The rain fell in Neo-Aetheria as it always had, since the days when the first arcologies clawed their way from the mud like the talons of some vast, awakening beast. Relentless sheets poured down, gray and stinging. It hammered the iron skin of Aetherforge Academy's outer hull, a ceaseless drumming that seeped through seams and rivets. The world turned into a sodden lament. Inside the dormitory warrens, deep in the academy's underbelly, the air hung thick as the breath of a dying forge. That rain became a muffled dirge, filtered through layers of rust-eaten plate and lumen-wired bulkheads. It emerged as a low, mocking hiss. Vesperion Blackthorn knew that sound well. He did not know it in this form, though, not in this cage of flesh that reeked of mildew and the faint, acrid tang of synthetic despair.
He stirred. Or what passed for stirring in a body that felt like a beggar's cast-off cloak, threadbare and ill-fitting. The seams chafed against bones that ached with the hollow throb of unfamiliar youth. Kairos Vale. That was the name etched into the crude lumen-tag dangling from his wrist, a strip of glowing polymer stamped with runes that flickered like the last embers of a peasant's hearthfire. Fifteen hundred years, the whispers in his blood murmured. A serpent's hiss uncoiled through veins that pulsed with vitae too thin to slake a rat's thirst. Fifteen hundred winters and summers, hurled into the void's maw. A seed of soul, flung by betrayal's cruel hand. It had sprouted now in this scrawny whelp's shell. The boy shivered under a threadbare blanket that smelled of unwashed bodies and the faint rot of dreams gone sour. Vesperion savored the injustice of it all, this petty exile from eternity. He let the thought linger, a cold comfort in the chill.
Vesperion, or Kairos if he must play the pup's part, opened eyes that were not his own. Black as the lightless heart of a collapsing star, they took the measure of the chamber around him. The dormitory stretched long and narrow as a grave-trench after a border skirmish. Its walls of riveted iron bore scars from a thousand spiteful knives and the careless scrape of boots worn thin as a whore's promise. Bunks crammed one against the other, like stacked corpses in a potter's field after the pox had run its course. Three high in places, they swayed on chains that creaked like the gallows' sigh. Lumen-strips clung to the ceiling in sagging festoons. Their pale glow stuttered like the fever-dreams of a man half-drowned. Shadows pooled in the corners like spilled ink, thick and treacherous. Vesperion traced one with his gaze. It twisted under the light, almost familiar. Almost an ally in this squalor.
The air stewed with stinks. Sweat soured by labor and fear. The greasy reek of synth-meat bubbling in communal pots at the hall's far end. Beneath it all, the metallic bite of flux-residue, that invisible ash left when Aetherborn pups called fire from their palms during illicit midnight drills. The miasma clung to everything. It seeped into the lungs like a thief in the night, promising power even as it choked the life from the weak. Vesperion drew it deep. He tested it against the memories that stirred in his marrow. Memories of Ebonreach Citadel's grand halls, where the air had tasted of blood-oaths and the sweet copper of fresh-spilled vitae. Not this gutter-slop of desperation. His new mouth twisted in a grimace. Fangs, dulled things these, mere vestiges of the sovereign blades he had once wielded, pricked against his tongue like the thorns of a crown ill-won. He ran his tongue over them slowly. The dullness offended him more than the hunger. A lord reduced to nubs. How the mighty groveled.
He flexed fingers that were slender and pale as a scribe's quill. Nails chipped and dirt-crescented from labors he had no recollection of performing. This body, this Kairos Vale, was frail. Limbs wiry as a gutter-rat's. Ribs pressing against skin sallow as old cheese left too long in the larder. A pulse in his throat fluttered like a moth against a lantern's cruel glass. Yet within that frailty, the echoes hungered. Ancient hungers, rivers of vitae once drunk deep from the veins of empires. Now reduced to a dribble that barely kept the sun from crisping his hide come dawn. He could feel them coiling in his gut, those ghosts of glory. The Eclipse Sovereign's shadow, long and vast as the wing of some abyssal leviathan, stirred against the bars of this borrowed cage. Betrayal's jest, to wake thus. Not in velvet-draped crypts hung with banners of midnight silk. No, in the reeking straw of a bunk that sagged under his scant weight like a hanged man's neck after the rope had done its work. Vesperion shifted. The straw crackled softly, a pathetic protest. He imagined the traitor's face, the one who had wrought this. One day, he would find it. And drain it dry.
Around him, the dormitory slumbered fitfully. A chorus of ragged breaths and muffled curses rose like steam from a cauldron on the boil. In the bunk below, a Faded boy, his own kind, poor wretch, muttered in the throes of some lumen-dust fever. Skin stretched taut over bones like drum-leather worn thin. Words slurred into the tongues of half-remembered sires. "The blood... the rivers run red... no, cold, all cold as the void's tit..." Vesperion marked him without pity. The Faded were beggars at the feast these days. Their fangs dulled by time's cruel jest and the creeping madness men called the Eldritch Veil. Once lords of the long night, drinkers deep from the throats of kings and holy fools alike. Now they skulked like whipped curs in the academy's dregs. Tolerated only because their vitae-dribble could staunch a rift-spawn's lash in a pinch. Vesperion considered reaching down, silencing the fool with a twist. But no. Let him babble. It amused, in its way. A reminder of what awaited if he faltered here.
Across the aisle, crammed into a lower bunk that groaned under her bulk, snored an Aetherborn girl. Her cheeks flushed with the inner glow of flux-veins, that molten ore coursing through her blood like rivers of fire waiting to be loosed. Broad-shouldered and flame-haired, even in sleep. Her tabard of coarse lumen-weave rucked up to reveal tattoos of plasma-lances coiling 'round her forearms like serpents in rut. Elara Voss, the whispers in the hall had named her last night. Or was it the night before? Time blurred in the void's aftermath, days bleeding into one another like colors in a rain-lashed tapestry. Elara, with her temper hot as her gifts. She sneered at the Faded like they were offal in the pottage-pot. Vesperion watched her chest rise and fall. The faint crackle of static sparked at her fingertips even in repose. He felt a flicker of the old curiosity stir. Such pups, these modern whelps, wielding fire from spite and lightning from their rages. All to stave off the horrors gnawing at the world's edges like rats in the wainscoting. Useful, perhaps, in time. Blades to be honed. Or throats to be bled. He leaned closer, inhaling her scent. Flux and sweat. Potent. He filed it away, a predator noting prey.
Further down the hall, where the lumen-strips dimmed to a sullen orange, a cluster of holy whelps huddled in their alcove. Tabards sewn with silver sigils that gleamed like false stars against the gloom. They were the Sanctum's get, these boys and girls with eyes too wide for their faces. Mouths moving in silent prayers to gods who had long since turned a deaf ear to the sprawl's pleas. One, a lanky lad with a face pocked by the scars of some childhood pox or rift-curse, clutched an amulet of sunburst crystal to his chest. He murmured litanies against the night. "Light ward the dark, light purge the veil, light bind the spawn that gibbers below..." His voice was a thin thread, fraying at the edges. Vesperion could smell the doubt on him, sharp as vinegar in a wound. Holy knights, they called themselves, these pups. Learning to call luminance from their prayers. Searingly the undead and mending the mad with touches that burned brighter than any torch. But faith was a brittle blade in a world where the gods played long games with dice carved from the bones of stars. Vesperion had toppled cathedrals with shadows that ate the light whole. Let the boy pray. Prayers were cheap as the synth-blood peddled in the Nocturne alleys. And twice as likely to leave you gutted in a gutter. He closed his eyes, listening to the rhythm of it all. The rain outside. The breaths within. A symphony of frailty. His own, for now. But not forever. The night called. And he would answer, in blood and shadow.