Clink. Clank. Clink.
The sound of metal striking stone echoed endlessly. Each impact vibrated through the air, bouncing off unseen walls until it became something closer to a chant than noise.
Kael's eyes fluttered open.
For a moment, his mind was blank — weightless, detached, like he'd surfaced from a deep, dreamless sleep. The air was filled with dust and iron, and a pale mist hung low, shrouding the ground in a dull, grey haze.
He blinked.
Shapes moved in the distance — silhouettes of people, dozens of them, hunched over and laboring. Their clothes were little more than torn fabric clinging to skin and bone. Each one swung a crude pickaxe against the jagged crystal formations poking out of the ground — pale shards that glowed faintly from within, pulsing to the rhythm of their toil.
Every so often, a shout rang out. Men in uniform — stiff and unyielding, marked by emblems Kael didn't recognize — stood watch nearby. They carried batons and rifles slung at their sides, crunching their boots over the gravel as they paced between the workers.
Kael stared for a long moment, the world gradually coming into focus. Then he looked down.
The fabric on his own body was the same — coarse, dirt-stained, and torn at the sleeves. Shackles hung loosely around his wrists, connected by a short length of chain.
He was one of them.
He turned, searching for a horizon, a way out — but there was none. Walls rose from all directions, vast and uneven, built of dark stone and metal. They loomed like the ribs of a colossus, enclosing the entire expanse in shadow.
From where he stood, it looked less like a courtyard and more like a prison — one carved into the heart of the world itself.
"...Where am I?" His breath turned faintly white in the cold air.
He then pressed his palm against his chest, as if trying to ground himself — and suddenly, the memories came rushing back.
The blaring alarms. The trembling ground. The sight of the Gateway tearing open beyond the horizon. Then — something vast and bright crashing down from above. A rusted steel of the incinerator's ceiling, or perhaps something far worse, had pierced straight through him, nailing him to the floor like an insect.
His pulse quickened. He yanked at his collar, pulled his ragged shirt aside—
Nothing.
No wound, no scar, not even blood. Just pale skin and faint dust smeared across it.
A chill crept through him. He ran his fingers over the spot again, harder this time, as if willing the pain or mark to return — but there was nothing. Only the silence of his own breathing.
Before he could make sense of it, a sudden kick struck his back.
"Move, scum!"
Kael stumbled forward, causing the impact to knock the air from his lungs. He turned sharply — one of the uniformed officers stood behind him with his rifle slung over his shoulder, and his expression was twisted with irritation.
"Why'd you stop?!" the man barked. "Keep working!"
Kael's mouth opened, but no sound came out. Confusion tangled his thoughts before he could form a word.
Then, another figure stepped between them — an older man, his beard was long and streaked with grey, and his back was stooped.
"Forgive him, sir," the old man said quickly.
"The boy just woke. Probably still half-dazed from the gas leak earlier — the dust makes the air thick down here. He'll continue right away."
The officer squinted, curling his lips slightly in disgust.
"Tch. Then make sure he does."
He spat to the side and turned away, moving on to patrol another section of the yard.
The old man exhaled quietly, lowering his shoulders once the officer was gone. Then he looked back at Kael, his eyes were sharp despite their weariness.
"Don't just stand there, boy," he muttered under his breath.
"Pick up the pickaxe before someone else notices."
Without waiting for a reply, he walked off, joining the others still hammering at the crystals.
Kael stared after him, furrowing his brow.
"Who the hell is he?"
***
The clangor of metal had dulled into a tired rhythm by the time Kael noticed the shift. One by one, the workers around him began to slow their movements — shoulders slumped, tools lowered. A shrill whistle cut through the air. Whatever it signaled, it was enough to make everyone stop.
He hadn't realized how long it'd been — an hour, two, maybe more. Time had lost its meaning somewhere between the ache in his arms and the sting of dust biting at his eyes. For all he knew, the sun outside this place might not have even existed.
Still, he kept moving for a while longer, swinging his pickaxe halfheartedly against the crystal vein in front of him. The last thing he wanted was another boot in the ribs or the kind of "attention" that left bruises.
Between strikes, he stole glances.
From what he could tell, there were at least a dozen officers stationed along the perimeter — men and women in the same dull-grey uniforms with their rifles. They rarely spoke, but their eyes never stopped moving. A single raised baton or shouted order was enough to send the workers scurrying faster.
The work itself followed a crude, almost ritual system. The miners — prisoners, most likely — split into small groups, each assigned a patch of jagged crystal embedded in the ground. They hacked off shards, stuffed them into rusted metal carts, then hauled those carts toward a gated tunnel on the far side of the yard. Beyond it, Kael could see faint, pulsing light — like veins of molten glass weaving through the dark.
And back then, it didn't take long for him to finally realized it.
The fragments they were mining weren't just minerals. The faint hum, the eerie glow, the way the air seemed to thrum around them — he recognized it.
Crystallis.
The same substance found inside Abjections. But why were they mining these things here? How could something born from corruption be harvested from the earth itself?
Even so, Kael found himself pausing to stare at one of the shards he'd managed to pry loose.
The fragment pulsed faintly in his palm — a dim, sullen red, like a dying ember struggling to stay alive beneath ash. The surface shimmered with faint veins of darker hue, threads that seemed to shift and curl as if aware of his gaze.
He knew enough to recognize what it meant.
Every Crystallis carried a resonance — a lingering echo of the Abjection it once belonged to.
When Kael held it close, he could almost feel it — that faint vibration beneath his skin, like the pulse of something ancient and hungry trying to breathe again. It wasn't merely light or sound that emanated from these shards, but... memory.
A kind of imprint, etched deep into the crystal's very structure, whispering fragments of the monster's existence before its death. Some said if one listened long enough, they could hear the screams of the world it once devoured.
And just like their former hosts, these fragments were ranked according to their power. Humanity, ever obsessed with hierarchy, had devised a system to measure it — a framework that became the cornerstone of modern metaphysics: the Cycle.
The Cycle represented the path of ascension — the deepening of resonance between the mortal soul and the Gnosis that slumbered within. Each Cycle brought one closer to what the old texts called Revelation: the moment when the boundary between man and divinity began to blur.
But the Abjections had their own reflection of this truth — a mirror twisted inward. Their strength grew through what people called the Delusion, a descent rather than an ascent. The deeper they fell, the more they shed their sense of self, unraveling into shapes that defied reason and existence itself.
Revelation raised humanity toward understanding.
Delusion dragged monsters toward oblivion.
Yet, in the end, both paths met somewhere beyond the threshold of the known — at the point where will and corruption became indistinguishable.
The shard in Kael's hand burned with the red color of the Third Cycle, what the people named the Tyrant Class for these Abjections. Creatures that had once reduced entire cities to ruin before their own energies burned out.
And yet here he was — holding a piece of one, dug straight from the earth like some common ore.
Something about that fact unsettled him more than he wanted to admit.