The pale, silver light of the gas-lamp outside his window had dimmed into a wan shadow by the time Seth Virell stirred awake. His eyelids were heavy, as though his very dreams had left residue behind — dreams not entirely his own. He dragged himself upright from the chair where he had collapsed the previous night, his muscles stiff, his throat dry, his mind still lingering in the echo of the Pillars.
For a long moment he simply sat there, palms pressed into his face, waiting for the confusion to pass.
"I left that place… less than five minutes here," he thought, recalling the unfathomable hall and the throne that had been conjured merely by his stray thought. "Less than five minutes, and yet it felt like entire ages were pressing down on me."
The clock on the wall ticked in indifferent response, its brass hand crawling toward the eighth hour. Seth rose, shuffled toward the narrow bathroom at the back of his apartment, and turned on the rusting tap. Cold water trickled down, splashing across his face and bringing clarity — the kind of clarity only poverty could grant.
When he patted down his coat pocket, his hand found only a thin leather pouch, pathetically light. Opening it confirmed his dread. Ten silvery shillings that he got after being summoned to the Library of Broken Spine glimmered faintly at the bottom, each one stamped with the crowned effigy of Aetheros' nameless sovereign.
"Ten shillings…" Seth muttered aloud, voice hoarse. His lips curled into a grimace.
That was all.
The rest — the twenty crowns he had been issued after his test— were gone.
"Why… why in the world did I spend like that yesterday?"
Memory struck him like the lash of a whip. A fine tailor's boutique off Ember Row. A suit of dark wool, stitched in such a precise cut it seemed to wrap around him like authority itself. Then the extravagant meal at a velvet-draped establishment whose patrons all spoke in hushed tones and never looked one another in the eye.
A single suit: fifteen crowns.
An evening of wine and lamb: five crowns.
Twenty crowns.
All gone.
Seth clutched at his hair, dragging it back with a frustrated groan.
"I should not have bought that suit. I should not have eaten that food," he muttered bitterly, teeth grinding. "Fool. Idiot. Halfwit. To spend twenty crowns like a lordling when I had barely learned to count shillings. And now… now I am left with scraps."
The bathroom mirror offered no sympathy. His reflection stared back, pale, eyes shadowed with fatigue and something deeper, something that seemed to whisper: You sat upon a throne not built for mortals. What need do you have for shillings and crowns?
He tore himself away, dressed in his new but already resented suit, and stepped into the morning streets.
Aetheros stirred around him like a machine that had never been turned off. Smoke curled upward from chimneys into the washed-out sky. Steam trams rattled along their tracks, their whistles sharp enough to sting the ear. Men in soot-dark coats hurried to factories, while ladies with parasols stepped gingerly around puddles of ash-water.
Gas lamps still burned despite the morning light, their pale flames bending strangely, flickering in ways that made Seth's stomach knot. When his gaze lingered, the lamps seemed to sway together, their oscillations aligning into crude shapes, like letters half-formed.
An alphabet without language.
Seth turned quickly away.
But the newspapers were no better. Boys hawked the morning's headlines at every corner — "Crimson Fog Engulfs Northern Harbor!" — "Second Son of the Carroway Family Missing!" — "Parliament Splits over New Grain Levy!"
The words shifted as Seth's eyes traced them. Letters bled into different shapes, sentences rewriting themselves only for him:
"The Empyrean Eminence gazes."
"The page is not closed."
"Beware the alleyways."
His jaw tightened. He did not buy a paper.
Instead, he pressed his few coins into the flour-dusted hands of a grocer, accepting a paper sack of bread, vegetables, and a pinch of spices. Mundane items, but they grounded him in something that did not whisper or flicker. He told himself he could cook tonight, something simple, something that tasted of ordinary life.
Tucking the sack under his arm, Seth wandered further, boots striking the cobblestones with mechanical rhythm. He thought of nothing. He tried to think of nothing.
That was when he saw it.
The alley yawned open between two brick buildings, narrow, damp, its shadows clinging even beneath daylight. At first Seth had no reason to step closer — until movement within drew his eyes.
Mist.
It slithered through the passage, coiling unnaturally, shaping itself into the crude outline of a man who advanced with fluid grace. Before it, stumbling, gasping, ran another man — hair disheveled, face bruised, desperation radiating from every motion.
The fleeing man crashed bodily into Seth before he could step aside. The impact sent the sack of bread tumbling to the ground, its contents scattering across wet stone.
"Wha—" Seth began, only for his words to choke as cold iron pressed against his ribs.
A revolver. Its barrel was jammed against his side, the hammer pulled back with a click that carried death in its echo.
"Don't move!" the stranger rasped, his arm locking around Seth's chest, pulling him close as a human shield. His breath smelled of whiskey and blood.
The revolver pressed harder.
"Let me go!" the man shouted toward the mist-shape advancing down the alley. His voice cracked with fear and fury. "I'll kill this boy, I swear it! Don't test me!"
The mist figure halted, its amorphous form shuddering like vapor caught in a draft. For a moment there was silence, broken only by the ragged breaths of the fugitive and the distant clang of a tram bell.
Seth's heart hammered. His mind leapt, racing with contradictory thoughts.
"I am Cipher Nine, an Archivist. I have glimpsed the Pillars, sat upon a throne no mortal should. And yet… here I am, revolver at my ribs, hostage in an alleyway like any ordinary man."
He swallowed, the taste of metal and panic thick on his tongue.
The revolver dug deeper.
"I'll do it!" the man barked again. His voice was wild, breaking. "I'll put a bullet through him if you come closer! I don't care who you are — or what you are!"
The mist did not answer. But something in the alley seemed to darken, as though the shadows themselves had drawn breath.
Seth's lips parted, unbidden words forming. "Wait… don't shoot." His own voice surprised him, strangely steady. "You kill me, and you lose your shield. Think about it."
The fugitive's grip faltered slightly. His eyes darted between Seth and the mist. Sweat slid down his temple.
"I… I just need to get out," the man muttered, almost pleading now. "Out of this cursed city… away from it all…"
The mist shivered again, condensing. Seth thought — or imagined — he saw faint eyes forming within its folds, watching.
And the revolver pressed closer still.
The bread lay ruined on the cobblestones. The gas lamps outside flickered. The newspaper boy on the street corner shouted a headline that shifted as Seth's ears caught it:
"A hostage in the alleyway shall choose his side."