Chapter Two: Embers of Rebellion
The Undercity breathed like a wounded beast—slow, labored, snarling between gasps. Pipes shuddered with the pulse of overused power, while lights flickered with a kind of unconscious dread. The people below no longer looked only to the shadows with fear. Now they looked with hope.
And fear of another kind.
Veil stood at the mouth of the gathering chamber beneath the ruins of what had once been the Old Academy of Mages. Centuries ago, this place had thrummed with chants and candlelight, filled with scholars and seers. Now it was a tomb of broken statues and scorched stone, hidden under meters of rubble and systemic denial.
But here, now, it lived again.
Lyra knelt at the edge of the stone dais, tracing sigils across the dusty floor with chalk made from ground crystal bones. Sweat matted her hair to her brow. Her fingers trembled, but not from fear. She was channeling magic in a way few dared—openly, defiantly, with the blood-born boldness of one who knew she was being watched by gods and tyrants alike.
Veil watched her with a stillness that was not human.
"You draw on old lines," he said quietly.
She looked up at him. "You said this place still remembered its name."
"It does," Veil murmured. "Even ash remembers fire."
A murmuring crowd had gathered, a rough ring of Sparks and low-dwellers, those who still dared hope. Not all trusted him. Few dared oppose him. Most simply didn't understand what he was. They feared the red in his eyes, the way his presence dimmed the air, but they clung to him because the surface feared him more.
And because he had struck the Obelisk.
It had only been a single act. A crack across its perfect surface. But it had been enough to stir panic in the towers above and belief in the tunnels below.
A boy stepped forward from the crowd, no older than ten, with soot on his cheeks and a broken lens for a monocle.
"Are you a god?" he asked, voice small.
"No," Veil said. "I am the thing your gods feared when they were still alive."
The boy didn't flinch. "Good."
That made Veil pause.
✦
High Chancellor Varik stared into the holoscreen with dead eyes as footage of the attack replayed for the thirteenth time. Drones falling. A tower's crystal glass shattering in response to raw, unfiltered magic. A figure, cloaked and moving like liquid shadow, unraveling soldiers with a flick of the hand.
"Slow it," Varik commanded.
The footage paused at the frame where Veil's face, obscured in blur, began to turn toward the lens. Even paused, even degraded, his gaze seemed to pierce through the screen. Varik's skin crawled.
A technician wiped his forehead nervously. "He's… not human. We ran biometric scans. No match to any class of recorded Spark. Cold-blooded. No thermal print."
"He's a vampire," Varik muttered.
"A myth."
"Is it a myth if it burns your city to the ground?"
The technician wisely said nothing.
Varik dismissed the image and turned to the room behind him. His generals—six of them—stood around the war table, their uniforms uncreased, their faces sharp with military resolve. Most had never stepped foot below the Divide. One had never seen a Spark before last week.
"He's drawing them together," Varik said, pacing. "They're uniting behind him. The Spark girl, the disappearances, the Obelisk sabotage—it's all him."
General Thorne crossed his arms. "Then we destroy him. We have the Null Guard. Anti-magic drones. Full-spectrum towers. No rogue mage survives more than a day topside."
"He is not a mage," Varik snapped. "He is a relic of a time when your technology would have melted in the face of true power."
The table fell quiet.
"Send an extermination squad," Varik ordered. "Not just to kill him. Burn the tunnels. Salt them. If the old gods have returned, then we must show them we are not afraid."
✦
Back below, Lyra finished the circle.
The runes glowed pale blue at first, then deepened to violet. The ground hummed. The symbols she'd drawn were not just aesthetic—they were conduits, a map of channels through which raw arcana could flow and gather. A ritual older than her bloodline.
"It worked," she whispered.
Veil stepped inside the circle, bare feet silent on stone.
"This place listens," he said. "That means the time is close."
"What happens when it wakes?" she asked.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Then I will no longer be the most dangerous thing they've forgotten."
The words echoed ominously.
Suddenly, a tremor shook the chamber. The air changed—buzzing with static. Veil's head snapped up.
"They've found us."
Crimson warning glyphs blinked along the old stone walls. Magical security—ancient systems reactivated by Lyra's ritual—responded instinctively to danger. Veil smiled slightly. "Even buried magic knows what it must protect."
He turned to Lyra. "You must leave."
"I'm not running."
"You're not. You're delivering a message."
She blinked. "What?"
Veil handed her a small object—an obsidian pendant, veined with red. She recognized the symbol etched into it: the same rune on his ring.
"This," he said, "is the key to the Throne Below."
She stared at him, stunned. "That's just a myth. A story from when the High Houses ruled."
"Everything was a myth," Veil said, stepping toward the growing tremors. "Until I woke up."
✦
The Null Guard arrived like a surgical disease. Black armor, mirrored visors, gauntlets that crackled with anti-magic currents. They moved in formation, descending through old ventilation shafts and disused maintenance tunnels.
They expected resistance. They found Veil.
He stood calmly at the center of the ritual circle, arms at his sides, eyes closed.
The squad leader barked. "You are under arrest under Article 4 of the Surface Sovereign Mandate! Submit for processing or face elimination!"
Veil opened his eyes.
"I do not submit."
They fired.
What happened next would not be shown in any propaganda broadcast.
Bullets slowed in the air, caught mid-flight by a field of force that pulsed from the runes. Veil moved, a blur of shadows and whispers. One by one, they fell—bled dry, or twisted into unconscious agony.
But Veil didn't kill them all. He left three alive. Deliberately.
"Go," he said, eyes glowing red. "Tell them the earth remembers what they tried to bury."
✦
Lyra ran.
Not with fear—but purpose.
The pendant pressed cold against her chest as she slipped through the cracks of the city, moving between train tunnels and freight elevators, past dead zones where magic hummed louder than technology dared. The map Veil had shown her in the dust wasn't a fiction—it had led her true. She arrived at a chamber sealed behind a slab of gold-laced obsidian. A throne-shaped sigil shimmered faintly on its surface.
She held up the pendant.
The stone parted.
Inside was a stairway spiraling down into unlit depths. Beyond that: the Throne Below.
Lyra descended.
✦
The surface burned brighter that night.
Newsfeeds across the Skyborn cities spun tales of a "terrorist insurgent" leading rogue Sparks in coordinated attacks. Whole sectors of the upper towers lost power as the Obelisk's fracture deepened. The energy extracted from the enslaved Sparks could no longer keep up with demand. Citizens grumbled about "security concerns," about "filtration shortages," about "subhuman uprisings."
But a few began to ask real questions.
And in the Undercity, rebellion had a name.
Veil.
✦
He sat alone atop a ruined altar as the sun rose beyond the earth, far above their steel tomb. His skin caught firelight that never reached his bones. He remembered warmth. He remembered love.
But he remembered betrayal most of all.
He remembered a mage named Aven, once his brother by blood-oath, who sold their people for coin and rank. He remembered the High Houses, once bound by sacred vows, turning on their own to secure places in the world's dying machine.
And he remembered the prophecy—half-forgotten, barely a whisper even among vampires—of the Throne Below. The place where the last magic slept, sealed away when the surface turned to ash and oil.
The pendant was in the right hands. The time had come.
✦
Lyra reached the bottom.
A vast cavern opened before her, filled with slumbering runes etched into the stone like veins of fire. At its center: a throne, carved from the fused bones of dragons, wrapped in ivy made of silver thread.
She stepped toward it.
The moment her foot crossed the final circle of protection, the runes ignited, casting the chamber in light that felt older than the stars.
The throne recognized her blood. It pulsed. It breathed.
And then it spoke—not in words, but in memory and song. Visions surged through her mind—Veil leading armies under midnight skies, gods bending to sorcerers, cities carved in starlight, and the fall… oh, the Fall.
She dropped to her knees, weeping from the sheer scale of it.
But when she stood again, she knew her purpose.
She was no longer just a Spark.
She was the Key.
✦
Above, High Chancellor Varik watched as reports rolled in:
Veil not found.
Null Guard compromised.
Obelisk destabilized.
Underground cities uniting.
And worst of all:
Energy feedback from the throne chamber detected.
He turned to his generals.
"He's not trying to destroy us," he said grimly.
"Then what is he doing?"
"He's waking the world."
The last words echoed like a judgment.
Far below, Veil stood at the edge of the Undercity, watching the first tendrils of true dawn crawl down through cracks in the metal and stone. Behind him, thousands gathered. Not soldiers, but believers. Not mages, but heirs.
He spoke quietly, but they heard every word.
"They thought they buried magic."
He turned, eyes afire.
"They forgot that roots grow deeper in the dark."