The city of Cael'Lorne never slept.
Not because it didn't want to, but because it couldn't. Beneath its glittering towers of steam-forged glass and clockwork wonders, the Undercrown — a place of rusted metal, frozen gutters, and bleeding neon — pulsed with sleepless agony.
And in a crooked alley of the Undercrown, with soot on his coat and blood on his knuckles, Silas Vale ran.
Footsteps thundered behind him. Enforcers. The elite guards from the upper spires, equipped with pulse rifles and glacial drones. They were getting closer.
Silas ducked into a narrow chute between collapsed steel beams, nearly slipping on frost-slicked pipes. He tapped the side of his wrist — a worn-down gadget snapped open, gears spinning erratically as a projection lit up: a blueprint of Cael'Lorne's sewage tunnels.
"Left, then down. Fast," he muttered to himself. The device flickered, then sparked. "Damn it, Frostbite, don't die on me now."
He dropped down into a tunnel and landed with a splash. Ice water soaked his boots. The hum of frost-tech echoed around him. The drones weren't far behind.
He wasn't just running for survival. He was running from everything.
From the memory of his parents — brilliant innovators burned alive by a device they were forced to create for the High Council. From his twisted uncle, who sold him to black market tech-butchers at age seven. From his sister, who smiled while handing him over. And most of all, from her.
Lyra.
Her laughter still rang in his ears. Soft. Sharp. Treacherous. She'd kissed him before betraying him to the Council. Said it was for the greater good. Said he was dangerous.
She wasn't wrong.
Silas stopped running.
The drones hovered in with a low whirring hum. Cold blue light scanned the tunnel. He stood still, breath fogging the air. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he activated the device he'd been building for weeks: The Shatter Pulse.
A high-frequency hum erupted from the core at his palm. The air cracked with freezing pressure. In one blinding pulse, the ice in the tunnel expanded — exploded — freezing the drones mid-flight, shattering them into crystal shards.
Silas exhaled.
His breath came slow. His body trembled — not from fear, but from restraint.
The old man had always warned him. "You're a fuse wire dipped in liquid nitrogen, boy. Beautiful. Brittle. Deadly."
That old man was the only one who'd ever raised him like a son. They called him Vorr, a one-eyed smuggler who ran illegal frost-tech through the city's underbelly. A villain to the upper world. A savior to the broken.
Silas looked up through a grating above the tunnel. Beyond it, the light of the upper spires gleamed like distant stars. Clean. Bright. Fake.
He would rise there one day.
Not for revenge. For revelation.
They would know what they did to him. To his family. And when Lyra looked down from her council seat again, she wouldn't see a broken boy.
She'd see Frostmark.
The echo beneath the ice was coming.