Morning came with the slow hiss of steam rising through the city's arteries.
Emberlight never truly slept; it only dimmed, catching its breath between
shifts. When dawn returned, the forges groaned awake, and smoke began to
crawl once more toward the sky.
Gizmo sat on a rooftop overlooking the Foundry Quarter, eating a half-burned
pastry he'd bought from a street vendor who insisted it was "traditional
dwarven cuisine." The Orb hovered beside him, pulsing faintly in rhythm with
the mechanical city below.
"You ever wonder," he said through a mouthful, "if the world hums for a
reason?"
The Orb gave a slow blink of light, uncertain.
"Yeah, me neither," Gizmo muttered, brushing crumbs from his gloves.
Below, the city's gears turned — literally and figuratively. He'd spent his first
few days wandering, absorbing the city's rhythm. Emberlight ran on a strange
blend of steam, runes, and pride. Workshops operated around the clock.
Airships docked above the towers like fat metal whales. Merchants shouted
over the roar of foundries, and apprentices ran with burns and blueprints alike.
But beneath it all, Gizmo heard the discord.
Engines whined too high. Runes sputtered out of sync. The entire city sang
off-key, and only he seemed to notice.
That afternoon, he found work at a small artificer's workshop run by a dwarf
named Bendrak Ironveil — a broad-shouldered man with a beard like steel
wool and the patience of a broken clock. Bendrak didn't trust goblins, but he
trusted results.
"Don't touch the big gear," Bendrak said on the first day. "Don't adjust the regulator, don't talk to the apprentices, and don't—"
"Fix anything?" Gizmo guessed.
"Exactly."
Within an hour, he'd fixed the regulator.
By sunset, the shop was quieter, smoother — humming correctly.
Bendrak scratched his chin. "You got a cursed kind of talent, goblin. Where'd
you learn?"
Gizmo smiled faintly. "Listening."
Bendrak frowned. "To what?"
"The world."
The dwarf didn't know how to answer that. He just grunted and handed Gizmo
a set of old tools. "You break it, you buy it. You fix it, I'll pretend I didn't
see."
Nights in Emberlight were golden chaos.
Forges flared like volcanoes in the dark. Lanterns painted the streets with oil
and shadow. From the rooftops, Gizmo could see the whole city pulsing like a
living heart — fire in its veins, smoke in its breath, and a thousand songs in its
steel.
He began tinkering in his rented attic above Bendrak's shop. The room was
small, but it had a skylight, and that was enough. His tools sprawled across the
floor in meticulous chaos — gears, bits of copper, rune shards, and sketches of
machines that had never existed.
The Orb hovered above his workbench, projecting faint blue diagrams in the
air.
He studied one carefully — a coil of glass and metal meant to amplify
resonance. The first of his own design.
"I call it the Resonator," he said. "You, me, and a bit of luck — maybe it'll
sing in tune."
The Orb glowed softly, approving.
When he tested it, the Resonator screamed instead.
A harmonic surge rolled through the workshop, shattering a window and
waking every bird in three blocks. The Orb flared bright, intercepting the
energy before it could tear the device apart.
Smoke drifted through the air. Gizmo coughed, wiping soot from his goggles.
"Okay. Too much luck. Not enough physics."
A knock came at the door downstairs. Bendrak's voice thundered up: "Gizmo!
Whatever you broke, fix it quieter!"
"On it!"
The Orb dimmed, almost like a sigh.
Later that week, word reached him of something unusual:
A Guild auction — restricted, private — selling off a relic recently excavated
from Emberlight's underworks. Rumor said it was a Shaper fragment. Ancient.
Unstable. Possibly alive.
Gizmo's blood ran cold. The Orb pulsed violently in agreement.
He stared at it. "You feel that too?"
The Orb's glow intensified — not alarm, but recognition. It was like hearing a
name you hadn't realized was yours.
He packed his tools.
The auction was held in the Guild's lower hall — a cavernous chamber filled
with brass chandeliers, velvet drapes, and men who thought their gold made hem immortal.
Gizmo slipped in disguised as a mechanic's assistant, goggles low, posture
small. Nobody looked twice.
On the stage sat a glass case. Inside, a crystal coil the size of a fist hummed
with faint light — a pale cousin to the Orb's radiance.
The auctioneer droned on about rarity, power, provenance. Gizmo barely heard
him. The Orb at his wrist was trembling. The two lights — his and the relic's
— flickered in sync.
The hammer fell.
"Sold! To the delegate from the Sapphire Guild!"
The crystal coil flared. A pulse of blue energy rolled across the hall like a
breath exhaled by a god.
Panic erupted.
Windows shattered. Lanterns exploded. Runes sparked into chaotic life.
Gizmo ducked as shards of light shot through the air, cutting through silk and
shadow alike. The Orb pulsed brighter than ever before, projecting a shield of
faint light around him.
Through the chaos, he saw movement — not panic, but purpose.
A tall figure in a dark cloak strode toward the stage.
Elven. Controlled. Calm amid madness.
Kaelira.
She raised her runic sword, spoke a word that burned itself into the air, and the
light bent around her like obedient fire.
Gizmo froze, watching her command the energy into silence. It obeyed her.
The room stilled.
For a moment, he swore she looked directly at him — not at the goblin, but at
the Orb.
Then she was gone.
Gizmo slipped out into the night through a vent before the guards could seal
the doors.
The Orb was still humming, faintly echoing the relic's resonance. His heart
beat in time with it. Somewhere deep inside him, something had awoken.
He didn't know her name. He didn't know what she was. But he knew one
thing with certainty: she was part of whatever song he'd started to hear beneath
the world.
And Emberlight, for all its brilliance, was only the overture.
(End of Chapter Two)