The air atop the Vane Estate screamed. At this altitude, the winds off the ocean were a physical weight, cold and jagged as broken glass. I stood on the very edge of the obsidian parapet, my bare feet unfeeling against the freezing stone. My hair, once a symbol of my vanity, was a wild, tangled mess, whipping across my face like silk lashes.
I looked down at the sprawling darkness of the grounds below. The lights of the city in the distance looked like fallen stars, indifferent and unreachable.
I felt hollow. It was a specific, clinical kind of emptiness—the kind that followed a total systemic collapse. The "Doctor" was dead. The "Architect" was a shell. And the "Sovereign"... she was a monster I didn't want to meet in the dark. Blood, power, the endless, suffocating cycle of desire and submission—I was drowning in it. I was a battery, a cup, a prize to be fought over by men who had forgotten what it meant to be human centuries ago.
