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Keeper's Adage:
"A bird may envy the cloud, but it is the wind that decides where both shall drift. To be offered the sky and given the abyss is the oldest cruelty."
–From the Canticles of the Ground-Bound, Keepers of Stories Archive
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The wall of his cell sighed open.
No warning. One moment, Lugal was a statue in his hexagonal jar, the sterile hum of the prison-spire vibrating in his teeth. The next, the seamless membrane simply peeled apart.
Two Wielders stood framed in the opening. Their presence was not announced by sound, but by a pressure change, a sudden focus in the air that made the light itself seem to bend toward them. Their armor was of a finer make than the Leviathan guards—interlocking plates of mother-of-pearl that shimmered with a faint internal luminescence, etched with glyphs that seemed to swim and reform as he looked at them. Their faceless helms reflected Lugal's own impassive face back at him, distorted and small.
A silent command pressed against his mind: Move.
He uncoiled, every muscle tense. His eyes flicked to the adjacent cell, a reflex. The girl—was watching, her own fear momentarily eclipsed by a sharp, assessing curiosity. He saw the look in her gaze, the Sinks-born instinct to gauge a threat. He offered her nothing in return, his face a mask of cold stone. Her story was not his. Her fate was not his concern. He was already a ghost to her.
He stepped out. The Wielders fell in behind him, a silent, deadly escort.
They did not take him to a torture chamber. They led him back into the throat of the living city. The transit-pod this time was a tear-drop of flawless, liquid crystal. It moved not through tunnels, but by being absorbed and re-emitted by the city's very substance, passing through vast, open atriums.
And then, the walls vanished.
The pod emerged into the open sky, and Lugal's breath—the carefully controlled breath of a Sunken Forum agent—hitched in his throat.
Aeridor.
It was a symphony in stone, cloud, and light, playing on an infinite stage. The city was not built upon the sky; it was woven into it. Its foundation was a tectonic plate of solidified storm-cloud, shot through with veins of captured lightning that pulsed like a sleeping leviathan's circulatory system. The very air was different—thinner, sharper, and humming with the latent energy of the realm. This was the source of their flight, he realized. It wasn't just an ability; it was a symbiosis with an energized atmosphere that rejected the concept of falling.
Towers weren't constructed; they were grown. They spiraled up from the cloud-base like colossal, crystalline trees, their branches forming districts and platforms. Their surfaces were alive with flowing Aeridorian glyphs—not carved, but inhabited by light, swirling in patterns that felt both intelligent and alien. This was the Aeridoric Script, the language of command that shaped the wind and bound the clouds.
And the people… they were the notes of the symphony.
They moved with an innate, breathtaking grace that was nothing like the frantic scrambling of Embermark. Aeridorians flowed. They stepped off pathways into open air and were caught by purposeful currents, gliding on unseen escalators of wind. Their garments, Cloud-silk, seemed to drink the light and amplify it, shifting colour with their mood and velocity. Some were attended by Sky-Mantles—living cloaks of shimmering, gossamer energy that trailed behind them like the wake of a comet.
This was a birthright. An existence so far removed from the soot-choked struggle of the Sinks it made a mockery of his entire life. A wave of pure, undiluted want washed over him, so powerful it was nausea. He wasn't looking at a city; he was looking at a self that had been stolen from him at birth. He saw a young man, no older than himself, laugh as he caught an updraft, his body a perfect instrument of the sky. That should be me, the thought screamed, a raw and silent thing in his mind. Why is that not me? He hated the boy instantly, with a ferocity that burned his throat. He hated him for his ease, for his belonging, for the unthinking certainty with which he inhabited his own skin.
The pod glided silently through this paradise. For a single, treacherous heartbeat, a thought bloomed in Lugal's mind, fragile and devastating: What if…?
What if the Fracture-Class was not a condemnation, but a potential? What if this city of sky-born lords, with its power drawn directly from the air, could sense a different kind of strength? A will hardened in the absolute dark, a mind sharpened on the whetstone of betrayal? The desire was a physical ache, a phantom limb screaming for the sky. He could almost feel the phantom kiss of that high-altitude wind, the dizzying liberation of the abyss beneath his feet, not as a threat, but as a domain. He would trade every scrap of his past, every lesson from the Forum, every memory of the Sinks, to be reborn as one of them. To be anyone but himself.
The pod swept through the Aetherium Bazaar. Here, the economy was of the soul. Stalls floated unsupported, their vendors offering not goods, but Experiential Vials—swirling condensations of a perfect memory: the euphoria of a first flight, the profound silence of a high peak, the focused clarity of a master glyph-wright at work. The air was thick with the scent of Zephyr-Blooms—flowers that grew on sound—and the clean, metallic tang of ozone. This was the true wealth of Aeridor: not coin, but curated sensation.
Lugal's hope, that fragile, stolen thing, grew thorns. It wasn't just a desire to be here; it was a need. To have this. To be part of this majesty. To be worthy of it.
Then, the city itself revealed the machinery behind the magic.
The pod slowed at the city's very edge, at the Chasm Rim Promenade. Here, the beautiful lie fell away.
They hovered at the rim. And beyond it, nothing. It was a balcony over the end of all things. Below was the True Abyss—a roiling, infinite sea of violet-tinged cloud, silent lightning, and absolute nothingness. The sight was a physical blow to the senses, a vertigo that clawed at sanity. This was the void that underpinned their paradise.
And it was from this void that the kingdom's power was hauled.
Massive Sky-Lifts of humming energy, like arteries pumping backwards, rose from the depths. They were coming from the Satellite Drifts—lesser, barren floating islands that orbited Aeridor like captive moons. These were the mining colonies. The Lifts disgorged their cargo: containers of raw, pulsating Akar, the lifeblood of all realms, alongside the spent, hollow-eyed prisoners who had mined it. The new batch—Lugal's batch—was ushered forward for the exchange.
The Sky-born Wielders overseeing the transfer moved with sterile efficiency. Their eyes, when visible behind their helms, held no contempt, no malice. Only a profound, absolute indifference. The Akar was logged, its resonance checked. The people were counted. That was all. They were less than ballast; they were a transient, renewable resource.
The fragile hope in Lugal's chest didn't just shatter; it was annihilated, and the void it left behind was filled with a despair so complete it was a physical weight. The cold truth was a splash of water on the parched soil of his ambition, and nothing grew there now. He was not for the spires. He was for the Drifts. He was not to be a student of this power; he was to be the grist in its mill. The Forum's promise wasn't a lie; it was a fantasy he should have known better than to entertain. He was a fool. A ground-bound fool who had dared to look up.
The descent in the Lift was a burial. The glorious light of the city above was swallowed by the thick, phosphorescent gloom of the mining colony's atmosphere. The air grew heavy, saturated with the smells of crushed rock, static discharge, and the flat, metallic scent of spent Akar. The hum of Aeridor was replaced by the percussive, industrial din of extraction—the shriek of rock-saws, the deep-throated groan of earth-rippers, the constant, pounding thump-thump-thump that was the colony's heartbeat.
The Lift settled into the Underside Dock, a cavernous bay carved into the belly of the floating rock. The scene was a brutalist, functional mockery of the majesty above. Everything was damp, rust-streaked, and utilitarian.
A Warden, his armor scarred and pitted, a data-slate grafted to his forearm, met them. His voice was a rasp amplified by his helm's vox-grille, stripped of all humanity.
"You are nothing," the rasp began, echoing in the cavern, a grotesque parody of his father's curse. "You are weight. You are muscle. You are a resource to be expended. Your function is to extract crystals for the glory of Aeridor. You will work. You will obey. You will not question."
The Warden's red lens swept over them. "Your only value is measured in crystal-dust."
This time, Lugal didn't just hear the words. He absorbed them. He let them mix with the memory of the sky-city, the effortless flight, the Aetherium Bazaar, the utter indifference on the Promenade. The words were true. They were the final, brutal verdict on his life. He was not the bird envying the cloud; he was the stone the bird shat out, falling endlessly toward the abyss it was promised.
The hope was gone. In its place was a cold, hard certainty, as dense and worthless as the rock around him.
He accepted his pickaxe, the handle slick with the sweat of the dead and the desperate. The weight of it was an anchor, tying him to this fate. He was given a number stenciled on his grimy tunic. He was shoved into a line marching toward a freshly blasted tunnel, its maw exhaling the scent of shattered dreams and cold stone.
They had given him a glimpse of heaven only to show him his designated circle in hell. It was the greatest theft imaginable. They hadn't just taken his freedom; they had taken the person he might have been and crushed him to dust before his eyes.
And as his pick bit into the rock for the first time, the shock jolting up his arms.