"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."
— Ernest Hemingway
Midnight in Erevale isn't quiet.
It pretends to be.
But if you listen closely, you can hear the machinery of survival grinding beneath the city's pulse — generators humming, deals whispering, sins breathing.
The east docks are where the city ends and truth begins.
No cameras here, no pretense of civility. Just fog, rust, and men who barter in shadows.
I walk past warehouses tagged with graffiti — fragments of rebellion and philosophy, splashed across metal.
One wall reads:
"Virtue is a performance. Survival is the truth."
I don't know if Lilith wrote it. But I know she'd agree.
The rain has stopped, yet everything drips — the sea, the lampposts, even the silence.
My reflection trembles on the puddles like it's trying to escape me.
I light a cigarette.
The flame flickers, small but defiant — just like the boy I used to be.
The Boy Who Read to Survive
I wasn't always Aurelius Kael.
Once, I was Kael Ardent — a boy from the west block slums.
My father worked in a refinery, breathing chemicals and calling it "duty."
My mother taught me Latin proverbs she didn't understand, just because she liked the sound of them.
When I was ten, the refinery exploded.
My father didn't come home.
They said it was an "industrial error."
I learned early that's what the powerful call murder when it's profitable.
After that, my mother began fading — not dying, just dissolving.
She'd sit by the window, whispering prayers to gods that never answered.
I stopped praying. I started reading.
Books became my escape, my rebellion, my weapon.
I devoured philosophy, psychology, literature — anything that could explain why good people suffered and liars thrived.
Every word felt like a brick in the armor I was building around my mind.
When the rent collectors came, I quoted Epictetus at them.
When they hit me, I quoted Marcus Aurelius:
"You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
I believed it then.
Now I know — strength isn't found. It's forged.
By sixteen, I had buried both parents — one to fire, one to grief.
I worked for whoever would pay me. Moved crates, fixed circuits, stole data.
Once, I watched a friend get executed for stealing from the wrong man.
That's when I stopped calling anyone "friend."
It wasn't cruelty — it was evolution.
The world was a chessboard, and sentiment was a pawn's delusion.
Every hardship polished me.
Every betrayal clarified me.
Pain became a curriculum.
And I graduated with honors.
Now, walking through these docks, I see ghosts everywhere — echoes of that boy who believed knowledge could save him.
Maybe it did.
Maybe it just turned him into something unrecognizable.
A gust of sea wind hits me — cold, metallic, real.
It smells like the refinery used to smell before it burned.
Funny how the past never dies; it just changes its disguise.
I spot a faint light ahead — flickering behind a warehouse door.
The sound of distant laughter, clinking glass, and jazz from an old gramophone drifts through the cracks.
It feels… out of place, yet magnetic.
I push the door open.
Inside, the world shifts.
The warehouse has been transformed — part bar, part art gallery, part secret society.
Paintings hang from steel beams; candles melt over crates.
People talk in low voices — philosophers, rebels, artists — outcasts who believe beauty can still wage war.
It smells like turpentine and tobacco.
And somewhere among them — she'll be.
Lilith Noir.
But before I see her, I see something else — a mural painted across the far wall.
A boy standing in fire, holding a book.
The title burned away, but one page remains, glowing in ember-red letters:
"Those who suffer early, see clearly."
I freeze.
Because that — that was my mother's handwriting.
Lilith couldn't have known.
No one could have.
And yet, there it is.
My past, staring back at me in paint.
I don't move.
For the first time in years, I feel something raw — not fear, not pain, but recognition.
As if the universe just whispered:
You're exactly where you're meant to be.