Colette was already waiting when Levi arrived just before seventh bell, sitting on a crate outside the meeting point with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had expected him to be late and was mildly irritated to have been proven wrong. She looked him over once, coat and all, said nothing about it, and stood.
"Change of plan," she said. "Docks can wait. You want to understand this city, you start from the bottom."
She didn't explain what that meant. She just walked, and he followed.
The slum sat twenty minutes south of the market district, past the point where the roads stopped being maintained and the buildings stopped pretending to be anything other than what they were. The change was gradual at first and then not.
The paving gave way to packed dirt, the dirt to mud in the low spots. The structures on either side went from old to older to something that had simply been assembled from whatever material was available and held together more by habit than by any structural intention.
The streets narrowed until two people couldn't walk comfortably side by side. The smell changed. Woodsmoke and damp stone and something underneath both that Levi registered and set aside. Colette moved through it with the ease of someone who had grown up knowing exactly where to step, which corners to take, which sections of ground looked solid but weren't. He kept pace and watched.
She didn't offer commentary.
A woman sat in an open doorway mending something with the focused patience of someone who had been at it for hours. Two old men crouched against a wall sharing a pipe, not talking, just existing in proximity. A dog watched them pass from a pile of rubble and then went back to sleep.
Then they heard it.
The sounds of violence past the point of shouting, dull and rhythmic, coming from the alley to their left. The sound of something being done to someone who had stopped being able to respond. Colette stopped at the mouth of it. Levi stopped beside her.
Three men, guild marks on their jackets. A fourth man on the ground. The three were working, without urgency, with the flat efficiency of people performing a task. The man on the ground had stopped moving well before they finished. When they did, one of the three said something low to the others. They walked away down the far end of the alley without hurrying.
The man on the ground didn't get up.
Levi stood there for a long moment. He looked at the empty alley, at what had been left in it, at the guild marks that had rounded the corner and gone.
"This city is really," he said, and stopped. There wasn't a clean ending to that sentence.
Colette glanced at him sideways. "No shit, librarian uncle. What did you think the slum would look like? A paradise?"
He didn't answer. He turned from the alley and kept walking.
.
.
.
They went deeper in. The structures here were less buildings than arrangements of salvaged material, walls patched so many times the original form was a memory, roofs that were more intention than barrier. Laundry hung between them on lines, more gray than whatever color it had started as.
Children ran between the gaps in the walls. Adults sat in doorways and watched Levi pass with the careful neutrality of people who had learned that strangers in this part of the city generally meant something was about to get worse.
He kept his hands visible and his pace unhurried.
Colette walked slightly ahead, and people who might have stiffened at Levi's coat relaxed marginally when they saw her. Whatever standing she had here, it was enough.
Then he saw them.
Along the base of a low overhang, where the roof of one structure jutted out far enough to cut some of the wind and most of the rain, a row of children lay pressed together under a shared piece of rough sacking. Eight of them, maybe ten. Small. Keeping each other warm by proximity because there was nothing else available to keep them warm with.
He stepped toward them.
Colette's hand closed around his sleeve.
"Don't."
He looked at her. "Why. I just want to check on them."
Her expression was flat and certain. "You're not going to like what you see."
"Now you've made me more interested," he said.
She let go of his sleeve didn't try again.
He walked toward the row of children. He got within a few meters and stopped.
"What the fuck?"
"I told you right?" Colette said, from just behind him.
He crouched down slowly. He looked at the nearest child, and then looked again, because the first look had produced information his mind was still in the process of accepting.
Every child in the row had empty eye sockets. Empty. The skin around each socket had healed over in the particular way of old wounds, smooth and settled, which meant this had not been done recently. This was simply how things were for them. Had been for some time.
One of the girls stirred at the sound of his footsteps. Her head turned toward him, tracking by sound because there was no other way for her to track anything anymore.
"Someone there?" she asked. Her voice was thin and patient, the voice of someone who had asked this question many times with varying results.
"Please," said another child, a boy, without lifting his head. "Water. Food. Anything."
Levi reached into his coat and took out his water flask. He moved to the girl who had spoken, crouched beside her, and lifted her head carefully with one hand.
"Here," he said quietly. "Drink."
He brought the flask to her lips.
She didn't drink.
The small weight in his hand went slack all at once. The shallow uneven breathing he hadn't consciously registered until that moment, stopped.
She died in his arms.
Levi stayed crouched for a moment with his hand still under her head. Then he set her down carefully, and stood up.
His expression had gone somewhere quiet and cold. Not grief and not anger in any form he recognized. Something that sat underneath both and was heavier than either.
"I told you right?" Colette said, from the wall where she had sat down while he wasn't looking.
He didn't answer immediately. He was looking at the row of children. At the small chests still rising and falling. At the empty places where eyes should have been.
"Colette," he said. "Tell me what happened here."
She was quiet for a moment. She looked at her hands.
"The Count," she said.
"The noble who governs this city. He's a fourth tier mage. He's been stuck there for a long time. The rumor is centuries, though no one says it loud enough that it gets back to him."
Levi waited.
System chim it to Explain more
In this world, when someone awakens their potential to walk the path of magic or the warrior's way, their eyes change color. It's not just appearance. It's a mark of what that person carries, what they're capable of reaching. The color corresponds to the potential. Higher potential, more distinct the change.
You've seen it. Velgrin, golden eyes. That gold is the mark of someone who could reach the pinnacle of what a human mage can become. It's not decoration. It means something real.
Levi looked at the empty sockets.
"If a child awakens," Colette continued, "and that child has commoner blood, or no blood at all, an orphan with no house and no family name, and their eyes change." She paused.
"The Count has a saying. He says it in public. He says that those born without standing who try to walk the path of power are committing a sin against the natural law. That the gift belongs to those of noble blood by right. That a commoner who awakens is a thief taking what was never theirs."
"Is this even human speech," he said quietly. too a deep breath and continue.
"So he takes their eyes,".
"He keeps them. Jars, supposedly. Lined up somewhere in the estate." Her voice had no texture left to it, worn smooth from having known this for too long.
"He doesn't kill them. He just takes what changed. And then they end up here."
The System notification appeared at the edge of Levi's vision.
SYSTEM NOTE: Eye color change upon awakening is not cosmetic. It is the physical expression of a soul's potential aligning with a chosen path. To destroy the eyes of an awakened individual is to sever that alignment permanently. The potential does not disappear. It remains trapped inside the person with no outlet and no path forward. In children, particularly young ones, this produces a specific and irreversible deterioration over time. The body continues. The potential has nowhere to go. The Count is aware of this. He has been aware of it for a very long time.
Levi read it to the end. He stood in the mud of the Salvene slum with the girl he had just set down behind him and a row of hollow children in front of him, and he was still for several seconds.
This water runs deeper than I thought, he said to himself. For fuck's sake.
He turned and looked at Colette. She was watching him from the wall with the careful attention she gave everything, reading him the same way she read every stranger, checking what he would do now that he understood what he was looking at.
"How long has this been going on," he said.
"Since before I was born," she said.