The ascent toward the Citadel was not a climb; it was an immersion.
Kaelen moved through the upper districts of the Black City like a diver descending into a trench, the pressure increasing with every step. The air here was no longer just cold; it was thick. It had a viscosity to it, resisting his movements, pressing against his eardrums with a low, static hum that drowned out the sound of his own boots on the cobblestones.
He huddled in the shadow of a flying buttress, his iron shield pulled close to his body. Above him, the architecture had shed all pretense of habitation. The buildings here were not homes, nor were they shops. They were monoliths of dark, quarried stone, rising fifty, sixty feet into the gloom. They had no windows. They had no doors that faced the street. They were sealed obelisks, their surfaces carved with intricate, spiraling patterns that seemed to writhe when looked at through peripheral vision.
Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, forcing his mind to reset.
Visual distortion, he told himself. Geometry is constant. Stone does not move.
But when he opened his eyes, the spirals were still there, gnawing at the edges of the stone.
He checked his Ledger. He didn't open it—the sound of the pages turning would be too loud in this oppressive silence—but he tapped the cover three times. A nervous tic. A confirmation of reality.
Objective: The High Keep. Distance: Visual estimate, 500 yards. Obstacle: The Geometry.
He wasn't fighting guards anymore. He was fighting the city itself.
He peered around the edge of the buttress.
The street ahead did not go straight. It didn't curve, either. It fractured.
The avenue leading to the Citadel gates had been broken by some colossal force. Sections of the road floated inches above the ground, tethered by chains of grey smoke similar to those held by the Cultists. The cobblestones on these floating islands were pristine, untouched by the grime of the lower city, but they were tilted at impossible angles.
And hovering above it all, dominating the narrow strip of sky between the monoliths, was the Sphere.
From the outskirts, it had looked like a distant moon. Here, beneath it, it was a terrifying void. A perfect circle of absolute blackness, so dark it hurt the eyes to focus on it. It hung directly over the Citadel, motionless, silent, and hungry.
The chains anchoring it to the high towers of the Keep were taut. They were massive—links the size of wagons, forged from a metal that glowed with a dull, sickly white luminescence.
It's pulling, Kaelen realized, feeling the vertigo wash over him. It wants to go up. It wants to take the city with it.
He stepped out from the buttress. He had to cross the fractured street.
He stepped onto the first floating section of pavement. It shifted under his weight, dipping like a raft on water.
Kaelen froze, dropping to a crouch, his shield raised.
Nothing happened. No alarm sounded. The silence held.
He moved to the next slab. This one was tilted upward at a thirty-degree angle. He had to scramble up it, his boots slipping on the slick stone.
He paused at the top, breathing hard. The air tasted of ozone and dry ash.
He looked down into the gaps between the floating road sections.
There was no earth beneath them. Just a grey, swirling mist that seemed to have no bottom. The foundations of the district had been eaten away, leaving the upper crust suspended by the gravity of the Sphere.
"It's not just a prison," Kaelen whispered, staring into the abyss beneath the street. "It's a parasite. It's lifting the host into the sky."
He continued the traverse. It took him an hour to cover two hundred yards. Every movement was a calculation of weight distribution and balance. His ribs burned with a white-hot fire, but the pain was a grounding anchor. Pain was real. Pain was biological. The floating rocks were nightmares.
He reached the other side of the fracture, collapsing onto the solid stone of the Citadel plaza.
He lay there for a moment, pressing his cheek against the cold granite, just to feel something solid.
Status: Nausea. Vertigo. Disorientation. Action: Observe.
He rolled onto his side and looked across the plaza.
The gates of the Citadel were open.
This terrified him more than if they had been sealed.
The gates were massive—fifty feet high, made of the same white-glowing metal as the chains. They stood ajar, revealing a darkness within that was deeper than the night.
And flowing into that darkness was a river.
Not water. Not sludge.
People.
Or what remained of them.
Kaelen army-crawled behind a row of stone gargoyles that lined the plaza's edge. He pulled his spyglass. The lens was cracked, splitting the image in two, but he could see.
A procession of the "Silent"—the scavengers from the outer wall, the dregs of the city—was shuffling across the plaza. They were herded by the Cultists in their black robes.
But the Cultists weren't touching them. They didn't need to. The Silent walked with a horrific, vacuous willingness. They stared up at the Sphere with mouths hanging open, their eyes wide and white, reflecting the nothingness.
They walked in single file.
As they reached the gates, they didn't stop. They walked into the dark.
But Kaelen noticed something else.
At the threshold of the gate, flanking the entrance, stood two massive constructs. They were not Iron Sentinels. They were Flesh-Masons, twisted and grafted into the stone of the archway itself. Their multiple limbs hung down like spiders, holding chisels and strange, glowing tools.
As each Silent passed, the Flesh-Masons reached down.
They didn't strike. They peeled.
With a motion that was shockingly delicate, the Masons stripped the shadows from the people.
Kaelen watched, his bile rising, as the shadows were physically detached from the heels of the walking men and women. The shadows were lifted up, writhing and struggling like caught fish, and placed into canisters strapped to the Masons' backs.
The people—now shadowless—stumbled forward into the Keep, diminished. Lighter. Less real.
The Tithe, Kaelen thought, gripping his obsidian shard until his knuckles turned white. They are harvesting the substance of existence.
He lowered the glass.
He couldn't fight that. He couldn't fight a system that processed souls like raw ore.
But he needed to get inside. The records—the Contract—would be in the Keep.
He looked at the procession. There were hundreds of them. A sea of grey rags and blank faces.
Observation: The Cultists are watching the line, not the perimeter. The Masons are focused on the harvest. The lighting is poor (Blue lanterns only).
Kaelen looked at his own shadow. It was long and thin, cast by the faint starlight and the glow of the chains.
If I enter, they take my shadow. Hypothesis: A man without a shadow is a dead man walking.
He needed a different way in.
He scanned the architecture of the Citadel. It was a fortress of spikes and towers, built to defy a siege from the heavens.
To the left of the main gate, about fifty feet up, there was a protrusion. A stone balcony, crumbling and dark. It was below the level of the Sphere, shielded from its direct line of sight by the bulk of a tower.
And hanging from that balcony, dangling like a broken thread, was a chain. A normal, rusted iron chain.
Access point.
Kaelen holstered his spyglass. He checked his shield straps.
He began to move along the perimeter of the plaza, staying in the deepest shadows of the gargoyles. He moved like a rat, scurrying from cover to cover, his eyes locked on the Cultists.
One of the Null Geometers—a spinning pyramid of void—drifted near his position. It paused.
Tik-tik-tik.
It spun, tasting the air.
Kaelen froze. He stopped breathing. He stopped thinking. He became a stone.
The Geometer hovered for an agonizing ten seconds. Then, it drifted back to the procession. It wasn't looking for rats. It was looking for devotion. And Kaelen had none.
He reached the base of the wall below the balcony.
The stone here was slick with moisture. The chain hung ten feet above his head.
He looked at the wall. The masonry was rough, the blocks large and uneven.
Climb potential: Moderate. Physical condition: Critical.
Kaelen gritted his teeth. He reached up, finding a handhold in the grout between two massive blocks.
He pulled.
Pain exploded in his chest. It felt as if his ribs were separating from his sternum. A grey haze washed over his vision.
Ignore it, he commanded himself. Pain is biological data. Data can be filed.
He climbed.
One foot. Three feet. Six.
His fingers were raw. The stone was freezing, sucking the heat from his blood. His breath came in ragged, wet gasps.
He reached the chain.
He grabbed it. It held.
He pulled himself up, hand over hand, his legs dangling in the void. He didn't look down at the plaza. He didn't look at the line of the doomed entering the gate.
He hauled himself over the lip of the balcony and collapsed onto the stone floor.
He lay there for a long time, listening to the pounding of his own heart. It sounded impossibly loud, like a drum beating in a library.
You are alive, the Audit whispered. Statistically improbable.
He rolled over and looked at the door leading into the balcony.
It was a heavy wooden door, bound in iron. It was cracked slightly open.
Kaelen stood up, swaying. He drew his obsidian shard.
He pushed the door open.
He stepped into a hallway that smelled of dust and dried lavender.
It was a stark contrast to the industrial horror outside. The floor was covered in a carpet—threadbare and grey, but a carpet nonetheless. Paintings lined the walls, though the canvases were black with age and grime.
This was the residence. The living quarters of the Citadel.
Kaelen moved silently down the hall.
He passed rooms with open doors. Bedrooms with rotted four-poster beds. Dining halls with tables set for ghosts.
It was silent. But it felt... occupied.
Not by monsters. By memory.
He reached a large set of double doors at the end of the hall. They were carved with the symbol of the Tower and the Eye.
Kaelen pushed them open.
He found himself in a throne room.
But there was no throne.
In the center of the vast, vaulted chamber, there was a desk. A simple, wooden desk, cluttered with papers, measuring instruments, and sextants.
And sitting behind the desk, facing the far wall, was a chair.
The far wall was gone. It had been replaced by a massive window—a single sheet of glass—that looked out over the city.
And directly through the window, filling the entire view, was the Sphere.
The chair was occupied.
Kaelen raised his shield. He crept forward.
The figure in the chair was small. It wore robes of purple velvet, heavy with gold embroidery that had tarnished to black. On its head rested a circlet of iron.
It was not a skeleton.
It was a man.
He was ancient. His skin was like parchment stretched over wire. His hair was long, white, and brittle, pooling on the floor around the chair. He sat perfectly still, staring at the Sphere through the glass.
Kaelen stopped ten feet away.
"Audit," he rasped, his voice sounding foreign in the stillness.
The figure didn't move.
Kaelen stepped closer. He circled the desk.
The man's eyes were open. They were milky white, blinded by cataracts—or perhaps by staring at the darkness for too long.
His hands rested on the desk. They were clasped over a document.
Kaelen looked at the document.
It was a blueprint.
A geometric diagram of the Sphere. Lines and angles were drawn over it, calculating its mass, its trajectory, its hunger.
And written in the margins, in a shaky hand, were notes.
Input > Output. The mass increases. The Tether holds, but the foundation cracks. We are not feeding it to keep it asleep. We are feeding it to keep it heavy. If we stop, it floats away. And it takes the sky with it.
Kaelen stared at the words.
To keep it heavy.
They weren't worshipping it. They weren't even really imprisoning it. They were weighing it down. The Tithe—the memories, the shadows, the stone—it was ballast.
They were frantically shoveling the entire world into the mouth of a balloon to keep it from floating off.
"Madness," Kaelen whispered. "It's an equation that ends in zero."
The old man's finger twitched.
Kaelen froze.
The man's head turned, very slowly. The neck cracked with the sound of dry twigs.
The milky eyes focused on Kaelen.
"You..." the man whispered. His voice was like wind in dry leaves. "You have... a shadow."
Kaelen stepped back, raising the obsidian shard.
"Who are you?" Kaelen demanded.
The man smiled. His lips cracked and bled black dust.
"I am... the Anchor," the man wheezed. "I am the... weight."
He lifted a trembling hand and pointed to the window, to the Sphere.
"It is... waking up," the Anchor whispered. "The Tithe... is not enough. It needs... denser matter."
He looked at Kaelen's chest. At the bandages. At the beating heart beneath.
"It needs... suffering. Real... fresh... suffering."
The room darkened.
Outside the window, the Sphere pulsed. A ripple of distortion waved through the glass.
Kaelen felt a pull. A physical drag on his soul.
The Anchor laughed—a dry, hacking sound.
"Run... little number," the old man rasped. "Run... before it audits... you."
Kaelen didn't wait. He grabbed the blueprint from under the old man's hands.
He turned and bolted for the door.
As he ran, he heard the glass of the massive window begin to crack.
CRACK.
The sound of the barrier failing.
Kaelen sprinted down the hallway, the carpet tearing under his boots. Behind him, the sound of wind—roaring, vacuum-sucking wind—exploded into the Citadel.
The Sphere had breached the observation deck.
Kaelen realized with terrifying clarity that he hadn't just found the truth. He had been the final variable that tipped the scale.
He ran for the balcony, for the chain, for the ground.
Because the Black City wasn't just a farm. It was a sinking ship. And the water was rising from the sky.