The city of Kareth woke each morning not to brilliant sunlight, but to the diffused glow that bled through a curtain of perpetual clouds. The sounds of nature had long been replaced by the hissing of pistons and the groaning of gears. Gray smog rolled through the streets like spilled ink, seeping into every alley.
Beneath the drone of factories and the rhythmic pulse of the steam-lines, the people of Kareth stirred awake engineers, vendors, dreamers, and those history had long since forgotten.
Apollo walked along the cobbled streets; his long coat draped loosely over his shoulders. The fabric was faded black, trimmed with brass clasps dulled by age. His silver hair hung messily, untamed, yet somehow his disheveled look never felt out of place among the passing crowd. In this era, anonymity was easy as everyone was too busy surviving to notice a stranger who never aged.
He wandered aimlessly through the morning haze until the sound of clinking metal drew his attention down a narrow lane. Steam curled from pipes stacked like organ tubes. There, half-hidden in the mist, sat a girl.
She was pressed against a rust-stained wall, knees tucked to her chest, swallowed by an oversized coat that might once have been white. Her soot-colored hair was a tangled mess, catching faint traces of light like steel threads. In her hands, she turned a broken gear, spinning it again and again as if it might suddenly work.
When she noticed him watching, she lifted her chin.
"What?" Her voice was dry yet sharp. "Never seen a helpless girl before."
Apollo stopped a few paces away staring into her eyes, they were dull gray like unpolished steel which lacked the shine that belonged to youth. Something in them mirrored a fatigue he knew all too well.
He didn't speak, but his quiet gaze seemed to unnerve her. She raised the bent cog slightly."They don't work anymore," she muttered. "Probably broken… just like me." The last words slipped out softer, almost swallowed by the fog.
A ripple passed through him, something faint and unexpected, as if something old had stirred awake, like an echo from another life. A memory of laughter by a river, a small hand tossing stones into rippling water the owners face a distant memory, blurred by centuries, but the warmth remained.
"What's your name?" he asked, the question emerging before he knew why.
She blinked, surprised. "...Jude. And yours, mister?"
"Apollo."
She tilted her head, eyeing him. "You don't look like you belong here your coat's too clean, boots too neat. You lost your way from the upper district?"
He shook his head. "I've been wandering for a while."
"Wandering's for poets and thieves" she said flatly, smirking. "And you look like neither."
At that he smiled; the faintest, strangest thing, pulling at muscles he'd nearly forgotten how to use. It startled even him, this small sign of life. For the first time in years, the corners of his mouth remembered warmth.
Jude frowned, uncertain whether to be annoyed or curious about the stranger interrupting her solitude.
A silence settled over broken only by the distant rhythm of engines and the slow hiss of pipes overhead. Apollo crouched, his gaze falling to the broken gear in her hand. Its teeth were uneven, eroded, yet still gleamed where her thumb had polished the brass.
It was battered and broken yet hid that shining gleam underneath just like her.
He reached into his coat or at least pretended to. His fingers flickered with a faint pulse of aether, invisible to all but those attuned to it, as a small cog appeared in his palm, unbroken and shiny, it's finish seemingly made from those new precision aether tools but strangely having signs of being handcrafted.
"Here," he said simply, holding it out.
Her eyes narrowed. "Charity?"
He didn't reply just nodded once.
The sharpness in her expression faltered. She took it slowly, fingers brushing against the warmth of his hand. "You're weird," she muttered. "People don't just hand things out around here."
"I've been told that before."
"By who?"
He hesitated. "People I used to know."
She murmured the words back to herself — used to. For the first time, her cynicism cracked just slightly. She studied him in silence, searching his face for irony or mockery, but found neither.
"You're not from around here, are you?" she asked at last.
Apollo looked up. The fog had thinned, turning the morning into a pale gold haze. "I've come from far away," he said softly. "And now, I think… I'll stay for a while."
"Why?" she asked.
He met her eyes the girl with the broken gear, the quiet defiance in a world that didn't care, all of it tugged at something buried deep within him something that he failed to understand. For the briefest heartbeat, he felt curiosity again, and recognition, a whisper of humanity struggling to wake beneath centuries of silence.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Maybe because you remind me of someone… someone I've long forgotten."
Jude blinked, startled it was the longest thing he'd said to her and it carried a weight she couldn't understand something old, ancient even but laden with loneliness.
"Good for you, mister," she muttered, but her voice had lost some of its bite. "But I've got nothing to do with whoever that was. Or with you. So can you please leave me alone now?"
Apollo didn't move he just stood there quietly observing her silently, the city's noise spilling around them. Far off, a bell tower rang, its metallic tone cutting through the fog, the workers of Kareth were rising, their silhouettes blurring into the smoke.
Jude slipped the new cog into her pocket, pulling her coat tighter as if suddenly aware of the chill. When she looked up again, he was still there seemingly unmoving, half-shrouded in steam and despite her own words earlier, she didn't quite want him to go.
That contradiction bit at her, unfamiliar and unwanted. All her life she had walled people off, knowing kindness often came with a cost. Yet something about him, his stillness, his strange gentleness just felt different and it seemed to draw her in.
"Suit yourself" she muttered, half to herself. She turned away, pretending to focus on her broken gear again but as the minutes stretched and the fog thickened. Her unease grew, her mind gnawing at her contradictory feelings and when she finally glanced up, he was gone.
Only the faint warmth of the polished cog in her pocket reminded her that he had ever stood there.
She sat in silence, staring down the empty alley. "Weird guy," she murmured but the words lacked conviction. The sound of engines filled the air again, the world moving on as if nothing had happened. Yet somewhere deep inside, beneath the layers of cynicism and soot, a spark had flickered.