The heavy oak door of his apartment clicked shut, severing the connection to the high-stakes theater of Prime Minister Eloi Raventhir's armored sedan.
Ogdi Num leaned his back against the wood, exhaling a breath he felt he had been holding since the explosion at the plaza. The silence of his room was absolute, but to his altered senses, it was deafening.
He could hear the Lattice.
It wasn't a sound in the traditional sense; it was a low, tectonic grinding—the groan of a submarine hull pushed beyond its crush depth. The air in his room didn't just sit; it vibrated with the tension of his existence. Every breath he took, every thought he formed, exerted pressure on the invisible geometric web that held the world's physics together.
He walked to the window. The pre-dawn light of Calmarith was grey and sickly, filtering through the smog of the industrial districts like dirty water through a sieve.
"Seventy-three percent," Ogdi whispered.
The number resonated in the forefront of his mind.
Integrity: 73%. Chaos Leak: 27%.
He looked at his hands. To a normal observer, they were the hands of a young student—calloused from writing, slightly trembling from fatigue. But Ogdi saw the truth. Around his fingers, the space distorted slightly, shimmering like heat haze above asphalt.
He was a cracked vessel.
"I wished for power without consequence," he muttered, his finger tracing a condensation line on the cold glass pane. "But the wish didn't remove the law of consequence. It just built a dam. And the dam is leaking."
The Universe balances accounts, Azad's voice drifted through his thoughts. It was quieter now, receding like a tide after the exertion of the "Sovereign Command" used in the car. You manipulate the Lattice without the structural integrity to hold the shape. The 27% you fail to control... that is the tax. And if you don't pay it, the world pays it for you.
Ogdi closed his eyes, the memory hitting him with the force of a physical blow. The three bystanders at the plaza. The bullet he had deflected to save Nala. The trajectory he had altered, only for it to find a new, tragic destination.
A sharp, metallic clink from his desk shattered his reverie.
Ogdi turned.
There, sitting amidst a pile of unread textbooks and scattered sketches, was the rusted object Murik had thrown at him days ago.
The compass.
It was vibrating.
Ogdi approached it cautiously. The air around the object felt unnaturally cold, smelling faintly of wet dog and turpentine. The needle, which had been spinning lazily when he first received it, was now locked in a rigid, trembling seizure.
It pointed Southeast. Not toward the magnetic North. Not toward the university.
It pointed toward the Rot.
"It points toward regret," Murik had said.
"Same thing," Ogdi realized, picking it up.
The metal bit into his palm, freezing cold. A pulse traveled up his arm—a wave of profound, crushing sorrow that wasn't his own. It was a scream trapped in iron.
"He's in trouble."
He shouldn't go. Logic dictated he stay, rest, and plan the "Isolation Field" with Eloi. He had a country to save. He had a King to overthrow. He had a brother to protect.
But a King who ignores the rot in his foundation builds a castle on sand, Ogdi thought.
Murik was a "Broken Dreamer." A man who had failed his trial with less than 2% integrity. If Ogdi wanted to understand the cost of his own 27% failure rate, he needed to study the man who had lost everything.
He grabbed his coat, the fabric settling heavy on his shoulders.
"Azad," Ogdi whispered. "Keep the veil tight. I don't want the Directorate tracking me."
The veil holds, Azad replied, a hint of dark amusement in the tone. But the compass leads to places where the Lattice is thin. Step carefully, Sovereign. The floor there is rotten.
South Farren – The Dregs
The city of Calmarith was shaped like a tiered cake, and South Farren was the layer that had been dropped on the floor.
Here, the grand architecture of the capital decayed into a labyrinth of narrow alleys, tenements held together by spit and prayer, and streets slick with a mixture of rain, oil, and unidentifiable sludge.
Ogdi walked through the fog, the compass guiding him with relentless precision. The mist here tasted of sulfur and unwashed bodies—a physical manifestation of the district's despair.
He saw the symptoms of the kingdom's disease everywhere.
In the shadows of a collapsing awning, haggard men with hollow eyes traded vials of Vesper—a shimmering, violet narcotic that let users dream of a life they would never have.
The nobility called it a nuisance. The King, Ogdi knew from the stolen intelligence, called it "filth."
They don't see people, Ogdi thought, stepping over a puddle that reflected a neon sign flickering with a dying advertisement for the 'Hope Lottery.' They see biomass. Eloi wants to fix the structure. The King wants to burn the biomass to purify the structure. Both are arrogant.
The compass jerked in his hand, pulling him toward a dead-end street known as "Artist's Row."
It was a graveyard of ambition. Decades ago, the government had subsidized housing here for creatives, hoping to spark a cultural renaissance. Now, the buildings were husks, their windows boarded up like blinded eyes.
But it wasn't just the physical decay that choked Ogdi; it was the atmosphere.
The air here was thick with a specific, suffocating weight. It tasted of ash and unfinished sentences. It was the feeling of waking up at 3:00 AM realizing you are ten years behind on your dreams and too tired to catch up. It was the psychic residue of thousands of "almosts" and "what ifs" that had curdled into resignation.
The pressure in the air spiked.
It wasn't the clean, geometric pressure of Ogdi's power. This was chaotic. Messy. It felt like a migraine given form.
The Lattice here felt twisted, knotted into ugly, jagged loops.
At the end of the alley, sitting on an overturned crate in front of a wall covered in frantic, maddening charcoal sketches, was Murik.
The old man looked worse than before. His coat was torn, revealing skin that seemed to be turning into parchment. He was shivering, clutching a bottle of cheap spirits, muttering to the wall.
But it was the wall that made Ogdi stop.
The sketches were moving.
They weren't merely animated; they were trying to peel themselves off the brick. Grotesque, half-formed dragons made of soot and shadow clawed at the 2D surface, snapping their jaws silently at Murik's back. They were pathetic, starving things—born not of majesty, but of misery.
"Stay back!" Murik screamed, swinging the bottle at the wall. Glass shattered, amber liquid spraying the artwork. "I didn't draw you! I erased you! Stay dead!"
The ink on the wall hissed as the alcohol hit it. One of the dragons lunged, its shadowy claw extending three inches into the 3D world, slashing the air near Murik's neck.
Ogdi stepped forward. The air crackled with the static of his presence.
"Mr. Venn."
Murik spun around. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and filled with a terror so raw it hurt to look at.
"You!" Murik gasped, backing away until he hit the animated wall. The shadow-dragons recoiled slightly at Ogdi's presence, sensing a higher predator in the ecosystem. "Go away! You... you shine too bright! You'll wake Her!"
"Wake who?" Ogdi asked, keeping his voice steady. He glanced at the wall. The Lattice around the graffiti felt shredded. Murik wasn't just hallucinating; he was unconsciously projecting his trauma into reality, leaking his inner nightmare into the physical world.
"The Mother of Mistakes!" Murik grabbed his head, his fingers digging into his scalp. "The compass... why do you have it? Throw it away! It's a curse!"
"It led me here," Ogdi said, taking a step closer. The pressure wave from Murik's uncontrolled power washed over him—a chaotic mix of grief and creative potential gone rancid.
"My integrity is 73%," Ogdi said, the words cutting through Murik's rambling. "I leak chaos. You... your integrity was less than 2%. You don't leak, Murik. You drown."
Murik stared at him, a sudden clarity piercing his madness. "73? You... you arrogant child. You think 27% is manageable? Do you know what 1% of a nightmare looks like when it breathes?"
A shadow-dragon on the wall suddenly solidified. It tore free from the brick with a sound like tearing canvas. It was the size of a large dog, made of jagged lines and malice. It didn't have eyes, only empty sockets that poured smoke.
It screeched—a sound that wasn't audio, but a psychic spike driving into Ogdi's frontal lobe.
It lunged at Murik.
Protect.
Ogdi didn't speak the wish. He didn't have time. He simply willed the space between the dragon and Murik to expand.
The distance stretched. The dragon leaped, but the two meters between them became twenty meters in a heartbeat. It landed on the wet pavement, skidding on claws that shouldn't exist.
"I am not here to hurt you," Ogdi announced. "I am here to learn how to stop the bleeding."
He raised his hand toward the shadow-creature.
"Unmake."
The command was absolute.
There was no flash of light. No sound. The Lattice simply obeyed. The shadow creature didn't die; it was deleted. It unraveled into harmless charcoal dust, drifting to the ground like black snow.
Ogdi waited for the impact. He waited for the dizziness, the nosebleed, the cost.
But there was nothing.
He felt a sudden, sickening lurch in his gut—not of pain, but of a debt being transferred. It was the distinct sensation of walking out of a restaurant without paying. The bill hadn't vanished; it had just been mailed to someone else.
Where did the cost go? he wondered, a cold sweat breaking on his neck.
Elsewhere, the Lattice seemed to whisper. The invoice has been forwarded.
He pushed the thought aside. That was a problem for another day.
Murik watched, his mouth agape. "You... you commanded the rendering. You didn't ask."
"No," Ogdi said. He walked over to the old man and offered a hand. "I don't ask anymore."
Murik looked at the hand. He hesitated. Then, he looked at the wall, where dozens more creatures were writhing, waiting for Ogdi's focus to slip.
"You can't fix this," Murik whispered, defeat heavy in his voice. "This isn't magic, boy. It's memory. You can't unmake memory."
"I can't unmake it," Ogdi agreed. "But I can reframe it."
He grabbed Murik's hand.
The moment their skin touched, the world lurched violently.
It wasn't a handshake; it was a collision of realities. It felt as though the ground had opened up and swallowed Ogdi whole.
It wasn't Ogdi pulling Murik up. It was Murik's gravity pulling Ogdi in.
Stay sharp, Azad's voice flashed, sharp and urgent, cutting through the vertigo. You are entering a destabilized Mind Palace. The Lattice laws here are subjective. If you die in his memory, your brain will cease function in reality.
"I know," Ogdi thought, gritting his teeth against the nausea. "But if I don't understand the failure, I can't survive the success."
The alleyway dissolved. The smell of wet trash was replaced by the acrid scent of burning paper and dried lavender. The grey sky swirled into a vortex of ink.
Ogdi stood in a field of white static.
Before him stood a house. It was a beautiful, idyllic cottage, the kind a child would draw with bright crayons.
But it was on fire. And the fire was green.
"Welcome to the regret," Ogdi whispered to himself.
He walked toward the burning house.
Inside the Memory
The heat was phantom, but the pain was real. As Ogdi stepped onto the porch of the burning memory-house, he felt the searing heat of Murik's guilt radiating from the walls like a physical fever.
Why didn't I stop drawing? Why did I think I could play God?
The thoughts weren't Ogdi's. They were the ambient narration of this space—the loop Murik had been trapped in for forty years.
Ogdi reached for the front door. It was locked.
He twisted the handle. It wouldn't budge.
"Open," Ogdi commanded.
Nothing.
He frowned. He focused his will, applying the Sovereign Word. "I wish for this door to open."
The door rattled, the wood groaning, but the lock held fast.
Suddenly, a sharp pain spiked behind Ogdi's eyes, and a small cut appeared on his cheek, weeping a single drop of blood.
Ogdi touched the blood, staring at it in confusion. The door had bitten him.
Exchange, a voice whispered from the burning timbers. A closed environment requires you to be a part of it.
Ogdi paused. In the real world, he drew energy from the Lattice, and the "leak" went into the environment. But here? This was Murik's mind. It was a sealed loop. There was no Lattice to draw from.
If he wanted to change something here, he couldn't steal the energy. He had to provide it.
"I have to pay the toll," Ogdi realized.
He placed his palm flat against the burning wood of the door. He didn't command. He offered.
"Take my vitality," he whispered. "In exchange for entry."
He felt a sudden, violent drain—a wave of exhaustion washing over him as if he had run a mile in seconds. His knees buckled slightly.
Click.
The lock disengaged.
"So this is how I fix the sum of 27%," Ogdi murmured, a cold realization settling in his gut as he pushed the door open.
If he wanted to reshape reality without the chaotic side effects—without the random deaths, without the "leaks"—he couldn't just wish the cost away. He had to internalize it.
He had to take the damage himself.
"Equivalent Exchange," he whispered. "To save the bystander, I must take the bullet."
It was a grim calculus. But for the first time since the explosion, he saw a path to control. It wasn't about avoiding the consequences; it was about choosing where they landed.
He stepped into the burning house.
Inside, the physics were broken. Furniture floated on the ceiling. The hallway stretched infinitely long, twisting like a kaleidoscope.
And at the end of the hall, a young boy—Murik, fifty years ago—sat on the floor, weeping.
Standing over the boy was a woman. Or rather, the absence of a woman. She was a silhouette cut out of reality, a jagged hole in the world where a mother used to be.
And coiled around her, tightening its grip, was a Dragon made of pure, unadulterated Imagination.
The Dragon turned its head. It didn't look at the boy.
It looked at Ogdi.
You do not belong in this story, the Dragon hissed. Its voice was the sound of a pencil snapping.
"I'm editing the draft," Ogdi replied, his voice hardening into the tone of the Sovereign.
He stepped forward. The floorboards screamed beneath his boots.
This was going to be a long night.