The rain had been falling for three days straight, turning the cobblestone streets of Lower Ashmark into rivers of mud and despair. Dust pressed himself deeper into the narrow alleyway between the baker's shop and the old clockmaker's store, his thin shoulders shaking as much from hunger as from the cold.
Fifteen years old, and he already felt ancient.
His stomach cramped—a familiar companion that had been with him since morning. The last meal he'd managed was yesterday: half a stale roll that Mrs. Henderson had thrown out, which he'd shared with the mangy cat that sometimes followed him around. The cat had gotten the better half.
Dust pulled his knees to his chest, trying to make himself smaller, invisible. The patched cloak he wore—stolen from a merchant's cart two winters ago—was more holes than fabric now, but it was all he had. His dark hair hung in wet strands across his face, and his green eyes, too large for his gaunt features, watched the world pass by with the wariness of someone who had learned early that hope was a luxury he couldn't afford.
Lower Ashmark wasn't the kind of place where dreams came true. It was where they came to die.
The city guards had already made their evening rounds, chasing away the "undesirables" from the main streets. Dust had learned their patterns by now—where to hide, when to run, how to become nothing more than a shadow slipping between the cracks of a world that had no place for him.
He'd been Dust for as long as he could remember. Not because it was his real name—he doubted anyone alive knew that—but because that's what the woman at the orphanage had called him when she found him on the steps fifteen years ago. "Nothing but dust," she'd muttered, and the name had stuck like everything else unwanted in his life.
A crash of thunder rolled across the sky, and Dust flinched. Storm season was the worst. No one hired street kids during storms. No odd jobs, no coin, no food. Just rain and cold and the gnawing certainty that tomorrow would be exactly like today.
But as lightning illuminated the alley for a brief, brilliant moment, something flickered in Dust's chest. Not hope—he'd learned better than that—but something quieter. A stubborn refusal to simply fade away like his name suggested.
He was tired of being nothing.
He was tired of being hungry.
He was tired of being invisible.
The cathedral bells chimed midnight somewhere in the distance, their bronze voices muffled by the rain. Another day ending, another beginning in a few hours. Dust closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be someone else—someone with a real name, a warm bed, a future that stretched beyond the next meal.
He didn't know that in exactly ten chapters, his life would change forever.
He didn't know that a system beyond his wildest imagination was already stirring, waiting.
He only knew that he was cold, hungry, and desperately, fiercely determined to survive another night.
The rain continued to fall, washing the city clean while leaving its people exactly as they were.
But change was coming, whether Dust believed in it or not.