The notice hung across the sky like a thin cut in glass.
—Triple-S Bloodline scaffold available. Acceptance is irreversible.
Damien didn't blink. His cursor slid to the sigil in the corner of his interface—the shallow crescent he had pulled out of stone hours ago when the world still behaved. The crescent pulsed once, waiting.
He accepted.
No flare, no trumpet. The night folded in on itself and came back a shade deeper. A second line appeared in that same thin hand:
—Scaffold initialized. Anchor I required.
Another, like a whisper following behind:
—Mark. Bind. Breathe.
The official UI tried to throw a tutorial at him—orange boxes, friendly arrows. They arrived late and landed wrong, half-clipping into the handwritten lines and sliding away like oil on rain. Across the server, chat windows exploded. Screenshots. Caps-locked questions. A guild advertisement rolled past promising "Blood Eclipse Carry—5 gold" and vanished under the next four hundred messages.
Damien shut the global channel. Noise was a tool only if you held it by the handle.
He stood where the starting zone's basalt path forked—left to the merchant tents and the healer's shed, right to a chapel so small it looked like a mistake. Every player spawned within shouting distance of that chapel and then forgot it existed. A long time ago, in a patch note most people never read, the devs had used it to test ambient sound. The bell inside had rung for an hour on a Tuesday and never again.
Now, under the Blood Eclipse, he could hear a note he had never heard—a thread of tone behind the ordinary sound, taut and trembling. He stepped off the road. The crowd thinned as he left the safe ring of torches. He walked past the chapel's broken hedge and up the two stone steps to the door.
The handle was iron. Cold bled from it into his palm like water. The door did not give.
He exhaled and looked—not with eyes but with whatever sense the crescent had cut into him. The world's skin turned translucent a fraction. The lintel above the door showed a hairline fracture. Inside it, motes moved in slow figure-eights, like dust dancing in a shaft of light. The Blood Eclipse's red tide slid past the chapel roof. For one breath it touched the lintel and the motes accelerated.
"Mark," he said, and felt foolish for speaking to a door.
—Acknowledged. Candidate attuned.
The iron gave. The door swung inward without a sound.
The chapel was an empty box. Benches. A chipped font. A rope that used to go up into the bell loft and now ended in a frayed knot. Dust lay everywhere but didn't smell like dust. It smelled like coin and old paper, the same scent that had rolled out of the relic vault before the floor had opened under him.
Under the bell rope, a plaque had once carried a verse. The verse had been scraped off. In the scraped metal, his reflection wavered, longer than he was and a little thinner, like something drawn from wire.
—Anchor I: Mark the night.
—Requirement: Witness the eclipse where no moon should reach.
—Method: unknown.
The script was very small. The official font tried to translate "unknown" into a bullet list and gave up.
No moon should reach inside a chapel with a roof, he thought. No moon should reach into stone.
He touched the frayed rope. It rasped. Above him the bell loft was a black box behind grating. He tested the wall beside the rope and found the seam a mason had left a hundred patches ago. He set his boots in the bench grooves and climbed. At the loft level, his fingers found the gap. He wedged his shoulder into it and pushed until the plaster cracked and a square of dark fell away.
The loft was smaller than he remembered from beta videos. It had enough space for him to stand awkwardly and turn to face the bell. The bell had been cast in pewter and painted to look like bronze. Its clapper was wood and tied with old ribbon. If he rang it nothing would happen except disappointment.
The Blood Eclipse made a red line on the rim that did not come from outside.
"Where are you?" he said softly, not to the bell.
The line moved, as if embarrassed at being caught. He followed it along the inner rim to a bruise in the metal—a dent the shape of a thumb. He put his own thumb there and pressed until the edge bit his skin through the glove. Heat went through him like a single breath held too long and then released.
—Mark accepted.
—Anchor I complete.
The bell did not ring. The silence after the words felt like a held chord cutting off exactly at the bar. In his palm, under the glove, something cooled—the crescent had imprinted itself into skin, not as a tattoo but as a temperature, a memory of warmth. He flexed his hand. The imprint didn't fade.
On his interface, a tiny timer spun into existence, counting from ten minutes down, and a line of text unfolded:
—Bind: Claim shadeglass from a place that forgot its sound.
—Breathe: Survive under the weight of the bell.
—Warning: Eclipse conditions transient.
He dropped back into the nave, landing lightly. The chapel door opened on its own. Outside, the crowd had thickened; the event had begun drawing whales and the whales had brought entourages. Players sprinted in armor that hadn't existed the day before, bought with real money. A few carried shields large enough to make doors nervous. Someone had spawned a pet shaped like a tiny sun. It shed soft rays and complained when it hit shadows.
On the main road, five members of White Crown had gathered around a bench, their capes crisp. The guild crest winked in silver on their chests; the crack through the crown had been polished out for the event. Asher had always been good at optics.
The lead knight lifted a hand to his ear. His helm was off; his face was forgettably pleasant. They weren't hunting. Not yet. They were screening. If they had been hunting they would have run every newcomer through an "accidental duel" and measured reaction times.
Damien kept his gait the way he had learned to keep it when he had money to carry through bad streets: unremarkable, metronomic, never in a straight line long enough to invite geometry. He angled past the bench. A younger Crown shifted, recognizing him a half-second too late, then checked himself and looked away.
The chat pinged. Not global. A direct whisper opened with no signature.
Lower bellfoundry. This is where shadeglass forms during eclipse. You have eight minutes. —S.
He did not answer. The old bellfoundry lay under the first city—the real one, not the starter camp, the place players always called the City as if there were no others. From here, on foot, it was a minute to the gate, three to the outer stairs, and two under the market if he cut the angles hard and nobody put a boot in his path. He could make it with one minute to spare. Two, if a door decided to open when it should not.
He cut right, away from the White Crown bench and the great public road, into an alley that smelled like wet wool. The alley took him to the rabbit track behind the apothecary and from there to a panel of wall someone had left hinged in an old content patch. He squeezed through the hinge and spat himself into the slope running down to the city gate.
Under the Blood Eclipse the gate wore a coat of smoke. Not real smoke. Shader smoke. The guards at the checkpoint had forgotten to bark quest lines. Their eyes tracked the sky.
Halfway down the slope, his private chat lit again.
You're late by a minute.
—S.
He ignored it. The gate admitted him with a shiver of red light along the lintel. Inside, the city became itself: cracked marble and snaking alleys, a river that had no source you could find, a market that sold spices with names you could not pronounce even before the devs added vowels. The foundry lay beneath the eastern quarter, under a hill that had been a fortress before it had been a mound of bricked-over rooms.
He ran. The Blood Eclipse thinned as if a cloud had passed. The timer said 07:01.
Two White Crown scouts turned into the street ahead. They saw him at the same time he saw them. One lifted a hand, meaning to signal and then remembered he would put his back to the wall to do it and stopped—training cautions battling swagger. The other had a skin he recognized, an old sponsor pattern from a tournament circuit. They were decent. They weren't Asher.
"Damien," the tournament skin said. He did not lift his weapon. "We need to talk."
"No," Damien said, and moved. Not a lunge. A sidestep that put him in the space between their lines of sight, a glitch in how people mapped streets with their eyes. The tournament skin took three beats to adjust and then did the wrong thing, ducking to his left, and by the time he corrected, Damien had gone past and down the stairs, his boots slapping stone.
They followed but not fast enough. He took the short tunnel under the silk market, breathing the ghost of old dyes. The tunnel had a grate in its floor where runoff collected; on eclipse nights the runoff glowed faintly red, not because the devs wanted it to but because the bloodline script did. He dropped through the grate and hit a ledge two meters down, rolled, and found himself in a crawl under the street that wasn't on any map.
The timer said 05:39.
—Bind: Claim shadeglass from a place that forgot its sound.
A foundry that could no longer hear itself—that had no bell, no hammer, nothing to make a note. The lower bellfoundry had been sealed after a physics exploit let players throw anvils across arenas for damage. The devs had deleted the hammers and removed the sound triggers. A place that forgot its sound.
He crawled until the stone opened into a room like a throat. Brick arched over a pit. In the pit, slag sat like cooled lava. A thin line of red ran through it, not light but heat that had refused to admit it had died. Above the pit hung a bell shape without a bell, the frame left and the body gone. It would have rung low and kind if it were here. It was not here.
Shadeglass grew where heat met silence. The red line had made a bud at the pit's lip, a flower of translucent black the size of his thumb. As he reached for it, the chat box ticked once.
Two on your tail. —S.
He plucked the shadeglass bud. It was colder than he expected. The crescent in his palm warmed in answer. The bud split with a soft, crystalline sigh and became a shard with a point and a flat back like it wanted to lie against skin.
—Bind accepted.
—Breathe: Survive under the weight of the bell.
—Duration: 00:90.
The room shifted. Not a visual shift. A pressure. As if air had become a thin skin of stone stretched over him. He had ninety seconds to stand under a bell that didn't exist and not stagger.
Footsteps scraped in the crawl behind him. The tournament skin came through first, careful enough not to slide into the pit. He straightened and saw Damien through the arch.
"Orders came down," he said without preamble. His voice tried for regret and found habit instead. "You're to be put to temple. We don't have to—"
The second scout barked a laugh. "'We don't have to'? He sold you all out, kid. He always sells. That's why you're poor."
Damien breathed. The pressure increased. The room wanted knees. He didn't give them.
"You can summon," the tournament skin said to his partner. "We'll pin him."
They weren't wrong. Under a bell, a body could not be quick the usual way. The pressure pressed every motion toward stillness. He did not need to be quick. He needed them to move wrong.
He lifted the shadeglass shard in his right hand and, with the left, tugged the rope that wasn't there.
The bell frame hummed.
Not possible. It was a frame without a bell and a rope without a rope. But the Blood Eclipse had written a line: Survive under the weight of the bell. If there was a weight, there was a bell. The hum went into the stone and came back as a taste. The tournament skin's jaw worked. His partner's shoulders bunched the way a man's shoulders bunch when he can't hear himself think.
"Stop," the tournament skin said, too late.
The partner leaped, exactly what the pressure wanted him to do: commit to a single path. Damien stepped half a pace, not back, not sideways—off-time, the way a drummer might land a stroke between beats to change a song and make it theirs. The partner hit where Damien had been and skittered the edge of the pit. His glove scraped slag. He grabbed the lip, swore, tried to marshal the UI and found the numbers slippery.
The shard in Damien's hand warmed. The crescent branded itself through the glove again, a slow burn that wanted to become a bond. He put the shard flat to the back of his left wrist and pressed. It sank into skin without breaking it.
—Bind complete.
The pressure went away in a slow exhale. He could move as if the room were nothing more than a room.
The tournament skin had not jumped. He had frozen, good discipline winning over impulse. Now he took his chance and drew, but he drew for stun. White Crown had a style guide. Even their punishments had to look presentable on stream.
Damien didn't draw. He put his palm—left, with the shadeglass bound—out in front of him. The crescent inscribed a curve in the air like fog on winter breath. The stun hit that curve and slid sideways into the pit. Blue light spat. The partner, still clawing at the lip, cursed and flinched as the stun danced along the slag and fizzled.
"You're not bound to him anymore," Damien said to the tournament skin. He was surprised to hear his voice level. "If you stay, that's yours."
The scout's weapon didn't dip. But his chin did, a fraction. A choice-lost tilt. The White Crown crest on his chest looked suddenly heavy.
Then a new set of footsteps came down the crawl—heavier, sure. The kind that learned to sound like they had always been in rooms like this. Selene slid past the scout, touched the arch with two fingers, and came to stand at the tassel of air where the rope was not.
"You're slow," she said.
"You sent the message late," Damien said.
"I sent it at the time you would read it." She looked at the shard glow pulsing in his wrist, then at his eyes. "Breathe is done?"
"Bind is done," he said. "Breathe—"
He didn't get to finish. The frame above them groaned. The sound was a real sound now, not a weight. Dust fell in a sheet. The bell that wasn't there tried to exist. It failed, failed again, and then, with the kind of obstinacy that kept cities standing, decided it had always existed and let itself be heard.
A note rolled through the room. Not loud. Low. It went through bone and page and number, through muscle memory and old shame. The partner at the pit edge went still as if the sting of it had narcotized him. The tournament skin closed his eyes and opened them. Selene smiled, very small, the smile of a woman who had tried very hard not to want a thing and found it anyway.
Damien stood under the note and did not bow.
—Breathe accepted.
—Anchor I complete.
—Scaffold stable.
His UI unclenched. The handwritten script tightened into a single glyph and nested beside the crescent: a bell mark, faint as dust on velvet.
Selene looked up at the frame, at the dust still drifting like soft ash. "He put a kill order on you," she said conversationally, as if commenting on the weather. "He told the sponsors you're unstable."
"He needed the story clean," Damien said.
"He'll expect you to go loud."
"I won't."
She raised a brow. "No?"
"No." He flexed his left hand. The shard's glow dimmed, then settled to a pulse matched to his heart. "I'll go where he isn't looking."
The tournament skin had not moved. He lowered his weapon now, by a degree that would show respect in any footage. "You'll have three minutes before the patrol cycles," he said. "You didn't hear it from me."
"I didn't," Damien said, and meant it.
He climbed out of the foundry room with Selene a step behind. In the crawl, dust powdered their shoulders. She did not ask him for thanks and he did not offer one. When they reached the grate under the silk market, she put her hand against it and it lifted with a soft sigh.
The market was louder now. The Eclipse had wavered and come back stronger, a fresh tide. Vendors had pulled sheets over their stalls to keep stray event sparks from setting wares alight. Children who had never logged out since noon chased glitch lights with hands outstretched. Somewhere in the square, a violinist played against the bells, using silence for percussion.
"Anchor II?" Selene asked.
"Not yet." He watched the crowd warp around the empty space of the White Crown patrol like water around a stone. "There's a fragment I need first."
"From where?"
"A place that remembers every sound," he said. "If shadeglass grows where sound is gone, the next piece grows where sound never ends."
She thought for a beat. "The cracked bell tower at the river."
He nodded. She fell into stride with him without comment. The White Crown patrol swung down a side street, drawn by a flare someone at the fountain had thrown too aggressively. For a moment the square belonged to no one but the eclipse and the people who had happened to be under it.
At the shadow of the tower, the stone steps disappeared into a darkness that owed nothing to weather. He put his palm on the rail, felt the bell-mark in his UI answer, and began to climb.
Behind him, the city breathed. Somewhere, under the foundry, a frame with no bell remembered how to ring. Somewhere else, a spear cast its shadow off a bone pedestal, pretending it did not envy anything.
On the sixth landing, where the crack in the tower let in the moon that should not have been there, a soft chime rolled through his UI like a coin across a table.
—Anchor II located.
—Requirement: Hold the tone no one can hold.
Damien rested his hand against the cold stone. Far below, a laugh rose and broke, as if a stranger had been brave for a moment and then remembered himself. He looked up, where the tower's mouth opened and the night waited with a patience that felt almost kind.
"After you," Selene said.
He took the next step.