Story written by: Tauphit
Reviewed by: Gavinkreads
Chapter 1 — "Ash Beneath Neon Skies"
The rain was a whisper against the metal streets of Veyla Prime.
It fell in threads of blue light, harmless to the touch, tasting faintly of static. Far above, glass spires reached toward a sun that no longer rose or set, its warmth replaced by the constant glow of synthetic dawn.
Sprinkles of the Smoke walked among them like a ghost learning to breathe again.
He wore scavenged clothes — the coat of a miner, patched with polymer mesh, its seams humming faintly with current. Beneath it, his flesh still carried the pallor of ages past; his veins shimmered with faint wisps of gray, as if smoke pulsed beneath his skin instead of blood.
No one noticed him.
In this world, no one ever did.
People here walked in silence, their eyes fixed on glass displays that hovered in midair, voices thin and digital. Their cities thrived on Synthlight, the shimmering energy that powered everything from skyships to artificial hearts. And everywhere, carved into walls and circuits, the same symbol repeated — a spiral of light devouring its own tail.
He recognized it instantly.
He had written that symbol himself — long before these towers ever touched the clouds.
> So, he thought, his lips curling faintly, you learned to feed on the dead and called it progress.
---
He moved through a marketplace — a place that smelled of metal and memory.
Merchants sold fragments of what they called "mana relics," shards of crystal encased in containment glass. Each pulsed faintly with color, the last echoes of true magic, bled dry to power simple trinkets.
He stopped at a stall. A child held a shard up to him — no older than twelve, her eyes bright.
"Hey, old man," she said, voice playful. "You like it? Purest grade, they say it used to belong to a real sorcerer."
Sprinkles studied the shard. Inside it, something flickered — a face, almost human, screaming without sound.
He closed his eyes. For the briefest second, the air around him went still.
"Who told you it was pure?" he asked softly.
"My teacher," she said. "At the Academy. They use these for studies — old mana echoes, they call them. But this one's special. It's warm."
He handed it back with a faint smile. "Keep it that way," he murmured. "Once it cools, it'll remember what it was."
She laughed, not understanding, and skipped away.
---
That night, he stood atop a bridge overlooking the city.
Drones passed in streams of light below, their hum blending with distant thunder from the upper levels. Far to the west, he could see the floating spire of the Aetherion Academy, its white towers wrapped in arcs of electric mist.
It pulsed faintly with a rhythm he knew too well — the heartbeat of bound souls.
Sprinkles leaned against the railing, watching the mist swirl around his hand. "Still they build upon bones," he whispered. "Still they fear silence."
He was not yet ready to reveal himself.
But he needed knowledge — to understand this world, to walk its halls unnoticed.
A name came to mind: Ren Ashvale.
A forgotten scholar who had vanished decades ago during an excavation near the Wastes. His record — easily stolen, easily assumed.
By dawn, Sprinkles had become him.
---
Two weeks later, the Aetherion Academy accepted their new visiting lecturer — Professor Ren Ashvale, a man of calm intellect and unsettling composure.
He arrived at the Academy's gates under the same synthetic sunrise that never dimmed. Students whispered as he passed — not out of fame, but because the air around him felt colder, as though he carried a storm within his breath.
The head researcher, Dr. Elira Sorn, greeted him in the atrium. She was sharp-eyed, with hair like spun copper and a mind trained to dissect the impossible.
"Professor Ashvale," she said. "Your credentials are... unique. We've never had a historian of the archaic arts who speaks fluent Lethan glyph."
Sprinkles inclined his head, voice even. "Some languages never die. They only wait to be heard again."
She paused, studying him. Something in his tone unsettled her — not arrogance, but a kind of mournful certainty.
"Then perhaps you'll help us translate the tomb fragments from the excavation," she said. "We found sigils there no one's been able to interpret."
His lips curved faintly. "Show me."
As she led him down the glass corridors, his shadow trailed long behind him — bending, shifting, whispering faintly as it passed beneath the lights.
And somewhere deep in the Academy, where the air grew cold and the hum of machines turned almost human, something ancient stirred — as if the dead were listening, waiting for the one who had once commanded them to speak again.