He was never meant to walk out of that place.
But the smoke always sank heavier in the mornings.
Not the soft kind. Not mist. It was the kind that clogged your throat, clung to your skin, and made everything taste like metal and misery. It rolled down from the refineries in choking waves, soaking the slums in soot.
And like most days, Reil barely noticed it.
He sat on a rusted pipe overlooking the refinery gates, elbows on his knees, watching workers shuffle through the ash fog. Cloth-wrapped faces. Bent backs. No voices. Just the shudder of machinery and the weight of the sky pressing down.
He should've been among them by now.
Didn't move.
Didn't want to.
"Reil!" a voice barked behind him. "You trying to get eaten by the smoke or just finally gave up?"
He turned his head. Mireya was halfway up the slag-stairs, dark eyes narrowed, soot in her braid, fingers stained oil-black. Her wrench was strapped across her back like a sword.
"Didn't hear the horn," he mumbled.
"Right. Because your ears fell off in your sleep."
She tossed him a rag. It smacked his chest.
"Your face looks like a bloodleech pissed on it," she added. "Wipe that off. Overseer sees it, you're getting tested for mutations."
He rubbed his face with the rag, more out of habit than obedience. Mireya didn't look away. She rarely did.
"You hear about Baylen?" she asked.
He nodded, slow. Baylen had worked one floor above him on Core Pipe. Yesterday, there was a mist leak. They said he boiled alive. One of the boys said the scream never stopped, even after the man did.
"They're replacing him with a kid from the orphan ward," Mireya said. "Twelve."
Still nothing from him.
She waited, then sighed."You keep walking into that place like it won't chew you up too. You ever think maybe you weren't meant to rot down here?"
Reil stood.
He didn't meet her eyes. "No."
"That's it?"
"I think I was born to it."
She blinked. Whatever softness might've been forming behind her scowl vanished.
"Right," she said. "Well. Try not to explode today. I'm low on patch kits."
—
The refinery greeted him with heat and metal screams.
It always did. Rusted scaffolds rattled overhead. Steam hissed from marrow lines, long bone-pipes threaded into the walls like veins, leaking divinity long since dried.
Somewhere above, a pressure valve wheezed, sounding too much like breathing.
Reil's job was the same as it had been for three years: clear the clogs.
When the marrow lines jammed, when pressure built too high. Someone had to crawl in and fix it. He was small. Cheap. Unnoticed.
Perfect.
He moved through the catwalks like a ghost. Mireya watched him from the repair bay. She said nothing this time. Neither did he.
—
By hour three, his arms ached from dragging himself through clogged pipes. His skin was coated in thin grease. His thoughts felt slow. Slower than usual.
Then came the vibrations.
Not the rhythmic thumping of gear pumps — something deeper. Lower. Off-beat.
Thrum. Pause. Thrum.
Like breathing. From below.
He looked up. No one else reacted. Either they couldn't feel it, or they'd learned to ignore it.
—
Hour four. Pipe 17 flashed red. Clog alert.
He sighed. Shouldered his pack, and crawled in.
Reil slid into the duct, torch clenched between his teeth, crawling on hands and knees. The inside of the pipe was warm. Too warm. He could hear the marrow bubbling behind the pressure wall. If the seal burst—
Snap.
He froze.
That wasn't marrow.
Crack. Clink. Snap.
The floor beneath him dropped.
—
There was no scream.
No time for one.
Impact.
Stone. Metal. A scream that wasn't his. Then silence.
—
He woke up groaning, half-curled on a cold floor. His left leg pulsed with pain. Something warm slicked his side.
His torch had rolled out of reach, but still flickered. Casting weak gold light across a space that wasn't a pipe or refinery or anything human.
A chamber. Huge. Silent.
And breathing.
—
The floor was made of fossilised bone, not marrow pipes, but real beastbone. Ribs the size of train engines curled up toward the black ceiling. The walls shimmered with thin veins of crystal that pulsed in rhythm.
Thrum.
Reil staggered to his feet.
The light from his torch touched a stone altar.
And there, carved in bleeding detail, was a figure.
Not man. Not beast. Somewhere between. A hulking figure with fur carved like flowing stone, a face twisted in agony, horns like knives, eyes hollow and bleeding down its chest.
Each hand was outstretched. In each palm: a sigil. In a language he didn't know, but somehow understood.
"Blood is memory."
It wasn't familiar.
But it felt known.
A name echoed in his mind, unbidden.
The First Bloodwright.
He stepped closer. Something cold stirred in his chest. Then lower. In his stomach. His spine. His bones.
He gasped.
His arm burned.
The veins beneath his skin flared. Not red, but silver-blue, then violet, then something he had no word for. Sigils – shifting and incomplete – spread from his wrists to his chest.
The air thinned.
The chamber inhaled.
Breathed.
"You are not the first. But you may be the last."
The voice didn't speak. It pressed into him.
He dropped to his knees. His heart pounded, not fast, but wrong. A beat not his own. A rhythm that echoed from the altar through the floor and into his spine.
His vision flooded – not with light, but scenes.
Beasts made of stars and screams. Cities turning to bone. A tower built from screams. Names that no longer had language.
He opened his mouth to scream.
Only silence came.
Then – Black.
—
Reil woke coughing up blood.
Alarms were wailing. Footsteps. Screams. Light.
Someone was pulling him from rubble. Someone crying his name. Mireya?
His vision blurred.
Above, refinery workers shouted over collapsing scaffolds. A siren rang across the sector.
And on his skin - still faint, still glowing - the marks remained.
Not just a burn.
A brand.
A breath.
A beginning.