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"A life forged in shadow does not fear the dark—it learns to wield it. The broken that survives does not mend; they sharpen."
—Keepers of Memories, Parable of the Unseen Blade
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Lugal ran. Not toward the hovel. Never again.
Ash and soot scoured his throat, sharp as shattered glass. His father's rage chased him—booze-thickened roars fading into the Sinks' indifferent clamor. The phantom belt still burned across his shoulders. The word nothing echoed in his skull.
He ran until the city's underbelly swallowed him. Chimneys hacked smoke-vomit. Steel wheels screamed on ancient tracks. Stray dogs, ribs like harp strings, bayed at phantoms only ash-blind eyes could see. The stench—rust, stale sweat, and the sweet-rot of Gloom-Rat carcasses—clung like a second, suffocating skin.
He collapsed in a dead-end alley, lungs raked raw. Ribs stabbed with each gasp. Hunger, a nest of razor-mouthed beetles, gnawed at his hollow core. Nine winters old. Bones felt like brittle kindling. Spirit scraped down to flint. He pressed his forehead against the cold, greasy brick. The city's Akar thrummed beneath him, distant, unconcerned. No one is coming. The silence after the storm was the loudest truth.
Three years passed. Ash fell. Seasons cycled. Hunger remained.
The boy who fled learned to hunt.
Lugal moved now—lean muscle over whipcord sinew, a shadow given teeth. His eyes, once wide with terror, were flat river stones now. Not dead. Focused. Calculating angles, exits, weaknesses. The market thrummed around him—a cacophony of desperation. Stalls overflowed with wilted Ghost-Glow fronds and meat crawling with metallic-green flies. Vendors hawked lies with practiced smiles. Then he saw it: a single apple, bruised but whole, perched precariously on the edge of a spice merchant's overloaded cart. Hope was a luxury; hunger was a command.
His hand darted. Cold, slightly yielding fruit met his palm.
Iron fingers clamped his wrist. Hard. Crushing.
"Thief!" The merchant's roar was meaty, reeking of stale ale and yesterday's onions. A face like spoiled dough loomed over him. "Sinks rat! Gutter filth!"
A fist rose. Knuckles like river stones. Slow. Deliberate. Lugal knew its weight, its language. He closed his eyes. Braced. Worthless. Nothing. Here it comes—
Impact. But not on him.
A blur—small, fast, barefoot—slammed into the merchant's knee with the force of a flung brick. A sickening crack of cartilage.
"Agh!" The man bellowed, grip loosening.
"Run, idiot!" The voice was young, raw, fierce. Not mercy. A command spat from the shadows.
Lugal's eyes snapped open. He saw a flash: tangled dark hair, eyes wide and storm-grey even then, a frame all sharp angles and desperate speed. The boy—Hatim, though Lugal wouldn't know the name for years—snatched the fallen apple and vanished into the seething crowd like smoke through grate bars.
Lugal stood frozen. Not from fear. From shock. The merchant writhed, cursing, blind to the escape. The phantom fist still hung in the air where Lugal's face should have been. His skin buzzed. His chest felt tight, strange. Not the familiar crush of dread. Something else. Unfamiliar. Unwelcome.
Gratitude.
It wasn't kindness. Kindness died screaming in the Sinks. It was a spark. A defiant flicker of light in a place where light was devoured whole. He never saw the boy's face clearly again. But he remembered the gesture. The reckless, furious intervention. A fleeting counterpoint to the crushing refrain of nothing.
That night, huddled behind a crate of rusted Verge scrap, hunger returned. Vicious. Unignorable. His ribs ached, old bruises singing a dull chorus. Pride, a sharper gnawing than hunger, twisted in his gut. He was nothing, saved by another nothing. The spark guttered.
Then, stillness. A presence.
"Hungry, boy?" The voice was low, resonant, cutting through the alley's drip and distant yowls.
A woman stood silhouetted against the grimy phosphor-glow of a distant lamp. Tall. Straight-backed. Her cloak wasn't rich, but unnervingly clean—the stark cleanliness of ritual, not coin. Skin like dark, weathered bronze. Eyes like obsidian shards—sharp, assessing, holding no pity, no questions about fading bruises or hollow cheeks. She held out a hand. Not bread. A choice.
"What are you willing to do," she asked, the words precise, cold as the stone beneath him, "to climb out of the gutter? Truly climb?"
He looked at the offered hand. Looked at the gutter scum clinging to his boots. Remembered the flash of storm-grey eyes, the stolen apple, the spark. Remembered his father's belt, the cold hearthstone, the vow whispered in blood and ash: I will rise.
He took her hand. Swallowed the question whole. Followed.
The Sunken Forum.
They were not faces. They were smoke. Shifting shadows in a chamber older than Valerian's rule. Whispers from the deep stone. A council of absences that gave commands.
Tasks first. Simple. Brutal.
Watch this alley. Count the enforcers patrols.
Listen at this pipe. Bring back the words.
Carry this vial. Return unseen.
Fail, and be forgotten.
Then, complexity. Cruelty.
Names. Routes. Weaknesses.
Maps drawn in blood-memory.
Eavesdrop through ventilation shafts choked with despair.
Steal ledgers from guarded Middens offices.
Extract truth not with blades, but with silence, pressure, the promise of deeper voids.
They didn't mend the broken boy. They reforged him. Tempered him in betrayal and subterfuge.
He learned to vanish between heartbeats, a rumour given legs.
To read the lie in a flickering eyelid, the tremor in a drunkard's hand.
To become the shadow even shadows feared.
They offered no comfort. No absolution.
They gave him a knife. Balanced. Silent. Hungry.
And a promise, breathed from the darkness:
You can rise.
You can matter.
You can make them choke on the word 'nothing'.
He clung to it. Not like breath. Like a lifeline thrown into an abyss. It was the vow under the table given form, weaponized. His father's phantom sneer—You'll never be nothing!—became the whetstone on which he sharpened his resolve.
He would rise.
He would become something so sharp, so undeniable, that even his past would flinch from his shadow.
He would make the world kneel.
The dream frayed. Shattered.
Lugal gasped awake. Sweat, cold and sour, plastered the thin prison tunic to his skin. The cell rushed back: the reek of despair, the weeping stone, the bars humming with containment runes. The phantom weight of the Forum's knife was gone. Only damp stone beneath his cheek.
Plink… plink… plink…
The drip counted seconds. Measured the erosion of hope.
He curled tighter, knees drawn to his chest, mirroring the boy beneath the table, the boy saved by storm-grey eyes. The past was a stone tied to his ankle, dragging him down. The future was the cell's fourth wall, featureless and cold.
And yet…
Deep in the marrow, beneath the despair, beneath the taste of rust and failure…
The promise still burned. A stubborn coal in the ash.
You will rise.
It was no longer a vow. It was a defiance. Spat into the face of the dripping dark. The only thing left that was truly his.