The rooftop greenhouse overlooked the city like a secret watching its own birth. Ivy curled around steel beams, and frost-laced orchids bloomed against unnatural heat spells. It was here that Caelum Dross gathered his first council—not rulers, not revolutionaries. Architects.
Five figures. Each chosen for silence, for brilliance, for damage done and undone.
They called themselves The Whisper Parliament.
Caelum stood at the center, dressed in ash-grey, the light tracing shadows beneath his jaw. He didn't speak immediately. Instead, he placed a map on the glass table—not of territory, but of institutions. Circles marked pressure points. Fissures. A system built for collapse.
"We don't burn it," he said. "We… restructure."
A woman named Veyra, former academic turned myth-maker, leaned in. "And the traitor?"
Caelum's fingers drummed once. "He built with borrowed bones. We will make the walls shift beneath him."
A man named Eland, hacker and social architect, added, "We can write policy into culture. People will think they asked for it."
Caelum nodded. "Let truth feel like familiarity. Not revolution."
The devil didn't appear—not yet. But her voice curled in his thoughts.
"You speak like me now. Bravo."
Outside, the city gleamed with dusklight. Inside, the Whisper Parliament began crafting doctrines, seeding platforms, orchestrating art and dissent that folded into law. Slowly, the ascent began—not with fire. With framing.
Caelum left that night with a briefcase full of rewritten futures.
And no one noticed.
Yet.