirping for the first time.
Madre Linn sealing the last wing strut.
Tarn clutching a copper-wire doll.
A name carved into the tower ledge: N.V.
A feather, bent by heat, passed from father to son.
He’d carried it so long he forgot what it meant.
Until now.
Wind caught him hard—dragged him left.
The membrane on the lower frame flapped loose—torn by tension.
He dipped.
The city roared closer.
He aimed for a clearing on the edge of the Aether Scar—an abandoned launch pad from the old airships. Flattened. Empty. A skeleton of a landing site.
If he could just—
Another gust. A bolt snapped. The right wing dipped.
He was falling now.
Falling fast.
But he held position.
He didn’t flail.
He didn’t scream.
He remembered the old man’s words from long ago, whispered through soot and story:
“He didn’t fall. He was never meant to land.”
Weylan smiled.
He angled the wings. Pulled the last emergency tether.
The glider dipped, curved—**
and touched down in fire-dust and broken gravel, skidding across rusted stone like a dropped knife—**
—and stopped.
He lay still. Breathing in steam and smoke and blood.
Above him, the sky was just sky again.
Not a dream. Not a myth.
But something he had touched.
And far below, the city watched the sky as if it had never seen it before.
They didn’t come right away.
The Council didn’t send guards.
The Saints didn’t descend in robes of fire.
Not yet.
The city did what cities always do in the face of the impossible—
It froze.
Weylan lay on the old launch pad, chest heaving, bones shaking. Every inch of his body screamed. The wings lay bent behind him, one strut cracked, the steam chamber hissing its last breath into the grit.
But he was alive.
He had landed.
And for now, that was enough.
Across the city, silence fractured.
At the Root nodes, messengers were sent—tappers, runners, engineers emerging from bolt holes and vent shafts to whisper one phrase:
“He did not fall.”
In shops and scriptoriums, in the collapsed boiler rooms turned into learning dens, in old tunnels repurposed for refuge—eyes lit, voices stirred, and tools changed hands with new purpose.
Weylan Vire had flown.
And he had landed.
And that meant they could too.
But not all watched with wonder.
Beneath the Council Dome, the Chimera shuddered.
Its core—a pulsating aether engine fed by both steam and suspicion—spun faster than it had in years.
A mask—etched in obsidian—clicked into place behind the long brass desk.
A voice crackled from the chamber wall.
“We have a symbol.”
Another replied.
“Worse. We have a survivor.”
“They will build wings.”
“They will build fire.”
“They will build... belief.”
Silence.
Then—
“Burn it down.”
The order was issued in cipher script—silent gears spinning in sequence.
Not a declaration of war.
A correction.
The Root must be broken.
Weylan must be reclaimed—or erased.
The symbol must not spread.
At the edge of the Aether Scar, Scraps found him.
The mechanical hound whined softly, pressed his cold nose against Weylan’s shoulder.
Weylan stirred, blinking through blood.
“You came,” he whispered.
Scraps chirped. Then stepped back.
From the haze, two Root shadows emerged—cloaked, masked, marked with soot.
One knelt.
“You’re the reason they’ll run now,” she said.
Weylan tried to sit up. Pain exploded across his ribs.
“I didn’t run,” he said. “I flew.”
The other nodded.
“Then we run to the place you rose from.”
They lifted him gently.
And from behind them, on the broken concrete—
A single word had been scratched in the dust:
R I S E
The ash didn’t fall like snow that morning.
It fell like judgment.
Heavy. Hot. Red-tinted. Each flake sizzling faintly as it touched metal or skin. People stayed indoors. The Saints walked with double censer chains, steam trailing behind them like execution smoke.
The city had seen something it wasn’t meant to.
And now it held its breath, waiting for someone to tell it what was real.
In the Slag Quarter, a mural appeared overnight.
Crude, etched in soot and weld-burn—
A pair of wings.
Not angelic. Not beautiful. Mechanical. Leaking steam. Bent at the tips.
And beneath it: one word carved with a sharpened bolt.
Flew.
It was gone by midday. Scrubbed by drones. Painted over with Furnace Creed scripture.
But someone etched it again. And again.
By nightfall, it had appeared in twelve districts.
The Council responded.
All root-level laborers were ordered to remain in their assigned zones. Curfews were reinstated. The Saint Walk doubled. Breath-tax readings resumed.
But worst of all—Ember Hunts began.
Unbranded citizens were questioned.
Branded ones were taken.
Anyone known to work with unauthorized schematics was flagged for interrogation.
Anyone with a history of “vertical obsession” was escorted to the Maw.
The Saints said nothing.
But their censors burned hotter.
And their footsteps grew louder.
Below it all, Root moved like shadow.
Madre Linn gathered her people in the submerged boiler vault beneath the Aether Scar.
Weylan lay in a recovery sling, ribs bound, fevered but lucid.
“You’ve become the sun,” someone said softly, watching him.
Weylan opened one cracked eye.
“No,” he rasped. “Just the crack in the clouds.”
They asked him questions.
How the wings felt.
What failed.
What worked.
What it felt like—to leave the ground and not die.
He answered what he could.
He left out what mattered most.
The way it made him laugh.
The way the sky opened like it had been waiting.
In Ember Hall, Silma Rae sorted new recruits.
Two dozen in a day.
Tinkers. Medics. Two ex-Saint acolytes with grease under their nails and heresy in their bones.
“They’re coming faster,” one said.
“They’ve seen the fire,” Silma replied. “Now they’re looking for warmth.”
In the Council Core, the Chimera reeled.
Its gears buckled under conflicting directives.
A shadow moved through the Doctrine Chamber.
Maskless.
Unrecorded.
A councilmember lost to history—one of the old ones.
He touched the council speaker grille and whispered a phrase not heard in decades:
“Project Silence.”
The chamber lights dimmed.
A new directive uploaded.
Find the wings.
Find the source.
Find the boy.
Erase.
Erase.
Erase.
And in the Wombs, a child named Tarn etched his own wing into the stone above his bed.
He didn’t cry when he drew it.
He smiled.
Because now, when he dreamed, the sky had a name.
The first sign wasn’t the footsteps.
It was the sound of silence.
Not the kind that lives in quiet halls or forgotten corners.
This was structured—designed.
A hush so complete, it smothered every whisper before it could reach the air.
The Black Saint had arrived.
No one saw him come.
Not even the Saints.
He did not emerge from the Saint Hall.
He was not blessed by the Chimera.
He simply appeared.
Clad not in red, but in matte black, stitched with steel filament. No censer. No scripture. No mouth slit in his mask. Just a thin slit across the faceplate—too narrow to be eyes. Too wide to be human.
His presence dropped rooms ten degrees.
The steam lines trembled.
The Flame Priests did not greet him.
They knelt.
He walked through the Chapel Quarter, past murals and whispers.
He stopped at a gear etched in rust.
Touched it.
And the wall behind it cracked.
He did not speak.
But everywhere he passed, silence followed.
And people vanished.
Beneath the Aether Scar, Weylan woke coughing.
The fever had broken. His bones ached like rusted joints, but he could breathe. He sat up too fast, nearly collapsed, but Madre Linn caught him.
“They’ve sent something,” she said, voice thin.
Weylan blinked. “What?”
“Not someone. Something.”
She gestured to a map burned into copper.
A new flare had been spotted. Not Root. Not Council.
No known signal pattern.
But the place it was seen—
“Here,” she said, pointing. “Directly over the Furnace Tower. Hovering.”
Weylan frowned. “Saint?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Then what is it?”
Madre Linn didn’t blink.
“A question with teeth.”
That night, three Root couriers didn’t report back.
A safehouse in the western pipe district was found empty—no signs of struggle.
Just dust. And one wing fragment, bent into a spiral.
Weylan stared at the fragment as Silma Rae placed it before him.
He touched it gently.
It wasn’t blood that scared him.
It was precision.
This wasn’t revenge. It was surgical erasure.
And in the Council’s deepest vault, the Chimera spun one word on its locked reel, again and again:
Null.
Null.
Null.
The pipes were weeping.
Not water—steam.
High-pressure. Unregulated. Each hiss a whisper too quiet to parse, but too rhythmic to ignore.
In the Root vault beneath the Aether Scar, Weylan sat upright in a sling chair, wrapped in sweat-soaked linen, watching the overhead vents exhale in slow pulses.
One long… two short.
Pause.
Repeat.
A pattern. Not random.
Across the room, Madre Linn stared at the same rhythm.
“That’s not a leak,” she murmured.
Silma Rae entered behind her, grime-streaked, jaw clenched.
“Three more gone,” she said. “Northern lift station. No signs. No witnesses. Just that smell.”
Weylan turned his head. “The Saint?”
Silma didn’t answer.
But her silence was agreement.
Scraps was already gone.
He had slipped out hours earlier, ignoring Weylan’s commands for the first time since his activation. No chirp. No nuzzle. Just the hiss of gears and a fading sound of padded metal feet on stone.
Weylan hadn’t slept since.
They had moved him to a deeper node—a reinforced chamber with only one way in. Dozens of Root members rotated through the space, always armed, always alert. And still, the tension felt thin. Like the walls were made of fog and prayer.
“Let me go,” Weylan had said, more than once.
Each time, Madre Linn shook her head.
“They didn’t kill you in the sky,” she said. “They want you scared.”
“They want the wings,” Silma added. “Or the plans. Or your voice.”
“They can have the wings,” Weylan said. “They won’t get the why.”
The steam rhythm continued.
It echoed through vents, through support beams, through the bones of the building. And Weylan began to wonder—
Is it even the Saint?
Or is the city itself starting to speak back?
Scraps returned just past dusk.
He padded in through the lower corridor, legs streaked with oil, one eye-lens cracked. His gait was slower. Almost... dragged.
But in his jaws, he carried something.
A sphere.
Smooth, blackened. Marked with Council sigils—but half-melted. Whatever it had been, it had burned.
Weylan rose unsteadily. “What is that?”
Scraps dropped it with a clunk.
The sphere hissed.
Linn and Silma stepped back. Others drew weapons.
Weylan approached.
A click.
A hum.
A voice.
No words—just sound. A low, echoing loop of a man’s breath… and then, a sob.
Silma froze. “That’s a recording.”
“No,” Linn said. “That’s a confession.”
They played it again.
A man’s voice. Twisted by heat. But clear.
“I built the mask. I saw his face. It’s not human.
It wears the silence. It doesn’t keep it.
He left this for me to find. I think he wants—”
The recording fractured. Skipped.
Steam hissed.
The voice dissolved.
Weylan stared at the black sphere.
Not left behind.
Planted.
They called it a March, but there was no sound.
No drums.
No chains.
No sermon.
Just the Saint.
Moving.
His path began at the Gear Gate.
The towering structure that separated the Council Core from the outer quarters had been sealed since the last combustion riot—but now it stood open, steam bleeding from its hinges like breath from an open wound.
The Saint stepped through.
Clad in black.
No censer.
No flame.
No sigil of forgiveness.
Only the mask.
And the silence.
He moved at a steady pace.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Just inevitable.
Children stopped playing.
Mothers stopped speaking.
Workers dropped tools as he passed.
And then—after he turned a corner—one was gone.
Always just one.
No sound.
No struggle.
Just space where someone used to be.
The first to vanish was a muralist.
He’d been sketching the wings again—etching them into a side wall of the smog tunnel.
Gone.
Brush still wet.
No footsteps in the soot.
Only a smear of black across the feather’s edge.
The second was a speaker.
One of the few who dared to recite aloud the name Weylan Vire—he stood on a lift crate near the furnace halls, shouting his belief that the boy had risen not as a traitor, but as a signal.
The Saint passed.
No one touched the speaker.
But ten seconds later—
Only the crate remained.
And a looping echo of his last sentence, bouncing unnaturally off the stone:
“We saw… we saw… we saw…”
Then silence.
Below, in the Root vault, Weylan listened.
He could hear the reports. Could feel the pressure in the walls. The steam vents had started mimicking the Saint’s walk—timed releases in sync with his steps.
It was like the city itself had joined in.
“Where is he taking them?” Weylan asked.
Silma Rae shook her head. “No one knows.”
“Why not kill them?”
“Maybe that’s not the point,” Madre Linn said.
“Then what is the point?”
“To make us listen to what isn’t being said.”
The sphere that Scraps recovered sat in a stasis shell now—wired to a pulse decoder and a dozen Root listeners, trying to pull meaning from the fragments.
So far, only one new line had been uncovered:
“He left the door open.”
Weylan stood near the boiler’s edge that night, watching the city through a vent slot.
He saw the Saint move through the Square.
Saw him pause.
And for the briefest moment—the Saint turned.
Looked directly toward the Aether Scar.
The vent slot froze with ice.
Weylan’s breath caught.
Silma shut the panel.
“That wasn’t random,” she said.
“No,” Weylan murmured. “He knows.”
The chamber was sealed behind a wall of cooled slag and rusted conduit, hidden at the base of the Aether Scar. It had taken the Root three days and a near-fatal gas leak to expose the entry valve.
Inside, the air was different.
Old.
Dry.
Like memory that hadn’t been touched in a hundred years.
Weylan stepped into the dark with Madre Linn and Scraps at his side. The mechanical dog sniffed the floor—tail twitching, ears rotating. He didn’t chirp.
He revered this place.
The walls were lined with pipes—but not like the rest of the city’s tangle. These were clean, arranged with geometric intention. Symbols etched in flame-forged script ran along their sides.
Weylan traced a finger over one.
“This isn’t Council make,” he murmured.
Linn nodded. “Pre-Creed. Maybe older.”
“How old?”
“Old enough that no one remembers it was possible.”
At the center of the room, under a rust-veined skylight, sat a table.
Flat. Circular. Half-covered in dust.
Scraps stepped forward first. Placed his paw on a small recessed panel.
A click.
The table lit.
Light hummed upward—dust glowing in columns—and blueprints began to unfold in the air like ghost-lace.
Wings.
Engines.
Harnesses.
And something else.
A shape like a tower—but inverted.
A vessel.
Not made to escape the city.
Made to pierce something above it.
Weylan stared, wide-eyed.
Linn stepped beside him.
“These weren’t flight tools,” she said. “These were breach rigs.”
He turned to her. “What does that mean?”
She touched one of the projected gears.
“It means the Creed wasn’t forged to prevent rebellion. It was forged to prevent discovery.”
More projections sparked.
Logbooks.
Failed launch records.
Signal pings into “atmospheric distortion strata.”
The city had tried once.
Many had tried.
And the Council had erased every attempt.
Not because they feared collapse.
Because they feared what might be above.
A final image stabilized above the table.
A name, etched in thin, curling brass lines:
“Project N-Virē.”
(Codenamed: Echo)
Weylan’s hand trembled.
“It’s not a name,” he whispered. “It’s a designation.”
Linn’s eyes widened.
“Your father wasn’t the first,” she said.
Weylan nodded.
“He was the last one who remembered.”
The vessel wasn’t a machine.
It was a monument.
Buried under layers of slag, sealed in a dry vault with false power records and a false Saint sigil, it had slept for decades—untouched, half-finished, waiting for someone who remembered how to ask the right questions.
Weylan stood before it now, hand on the cold brass hull.
It was shaped like a spire—narrow, aerodynamic, but hollow in its lower third. Large enough for one person, maybe two.
A launch vessel.
Not to escape outward…
But up.
Silma Rae stood beside him, running her fingers across the lift thrusters. She’d never seen tech this old. And yet, it felt… familiar.
“Looks like it was meant to punch through something,” she said.
“It was,” Weylan replied, eyes locked on a schematic displayed beside the frame. “Atmospheric breach patterns. There’s a layer the Council mapped, then erased.”
Linn exhaled sharply.
“They knew the sky was a wall.”
“They didn’t want anyone to remember that.”
He spent that night pouring over the logs.
The Root’s engineers rerouted power from a disabled lift generator.
Steam hissed through corroded ports.
Scraps helped lift panels.
Everything stank of dust and destiny.
The system came online at 03:14 local.
And the ship—designated Echo-9—greeted them with one word:
“Listening.”
Weylan didn’t sleep.
Not because he couldn’t, but because he wasn’t alone anymore.
Every blueprint he touched, every rusted latch he tested, felt like fingers brushing through time.
His father’s sketches were here.
A different voice. A different hand.
But the same dream.
Flight wasn’t rebellion.
It was remembrance.
By morning, the Root had built a scaffold around the vessel. Someone painted a cracked gear on the wall behind it—not in ash, but in gold solder.
The first light the city had seen in years.
But far above, at the Tower’s pinnacle, the Black Saint watched from the smoke-rimmed ledge.
He said nothing.
But on the chamber wall behind him, written in his own hand—
One line:
“Let the ghost rise. I will be waiting.”
The first time Echo-9 spoke, it didn’t sound like a machine.
It sounded like breath.
Not processed air or exhaust venting—something deeper. A pulse, low and heavy, like the world exhaling after holding itself together too long.
Weylan stood beside the control panel as it came online—eyes red, body shaking, heart too tired to race. Scraps sat just behind him, tail unmoving, his cracked eye flickering as the vessel’s interior hummed.
“Listening,” it had said.
Now it whispered again.
“Ready.”
The phrase echoed down the walls of the vault.
Madre Linn stared at the readout with something approaching awe. She hadn’t prayed in years. But now, standing before a machine built by hands long dead and dreams long buried, she crossed her arms over her chest and bowed her head.
Silma Rae approached with a coil of ignition wire.
“You realize this thing could explode before it lifts an inch,” she muttered.
Weylan looked up at her.
“If it does,” he said, “at least we’ll know what the sky sounds like when it says no.”
Outside the vault, Caligo Verge was tightening its throat.
The Council had gone quiet.
The Chimera’s reels had stopped spinning.
The Saints were gone from the streets—not absent. Just waiting.
Like the silence before a scream.
The Root had gone underground again, deeper than before. They spoke in flares, moved in hatches, mapped air ducts like arteries. Not one of them asked Weylan to stop.
Because now, they believed.
He had flown.
And now… he would pierce.
The vessel was unlike anything built since the Creed.
Its body was dense but elegant—fluted like a bird’s ribcage, reinforced with gear-spine bracing. The thrusters had been heat-wrapped with scavenged Saint robes—blasphemy in cloth, brilliance in insulation.
Weylan sat in the pilot’s shell, heart pounding.
The copper feather, worn smooth with years of sweat and ash, rested over his pulse.
Scraps paced once, then hopped into the small footwell at his side.
“Not room for two,” Weylan whispered.
Scraps whined softly. Stayed anyway.
On the outer rim of the launch cradle, Madre Linn activated the ignition sequence.
Steam hissed through the launch cage. Old gears clicked. Ancient cables groaned to life.
And from somewhere far above—
A thunderclap.
Not from the sky.
From the Tower.
Silma’s voice cracked over the comm line. “They’ve opened the Saint Gate.”
“What does that mean?” Linn asked.
But Weylan already knew.
“They’re going to try and bring me down before I leave the ground.”
Weylan pulled the visor down over his face.
He heard the vessel seal.
He felt the heat build beneath him.
And for the first time since his father disappeared into fire, he understood what legacy really meant.
Not a name.
Not a monument.
Just the sound of something trying to break the silence.
The launch timer ticked down.
5…
4…
Above the tower, the Black Saint moved.
His hands opened.
And across the city, every vent shrieked at once.
3…
2…
Weylan gripped the throttle.
Scraps braced against the seat.
And in the moment between countdown and combustion—he whispered one word:
“Now.”
The ignition was not a roar.
It was a heartbeat—
Low. Deep. Heavy with purpose.
Echo-9 shuddered beneath him.
Steam punched through the launch seals.
A tremor ran from the base of the Aether Scar to the broken teeth of the Chapel Tower.
“Clear,” Silma’s voice crackled.
“Go,” Linn whispered.
“Now,” said no one—and everyone.
Weylan slammed the throttle.
The launch rails cracked.
The clamps released.
And the vessel surged upward like a fist through flame.
Below, Root watched the ceiling quake, lamps burst, and pressure valves scream like alarms.
In the street, people ran—not from fear, but toward the sound. Toward the center. Toward the impossible.
The children who had etched wings into walls wept.
The murals flared. The sky above them—once only gray—began to glow.
The Tower groaned.
At its peak, the Black Saint opened both arms.
Wind spiraled downward from some unseen place above.
And through his mask, he whispered:
“Let it see.”
Inside the vessel, Weylan gritted his teeth.
His hands shook.
The hull howled.
Every panel screamed against gravity.
“Stabilizing,” came the ship’s voice.
“Velocity exceeding breach threshold.”
“Final contact imminent.”
The sky grew brighter.
Not sunlight.
Something else.
He remembered his father—not falling, but flying.
He remembered Tarn. Madre Linn. Scraps at his side.
He remembered the silence.
And he remembered that silence is only holy if no one knows how to sing.
Echo-9 struck something unseen.
The cabin shook.
Light poured in from all sides.
“Atmospheric shell compromised.”
“Breach successful.”
“Unknown environment detected.”
Weylan looked through the viewport.
And saw—
Nothing.
Not stars.
Not void.
Not a new sky.
But something that looked back.
“Signal received,” the voice said.
“You are not alone.”
The Council’s grip broke.
The Saints stopped moving.
The Chimera’s gears locked mid-turn.
And below, the city heard a sound it had forgotten:
Hope.
And for the second time in history, a single truth echoed across Caligo Verge:
He did not fall.
END