CHAPTER 1 — The Man Without a Face
Location: Halworn, City of Iron Sky
Time: 3rd solar tilt, 14th rotation — Mid-Rift Equinox
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The city never slept. It only pretended to.
Halworn breathed in metal and exhaled heat. It was a city that had forgotten silence, lost somewhere beneath its own clockwork arteries. Gears turned in the towers. Sky trains roared on magnetic veins high above. Neon glyphs buzzed weakly in layered shopfronts. Old temples rotted under steel scaffolds while drones blinked overhead like curious stars.
And always — the suns.
Four of them.
Each hanging from a different cardinal sky, casting Halworn in a perpetual half-day. Shadow existed only under machines and cowardice.
The heat made everything feel alive.
Or at least like it was decaying loudly.
And into this living, breathing furnace walked a man no one recognised.
---
He wasn't cloaked. Wasn't masked. Didn't hide.
But still — no one saw him.
Their eyes slid past him.
Their words softened near him.
Even the air held its breath.
He walked like someone who had forgotten what it meant to fear — not because he was arrogant… but because he had never needed to remember.
He was tall, too tall — 6'8" of lean stillness, dressed in black that drank the light but shimmered at the edges with runes that pulsed faintly with unspoken language. His coat was clean despite the city's filth. His boots clicked once with each step. Never more.
One eye, blue and sharp like glacier light.
The other, a swirling black hole that devoured reflections — no pupil, no sclera, just gravity wearing the shape of a gaze.
He didn't look around. He didn't need to.
His name was Lucien, but no one here knew that.
To them, he was simply... wrong.
---
Across the marketplace, a young boy accidentally dropped a crate of synthesised fruit. The contents rolled toward Lucien's path — bright orange globes pulsing faintly with dream-energy.
Lucien kept walking.
The fruit stilled on their own.
The boy blinked. Then cried harder.
---
A preacher screamed from atop a rusted podium:
> "The Thorned Cradle is blooming again! You think your weapons will stop sorrow?! You think your tech priests will fix grief?! We are but roots in its belly—!"
He stopped mid-sentence.
His eyes locked with Lucien's for just one second.
And then he stepped down quietly, folding his robes like a man burying himself.
---
In a far corner of the square, three enforcer droids turned their heads to scan the crowd. One's red eye focused briefly on Lucien's silhouette… then glitched. It emitted a soft mechanical chirp, then re-routed its patrol route without alert.
> "Database mismatch: No known entity. Authority level… undefined. Recalibrating."
---
Lucien kept walking.
He wasn't watching them — he was watching the sky.
No, not even the sky.
The space above it.
---
Somewhere far above, four layers higher, atop a rooftop made of charred obsidian tiles and cracked prayer stones, someone watched him back.
She was small.
Smaller than most adults. Barely taller than a child. But her presence — somehow — still felt… bigger. Like a storm caught mid-yawn.
She had hair blacker than midnight ink and skin pale enough to offend the sunlight. Her ears — long, white, and rabbit-like — flopped back lazily across her shoulders. Her expression was blank. Not stoic. Just... uninterested.
At her back rested an enormous warhammer — nearly as tall as she was, plated in tarnished dragonbone and embedded with glowing veins of sapphire. It was ancient. Semi-sentient. Its eye slit pulsed softly.
And it was humming.
> "Tch," she muttered, eyes narrowed slightly.
"He walks weird."
Her name was Eris, but Lucien didn't know that yet.
Just as she didn't know his.
---
She didn't move. Not even when the wind shifted. Her fingers twitched slightly. Her eyelids dropped.
She almost fell asleep standing.
But the warhammer's hum deepened.
It had never hummed before.
> "…Ugh. Annoying."
Still, she kept watching.
---
Back below, Lucien finally stopped.
Not for the preacher.
Not for the fruit.
Not for the mechs or the heat or the crowded sky.
He stopped because he felt it.
Not a spell. Not a weapon.
Something heavier. Older.
It moved like a gravity well. Like entropy given shape.
It was... lazy. And perfect. A kind of spiritual drag so natural it didn't feel like resistance — it felt like permission to slow down.
His eyes lifted.
They met hers.
High above.
Red eyes. White ears. An unmoved stare. A hammer that shouldn't exist.
Lucien tilted his head.
The hammer pulsed again.
---
Eris blinked.
> "...He saw me."
She yawned.
The warhammer shivered.
> "Tch. Don't be weird about it," she whispered, pressing it down with one hand.
---
Lucien took one more step forward, then stopped.
His coat rustled in the solar breeze.
The shadows bent a little.
He smiled.
The first time in weeks.
---
A whisper danced through the crowd.
Not a name. Not a warning.
Just a feeling.
Like a myth had walked by.
Like fate had skipped a beat.
Like the universe was waiting for someone to do something stupid.
---
Up above, Eris sat down cross-legged.
Then lay down.
Then placed the warhammer like a pillow.
> "...Too much noise," she muttered.
The hammer purred.
---
Lucien's eye shimmered — the blue one.
The black one simply stared into nothing.
And Halworn didn't notice it was holding its breath.