Part 1: The Junk Cathedral
The first rule of scavenging was don't think about the bones.
Cael ducked under a broken beam, brushed rust from his collar, and stepped into the ruins anyway.
Everything smelled like ash and burnt copper. Old cables hung from the ceiling like tangled nerve strands. Walls that once hummed with worship were silent now — but the silence wasn't peaceful. It was the kind that waited.
He hated places like this. Not because of the corpses. Because they always felt like they remembered him.
He took out his hook-blade and walked deeper into the hollowed-out cathedral, past piles of melted machinery and long-dead script. Light filtered in from a crack in the roof, catching on glass dust in the air. It sparkled like frost.
He'd been here once before. Or dreamed it. It was hard to tell anymore.
"You're wasting time," he muttered to himself.
Not that it mattered. The Writhe Dogs were already behind him — two hours, maybe less. And they wouldn't care about the dead gods buried here. They just wanted what he had in his satchel: enough lock-metal to trade for two weeks of food… or three minutes of stupid.
But Cael wasn't here for scrap. Not this time.
He was here for proof.
Because last week, in a dream that smelled like thunder, he'd seen something glowing in this place — something buried beneath the altar. And when he'd woken up, his pillow was singed. His nose was bleeding. And for three seconds, his shadow had moved without him.
So here he was.
Looking for a glow that shouldn't exist.
Part 2: The Broken Whisper
The glow wasn't warm. That was the first thing that struck him.
It looked like light, soft and pulsing — but it gave off no heat. No radiation. Not even a shadow.
Cael reached out slowly, his fingertips trembling, heart pounding like something wanted out of his chest. He wasn't even sure why he was doing this. There was no logic, no scavenger's instinct. Just… gravity. As if his bones remembered the shape of this thing even if his brain didn't.
He touched it.
And the world forgot itself.
There was no sound.
No breath.
No light.
Just a sudden, terrifying absence — like someone had pulled the plug on reality.
Then:
A voice.
Not heard. Not spoken.
More like etched into the inside of his skull, in letters made of pressure.
"What is your first law?"
Cael tried to scream.
Nothing came out.
He wasn't in the cathedral anymore — or maybe he was. He saw fractured reflections of himself floating in the dark, each flickering like flame — older, younger, bleeding, laughing, burning, watching.
He stumbled backward — or forward — or somewhere, and his foot landed on something solid. Stone? Flesh? He couldn't tell.
The question repeated.
"What is your first law?"
His throat locked up. His thoughts scattered like ash in wind.
He wanted to say I don't know.
He wanted to say I'm not supposed to be here.
But his lips moved — and he heard a voice that was his and wasn't his say:
"Nothing rules me unless I let it."
Snap.
The world snapped back like a stretched rubber band.
Sound returned. The color of light returned. The shape of his own body returned.
Cael gasped and fell to his knees, coughing. The fragment he'd touched had gone cold — now a dull grey. But his hand…
He looked down.
Something was burned into the skin of his forearm.
It looked like a spiral — broken halfway through — with twelve tiny teeth jutting outward from the arc. It shimmered slightly, even in shadow.
His stomach turned.
He knew — without knowing how — that this was something no one should have.
A Keymark.
A real one.
He scrambled to his feet. The altar was cracking. The entire vault vibrated, ancient steel groaning. Dust fell from the ceiling. Something deep in the stone began to hum — not like before, not a pulse.
This time, it was a scream — low, buried, far away but rising fast.
He ran.
Down the corridor. Past the dead machine-doors. Through the silence that had returned and was now watching him.
His feet found the path on instinct. No thoughts. No breath. Just motion.
He burst out into daylight — or what passed for it — and collapsed onto a ledge overlooking the broken valley below.
The cathedral behind him shuddered, then went still.
He looked at his arm.
The Keymark was still there.
Not burned. Not inked.
Etched. Into him.
He stared at it for a long time.
And in the back of his head, like a song he couldn't remember forgetting, the voice whispered once more:
"Nothing rules you… unless you let it."
End of Part 2.
Part 3: Memory Burn
He didn't move for a long time.
Not because he was tired — though he was — or hurt — though something in his chest ached like a broken name.
It was the Keymark.
It didn't pulse. Didn't glow.
It just was.
Etched into his skin like it had always been there, waiting for the world to remember it.
Cael reached out to touch it again, just to see if it hurt — and then stopped. He didn't want to know. Not yet.
His breath steadied. The sky above the valley flickered with ion dust — a pale green shimmer that always came after reality distortions. Like the world was trying to heal around a scar.
But that wasn't the part that scared him.
What scared him was that he remembered something now — a new memory — and he had no idea if it was real.
It came like a cough — sudden, choking.
He was six years old.
Standing on a black bridge, under a red sun.
Holding someone's hand.
A woman's voice whispered:
"Never open it unless you forget who you are."
Then the world cracked. He saw lightning made of bones. The sun shattered into twelve teeth.
He looked up at the woman — she didn't have a face — and she said:
"I'm sorry."
And let go.
Cael blinked hard.
The memory evaporated like steam.
He was back on the ledge, dust in his mouth, wind on his neck, heart kicking his ribs like it was trying to leave without him.
That didn't happen, he told himself. That was a Lock-echo. A hallucination. Some memory fragment stored in the vault.
But another part of him whispered:
Then why did she call you by name?
He rose shakily, shielding his eyes.
Far below, across the jagged valley, something shimmered. A tiny flicker of silver — gone in an instant.
Was someone watching?
Cael backed away from the edge, breath tight. No time to process. No time to unravel.
If the Writhe Dogs caught him now — or worse, the Lock cults — he wouldn't get to ask any questions at all.
He had to move.
But as he turned, something tugged at the back of his thoughts.
Not a memory.
A feeling.
Like something under the earth had just opened one eye — and seen him.
End of Part 3.
Part 4: The Silence EndsHe didn't realize anything was wrong until the birds stopped mid-air.
Cael had made it halfway down the scree slope beneath the vault entrance when he looked up and saw a flock — thin-winged shadow gulls — just hanging in the sky.
Frozen.
Not flapping. Not falling. Just stuck, like they were painted there.
A loose stone rolled under his foot and bounced three times across the slope. The third bounce? Didn't land. It just… hovered.
Oh no.
He reached instinctively for the mark on his arm.
Still there.
Still humming, though now it was more like a distant itch inside his skull.
Am I doing this?
He moved slowly. Every footstep left a brief delay ghost — a flicker of himself that lagged half a second behind before catching up. Like the world was buffering his existence.
And then, as suddenly as it had started — everything snapped back.
Birds flapped again. The stone hit the ground. The wind returned.
Cael dropped to one knee, heart jackhammering.
This wasn't just Lock resonance. This was environmental bleed — a full zone-level reaction.
And that meant...
Someone will have seen it.
He turned fast, scanning the cliff walls above and the ruins behind.
And that's when he saw them.
Three silhouettes. Far up the ridge. Robes too clean for scavengers. Eyes that caught the light wrong.
They weren't moving.
But they were watching.
He squinted — and as his vision adjusted, he saw what they were standing on:
Lock-etched stone. Ancient script. Circular platform.
A Resonance Monolith.
They were tracking Lock surges.
They hadn't come for him. But now they'd seen him.
He didn't wait.
He bolted down the slope, taking the dangerous route between razor-rocks and twisted pipe roots. A scrape opened on his arm. His boot split on a jag. He didn't stop.
The whisper from the vault still echoed in his mind:
"Nothing rules you unless you let it."
He didn't know what that meant. Not really.
But right now, he didn't have time to be anyone's key. Or pawn. Or prophet.
He just had to disappear.
Again.
End of Part 4.
Part 5: Eyes in the Ruins
Somewhere high above the valley, beyond the jagged crown of the broken ridge, the air shimmered — and then peeled.
It was not sound. It was not light.
It was permission.
A slit in space widened like an eye, and three figures stepped through it — robes folding wrong against the wind, as if gravity didn't fully apply to them.
They stood in silence, atop the Resonance Monolith, overlooking the cathedral below. The Lock-vault pulsed faintly in the distance, still warm from what had happened inside.
The smallest of them — a thin figure with glass stitching around their jaw — finally spoke.
"That was not a registered awakening."
The tallest one, face masked in mirrored bone, tilted its head.
"We received no signal from the Old Seats."
A pause.
"And yet a Keymark appeared."
None of them moved.
Not in the way people moved.
Their limbs adjusted slightly — like strings being plucked into new positions.
The third, cloaked in a copper-thread robe riddled with holes, knelt and touched the etched stones beneath them. Symbols flared briefly, then burned out.
"Trace is fragmented," the copper one said. "But it held. The Lock reacted to a command phrase."
The masked one turned slightly, just enough to glance toward the direction Cael had run.
"The boy?"
"Unregistered. Unaligned. No recorded bloodline, no cultivation, no inheritance."
A breath.
"And yet the Lock answered him."
"That should not be possible."
Silence returned — thick, waiting, full of algorithms.
Then the copper-voiced one whispered:
"He doesn't know what he is."
"Good," the tall one said.
"Let's keep it that way."
They stepped backward into the slit in the air.
It closed without a sound.
And the wind continued as if they had never been there at all.
End of Part 5.