A chill, pervasive, and deep, was the first fact of existence for the man who knew himself as Lucio. It seeped up from the damp earth, pressed against a bare back, and lay heavy in the dense fog.
Coarse gravel and the radial patterns of tough weeds bit into pale skin. The air carried a complex signature of wet stone, ozone, and the distant, cloying sweetness of alchemical waste.
Awareness returned, piecing itself together from the cold and the smell. But this mind was different. Quieter. Analytical. Haunted by the ghost of a silent room.
The pearlescent fog diffusing the nascent light suggested a pre-dawn hour. A crumbling slab of concrete nearby, its rebar bursting forth like rusted veins, spoke of structural fatigue and long neglect.
This was the Ballast. The name surfaced with cold clarity. The immense cityscape below, a canyon of impossible architecture where crystalline spires pierced a bruised sky, was Aethelburg.
Movement initiated. Lucio's tall form rose from the ground with a fluid, testing grace, piloted by Lev's will. Long, dark hair, the color of wet slate, fell across a face of stark pallor.
A hand, Lucio's hand, of articulate fingers and latent strength pushed the hair back, revealing features of sharp, unblemished marble and eyes of a clear, light-filled hazel. The fingers exhibited a fine tremor, a physiological curiosity observed with detached interest by the mind inside, Lev's mind.
Lev, seeing through Lucio's eyes, swept his gaze downward, analyzing the descent. The scree-covered slope offered three primary paths. The eastern route promised cover but was threatened by an overhang of unstable-looking shale. The central path was more direct but exposed.
A third, weaving through a fossilized drainage culvert, presented a balance of concealment and structural soundness.
From the warren of dwellings clinging to the cliffside, a low hum of life began to emerge: the cumulative weight of countless breaths, the thermal signature of thousands of bodies, the faint, almost subsonic resonance of a populace moving through its prescribed routines.
This was not a collection of individuals, but a single metabolic entity, its patterns readable in the rising threads of cook-fire smoke and the specific frequency of its ambient noise.
An impulse surfaced, unbidden and distinct from the cold analysis. It was a need to quantify, to impose order on the overwhelming sensory data. The mind, without prompting, began to count the rhythmic beats of its own heart. Fourteen.
Then, it sought to estimate the threads per square inch in therough-spun fabric of the trousers it wore, the calculation a familiar, grounding ritual against the vertigo of an unknown self.
Within, a profound and resonant silence held sway. It was not an emptiness, but the shaped void of an absolute absence, a gravitational pull exerted by a missing star.
A soft exhalation took form in the cold air, a vocalization to test the integrity of this new reality.
"I am here."
The descent was a physical algorithm. His mind processed the scree slope not as a landscape, but as a set of variables: the average size and angularity of the stones, the moisture content of the soil, the optimal path for minimizing energy expenditure, and the acoustic signature. He moved with a predator's economy, each footfall placed with geometric precision.
The transition from the hill's desolate overlook to the city's edge was a descent into a different stratum of reality. The fog thinned, replaced by a haze of coal-smoke and the ozone tang of overcharged energy conduits.
The sounds coalesced from a distant roar into a symphony of dysfunction. It was not the organized chaos of a thriving metropolis, but the arrhythmic convulsions of a dying one.
He paused at the periphery, his new eyes scanning, categorizing.
A man in the tattered robes of a merchant caste stood in the middle of a thoroughfare, methodically smashing his own data-slate against a wall, over and over, weeping as he chanted a list of forgotten debts.
A group of children, their eyes wide and vacant, huddled around a non-functional public Glimmer-dispenser, scratching at its metal shell as if seeking a memory of comfort. From a towering residential spire, a single, sustained scream echoed, uninterrupted. There were no enforcers, no attempts at order.
The authority had been psychological, and it had vanished.
The first coherent data stream was auditory. Two scavengers argued near a collapsed conduit, their voices sharp with a panic that had curdled into rage.
"—you took the larger portion—"
"—the regulator's patrol is shifting, we have a seven-minute window—"
He moved on, a ghost navigating the breakdown. He identified a potential information hub not by a sign, but by its anomalous traffic pattern. This recessed doorway showed a statistically significant frequency of use for its apparent dereliction.
He moved through the dysfunction, a ghost absorbing the city's collapse. A scavenger, her knuckles scraped raw and glittering with embedded crystalline dust, shoved past him, snarling at her partner.
"Move your feet, you lazy keth! Or are your Stone-born bones finally turning to gravel?"
The partner, a hulking man with skin the color of weathered granite, spat a wad of phlegm that sizzled where it hit a leaking conduit.
"My blood's as old as the Citadel's foundations. It's your line that's thin as watered-down Glimmer." He hefted a chunk of rubble in a hand that seemed carved for the purpose, the tough, radial patterns of his calluses mirroring the stone itself.
The wear pattern on the stone threshold and the specific microbial growth around the curtain's edge indicated a node of concentrated human activity.
The woman, Eloria, was hunched over a slate, her fingers flying. She looked up, her face a mask of professional neutrality that lasted for exactly one second.
Her gaze locked onto him. The neutrality was shattered. Her eyes widened, her body recoiling as if from a physical blow. Her hand, moving with a speed born of pure instinct, snatched a heavy, crystal-calibrated weight from her counter and hurled it at his head. "Get out!"
The object, a polished obsidian cube, tumbled through the air. His new mind calculated its trajectory, mass, and rotational velocity in a microsecond. No flinch came from him.
His hand snapped up, not with blurring speed, but with an absolute economy of motion, intercepting the precise point in space-time to catch it without a sound. The impact was a dull, final thud in his palm.
He looked from the cube in his hand to her face, analyzing the cause-and-effect relationship. Her act of violence was a rich data source: her fear was not generic, but specific. She recognized him. And what she recognized was a threat that warranted immediate, violent expulsion.
Placing the cube gently on a nearby crate, the action was unnervingly calm.
"Explain," he said, his voice syntactically perfect, prosody null.
Eloria stared, her chest heaving. The professional calculation returned to her eyes, overlaying the terror. She was reassessing. The thing she feared had not reacted with expected violence. It had reacted with... analysis.
Her gaze intensified, focusing on him. Carrotcall's Guild was active.
"The Scapegoat's Guild," she breathed out. "Dormant. But fused with something else... something unknown. No one should be able to hold that power and stay sane. Unless... you're from the Oedipus bloodline."
"Explain 'Scapegoat's Guild'," he requested.
Her composure cracked again. "You ask me? You, who wear its architecture like a second skeleton?" She took a sharp step back. "There is no possible way you are unaware of his identity. You are Lucian Oedipus or his ghost."
The name landed in the silent space of his mind. It triggered no memory, no echo of recognition. It was merely a new variable: Designation_Lucian. It correlated with the observed fear response.
"Your premise is flawed," he stated, the words clean and precise.
"I possess no data on 'Lucian Oedipus'. Your reaction provides the primary evidence for the designation's significance. The 'Scapegoat's Guild' is a constant you perceive. I am the variable. Your logical conclusion should be that I am a new entity, or that 'Lucian Oedipus' has been fundamentally altered. Not that I am feigning ignorance."
Eloria's eyes widened further. The horror on her face deepened, not from the threat of a king, but from the implications of his cold, flawless logic. A king could be reasoned with, appealed to, or feared. This was something else.
"Altered?" she whispered. "Shattered, more like. He broke the throne. He severed the covenant that bore the empire's painand instead of continuing a legacy, he threw himself off a one-kilometer-high building to die, the ultimate act of selfishness.
"Now that pain is loose. It's in the Glimmer in their veins, in the Aetherium itself. The city is not rioting. It is... unlearning sanity. And you... You are the source of the silence at the center of the storm."
She looked at him, truly seeing him now not as a man, but as a walking cataclysm.
"If you are not him, then what are you?"
His light hazel eyes held hers, devoid of answer, containing only the question itself.
The silence in the shack stretched for a three-count too long. Eloria's sharp eyes, which had widened in terror, now narrowed in reassessment. The thing wearing Lucian Oedipus's face had not threatened her. It had… processed her. It was a paradox, and paradoxes were a form of currency.
Her posture shifted from defensive to analytical. She was a woman of sharp, practical angles, her tarnished-silver hair shorn close on one side, the rest in a severe plait.
"You don't know," she stated, the realization settling not as fear, but as a business calculation. "Carrotcall doesn't lie. You have the Scapegoat's Guild woven into you, but you're accessing it like a child with a masterwork sword. You're a blank slate." She gestured at his bare feet, his rough-spun trousers. "And a poor one. You need information. I sell it. But your face is a liability that gets us both killed. So we talk."
She moved behind her counter, placing the physical barrier between them as a professional formality. "Guilds are not poems or prayers. They are tools, weapons, commodities. You are born into a Caste, Menial, Peasant, Merchant, Artisan, Soldier, all the way up to Emperor, these are called Castes. Your Caste is your birthright, it dictates your potential. But a Guild… a Guild is the specific power itself. Sparks, are guilds from your bloodline, as in your… condition. You can buy a transferred Guild, if you have the currency and the compatibility. Or you can take it from a corpse by sacrificingsomeone."
She paused, letting him absorb the brutal simplicity of it. "My Guilds are for finding and knowing. Runrabbit finds any physical object. Carrotcall lets me see the Guilds in others, their Caste and Class. Right now, I see a dynasty's curse inside a shell with no king. It's… unstable."
Finally speaking, his voice remained a quiet, calibrated instrument.. "You say I am Lucian Oedipus."
"I say you have his power, practically identically his face, and his catastrophic timing, all in a slightly taller body. The man who was Lucian Oedipus shattered the imperial covenant and threw himself into the sky. He is the reason the city is screaming."
The man possessed a beauty that could, in the uncertain light, be mistaken for a woman's. But this was a misreading, a failure of perception in the same vein as Eloria's initial diagnosis of him as a ghost or a shattered king. Where Lucian's features had been a study in imperial severity, all sharp angles, raven-dark hair, and a gaze like polished obsidian, this face was its spectral counterpart.
She leaned forward, her voice low and intent. "But you? You stand there and count the threads in your trousers to keep from drowning. So, I'll ask the question you can't. If you are the Emperor, why do you feel like a ghost?"
A fracture, subtle but profound, showed in his composure. The analytical stillness broke for a single, raw instant. His eyes, a clear and light-filled hazel, lost their focus, looking at something internal and terrifying.
"I am not a king," he whispered, the words fraying at the edges. "I am… a count. Of breaths. Of threads. A curator of a quiet room." The confession was torn from a place deeper than memory, a foundational truth of a self that was not Lucian. He looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. "This body is wrong. This power is a noise. How can I be a man who broke the world when I feel like a man who was broken by it?"
Not "who am I?" but "What am I, when my soul and my flesh tell two different, terrible stories?"
Eloria watched the fracture in his composure, her merchant's mind calculating the cost of his existential debt. "That," she said quietly, "is a more expensive question. But for now, the price is getting you off the street." She moved to a grimy window, peeling back a corner of the shutter. "Your face is a beacon. And beacons attract every kind of pest in a collapse."
She pointed into the chaotic street. "See them? The ones not screaming?"
Following her gaze, he saw that amidst the wailing and the catatonic, a few figures moved with a different purpose. Their eyes were not glazed with remembered pain, but sharp with a new, feverish intensity.
But his focus snagged on a different sight, a devastating echo that bypassed his analytical mind and struck a chord of pure, somatic recognition.
A woman was hunched in a doorway, her grimy blanket drawn to her chin, her hands lying open and upturned in her lap. The posture was a replica of the one that lived in his bones, a symbol of total surrender, of empty offering. A preview of the absolute zero of human need.
An impulse, vast and irrational, overrode all other processes. It was not the cold calculation that had guided him off the hill. This was a deep, compelling need to act, to fill those empty hands.
"Wait here," he said, his voice losing its sterile quality, gaining a faint, unfamiliar urgency.
Before Eloria could protest, he was out the door and moving through the chaos with that same preternatural economy of motion. He did not fight the current of panicked bodies; he navigated it like a fish, arriving at the woman's side.
He had nothing to give, no food, no coin so he found himself kneeling. But the impulse remained. He reached out and simply closed one of her hands, his own large, pale fingers covering hers for a moment in a gesture of futile, human solidarity.
It was nothing and it changed nothing. But as he stood and turned back, he found Eloria staring at him from the doorway, her expression unreadable.
When he re-entered the shack, the air had changed, thedynamic had shifted.
"You moved like a king," she said, her voice low. "But you knelt like a sinner seeking grace. Which is it?"
Looking at his own hand, the ghost of the woman's touch remained on his skin. The two impulses, the cold architecture of Lucian's power and this deep, empathetic compulsion, warred within him, not as a memory, but as a fundamental schism in his present self.
"I am not Lucian," he stated, the certainty solidifying.
"I have his… tools. But not his will." He looked up, his clear hazel eyes meeting hers. "The man who broke the world is gone. The man who was broken by it is also gone."
He made a pause, the final piece of the equation clicking into place, a self-assigned designation to fill the void.
"What remains requires a new name. You will call me Lucio."
A shift passed through Lucio, subtle yet unmistakable, as his attention drifted toward the small window clouded with soot. The city sprawled beyond it in a slow, uneven pulse, a landscape struggling to remember its own logic. Something in its turmoil resonated with him, not as a memory but as an impression carried over from a life that no longer matched the body that housed it.
"I find myself unable to reconstruct the full path that brought me to this point," he said at last. "Nor do I yet comprehend the form or purpose of what I have become." The admission landed with measured calm, stripped of self-pity. "But one truth remains intelligible."
"We find the current," he said, Lev's philosophy finding new form on his tongue. "And we learn to steer it."