They did not call it Grey Rock then. Not yet. At first it was only a family that kept careful lists and asked careful questions. The first of them studied patterns. He asked why a power moved when a life stopped. His notes looked like heresy. His descendants turned those notes into law.
They learned how to read breaths. They learned to measure currents. When electricity came they made priests of machines. They built an altar out of wire. The family wrapped their work in a thousand polite names and sank it into the foundations of the city.
When the three hundred and sixty five arose the family watched. They catalogued fires and healers and storms. They bound each kind of light to lines of blood and ink. No one outside their rooms knew those ledgers existed. To the world it was chance. To the family it was numbers.
But one thing always broke their counting. The three hundred and sixty sixth. An anomaly. A child who answered the world out of step. Every time that child appeared empires trembled. The family could not allow that to keep happening.
They built the Synchronizer. A machine that would steer the current like a river dam. It timed this death with that birth down to the smallest fraction. For a long time it worked. The family kept the flow. The world called them stability and progress. They called themselves guardians.
Then one night the machine missed. A storm came. In the high chambers a child was born with glass and monitors and a council who toasted success. Wires sang and the old bearer took his last breath. The machine closed the circuit.
Miles below in the rain a woman pushed a life into the dark without monitors or ritual. No one bothered to look. A baby cried into the gutter. The current split. The ledger recorded success and the family drank their wine.
But the shadow did not read ledgers. It answered the first cry. It slid into the child in the mud. The family never noticed the mistake. They wrote their next line and smiled.
Far under the ocean I felt the shift. I heard a small voice in the mud. I whispered to the tide. The ledger lied. The cycle continues.