He had no name.Not one that mattered.
The people of the undercity called him things meant to hurt—Stray, Ashskin, Ghostborn. Words spat like poison when he passed. Others pretended not to see him, as if he were already dead.
But he endured.
Because at night, when the city's clamor faded and shadows grew long, he dreamed of gods.
The world he woke to was gray and hollow.
Cracked towers reached desperately into a sky choked with smoke and static. Rusted skywalks hung broken and empty, their railings jagged teeth against the dull horizon. Cities stitched together by scavenged code, discarded relics, and hollow faith.
The sun, when it showed at all, struggled weakly through a haze of soot and dying light.
He slept beneath the broken shell of an ancient observatory. No roof. A single crumbling wall barely holding back the cold. The stars above had long since been swallowed by the gray veil.
Still, he looked for them.
Because when he slept, they came.
In dreams, he was not small. Not lost in the rubble or forgotten alleys.
He stood beneath towering spires that sang with a sound older than time.
He knelt before a woman encased in crystal light—her eyes full of both sorrow and defiance.
He screamed as burning universes crumbled into dust.
And always—always—he saw the man.
The one with a single eye.
Wrapped in robes of shadow.
Walking through fire without sound.
Watching him.
He woke breathless.
Sometimes trembling.
Sometimes crying.
Each morning, the dreams bled into his waking mind like veins of gold running through broken stone—bright, impossible, and fragile.
No matter how far he wandered, no matter how deep he sank into the rusted arteries of the city, he could not shake the feeling:
He did not belong here.
And worse—
He wasn't meant to stay.
The whispers began during the storm season.
Strangers spoke his name before he spoke it himself.
Birds fell silent when he passed.
The old data-scribes averted their eyes.
Some said he walked with shadows that breathed.
Others said his blood burned with a strange, blue fire.
He tried to ignore it.
Until the night the wind itself spoke.
The storm tore through the city like a wound carved open by lightning.
Towers groaned as if in pain. The skies cracked, peeling back like torn paper.
Lightning raked the skyline in jagged sheets of violet flame.
He huddled beneath the collapsed dome of the observatory, watching the world bleed silver light.
And then, in the space between thunder—
He heard it.
Not a voice.
Not a sound.
A memory.
"Caelum."
It did not echo through the storm.
It arrived—clear, sudden, unavoidable.
And something inside him fractured.
He turned—and the dream stood in the doorway.
Tall. Silent. Robed in void.
One eye missing. The other a storm without mercy.
The boy did not scream.
He recognized him.
"You've been dreaming of me," the man said.
His voice was quiet. Not cold. Just tired.
The boy nodded.
He didn't ask who the man was.
Because he already knew.
The man knelt.
Closer now, his presence pressing down like gravity.
"Your name is Rael."
"And the time for silence is over."
Rael's breath caught.
The air around him seemed to thicken, as if the broken city itself held its breath.
He wanted to speak, to ask why—why now, why him—but the words caught in his throat.
The man's gaze softened, but it held weight, like the last anchor in a storm.
"You carry a legacy older than you know," he said. "Blood that runs deeper than the rust and dust. You've been waiting—for this. For me."
Rael's hands clenched the cracked stone beneath him.
The sky flickered. Thunder rumbled low, shaking loose forgotten echoes.
"I'm no one," Rael whispered.
"You are the last hope."
The words hung between them.
Heavy.
Impossible.
Yet undeniable.
The man rose, his robes swirling like shadow and flame.
"Rise, Rael. The world is waking. The silence is breaking."
For the first time, Rael felt a spark inside him—a flicker of something more than survival.
He stood.
And with the storm raging above, he stepped forward into the night.
Rael swallowed the silence that followed.
The weight of the night pressed in, filled with unsaid truths.
The cliff's edge crumbled beneath their feet.
And somewhere beyond the horizon, the first breath of a new beginning stirred.
Rael stood in the storm's fading light, the weight of Caelum's words pressing deep into his bones.
The city around them groaned, fractured and forgotten, but a spark had been lit within him.
He was no longer just a ghost in the undercity.
He was a student.
And the lessons had only just begun.