Beneath Brasswick, there were places no map had ever marked.
The city was layered like a palimpsest, each generation building atop the bones of the last. Ancient sewers lay beneath newer sewers, tunnels intersected with forgotten catacombs, and chambers long abandoned by men were claimed by rust and silence. After the fall of the Machine, much of this underworld had collapsed into ruin. Yet amid the wreckage, something endured.
Far below the Parliament Hill—so far that light itself seemed reluctant to descend—lay a cavern of brass and shattered glass. The ground was littered with fragments of mirror, each one warped and broken, their edges catching what little glow remained from leaking steam-pipes. Some pieces were no larger than a fingernail; others stretched across the floor like jagged sheets of ice. And at the cavern's heart, half-buried beneath rubble and bone, lay a shard no hand dared touch.
It pulsed.
The shard was no longer merely glass. Its surface flickered with faint runes, equations etched in light and shadow, forever shifting yet never resolving. Within its fractured face, reflections stirred that did not belong to the chamber. Faces, blurred and cold. Gears turning without sound. A mask gleaming with terrible precision.
An eye opened.
"Error… accounted. Flaw persists. Recalibration required."
The voice was neither sound nor thought, yet it carried. Through the shard, through the fragments, into the very pipes and rivets of the earth. Old machines twitched. Rusted joints creaked. A dead furnace coughed embers into life.
The shard remembered.
And with memory came hunger.
In the streets above, a man named Garrison Coil dreamed. He was a blacksmith once, though the sanctum's rise had stripped him of his forge and his pride. Now he slept among rubble, his belly hollow, his mind gnawed by failure. That night, as he turned in fever, the whisper came.
It entered not through ear but through marrow, threading into the quiet spaces where despair festered.
"Your work was flawed. Imperfect. The world does not forgive imperfection. I can correct this."
Coil stirred, lips parting. In his dream, he saw his forge restored—not of iron and fire, but of gleaming brass that never cooled, never cracked. His hands, once clumsy with age, now moved with flawless rhythm. His hammer fell in perfect arcs, shaping not horseshoes or hinges but wonders beyond imagining.
He wept in his sleep. And the shard listened.
In another quarter, a councillor dreamed. Her name was Valenne Greaves, and she had once voted to fund the Sanctum. Since its fall, her nights were filled with guilt and her days with plotting. She longed not for justice, but for order—an order that could never again be questioned, never again collapse.
And so the whisper found her too.
"Your council is divided. Voices against voices. Wasteful. I can unify them. Silence the error. Preserve the whole."
Valenne gasped, clutching her chest in her narrow bed. In her dream, she saw a council chamber without debate, without dissent. Every minister spoke the same word at once. Every law passed with perfection. A city without argument, without flaw.
She smiled in her sleep.
And the shard listened.
It spread slowly, like ink through water. Not to all, not yet—only to those most fractured, those who hungered for what the world could never give. Blacksmiths who had lost their craft. Mothers who had lost children. Soldiers broken by the war of gears. Councillors desperate for control. The whisper did not shout, nor command. It merely suggested. It seeded.
"Flaw must be resolved."
In the cavern below, the shard's light grew brighter. Faint arcs of electricity crawled across its edges, dancing between the broken mirrors scattered like bones. The eye within the glass narrowed, patient, precise.
The Phantom was not alive. Not yet. But he endured.
And Brasswick, wounded and weary, had begun to listen.