A night that couldn't be forgotten.
The first thing Ari remembers is the sound of acid hissing on stone.
That night, the beasts came — glass-back things with pale plates along their spines, eyes like clouded moons. They moved in packs, silent except for the scrape of claws on old stone. Ari could still taste the fear, how it sank into his tongue like bitter smoke.
The glass-back's drool hit the tunnel floor in tiny burning drips — each one a promise of what would happen to him if he stumbled.
He was small — smaller than he'd ever admit now — bones sharp under ragged clothes. His ribs felt cracked from hunger. His throat was dry, but his palms were wet — gripping a broken pipe like it was a sword.
He wasn't alone. Not entirely. Beyond the beast, beyond the pulsing terror, he registered the figures huddled by the rusted shelves. There was Kaela — a girl barely older than him, kneeling amidst the debris. Her filthy hair, matted with dust and fear, fell over her eyes, but her small body was rigid, a desperate, fragile shield for the two tiny forms pressed against her back. Lise and Mira. He could hear their choked sobs, their small fists pressed tight against their eyes, trying to block out the malevolent glow of the beast's unnatural eyes.
"Don't look," Kaela whispered, her voice a thin, ragged thread, repeating the plea like a desperate prayer. "Don't look. Don't look."
But they looked anyway. Their faces, pale and streaked with tears, were turned towards him. Their eyes — too big, too hollow, reflecting the impossible blue of the beast's veins — burned into his back. An unspoken plea, a desperate understanding. A horrific certainty settled in his gut: if he ran, the beast would consume them first. They were already dead, perhaps, if he didn't move.
So, he didn't run. He stood his ground, the cold weight of that truth settling deeper than the dust on his skin. He whispered,
"Please, stop," like the words themselves might somehow penetrate the beast's corrupted mind. The comet's whisper flickered in his blood again, a strange echo of the cosmic impact, and tiny veins under his wrist glowed a faint, trembling silver. He didn't understand it.
He only knew, with a desperate, primal urge, that he wanted it to help.
The beast didn't care. Its inhuman eyes, still fixated on him, held no recognition, no mercy. It crept forward, slow and deliberate now, its claws scraping faint sparks from the ancient stone floor.
He raised the broken pipe, its jagged edge a pitiful defense against the oncoming horror. His breath cracked in the frigid air, sounding as fragile as the floor beneath his bare feet.
The glow under Ari's skin flickered once more, a desperate plea for power, but it was too soft, too weak, like a dying ember. He thought he felt something within him reach, straining for a connection, for something deep under the tunnel's old bones – a vast, hidden reservoir
– but there was nothing there for it to find. Not yet.
When the glass-back lunged, Ari braced for its jaws — and for a heartbeat, he almost wished it would take him first. The comet's whisper, that faint, nascent power, died in his veins, leaving him cold and utterly helpless.
But the dark behind him changed.
A sharp tap — metal striking stone once, then again. A dry voice, like grit in a cracked throat, uttered a single word, too low and alien for Ari to distinguish. The beast's eager hiss of corrosive acid suddenly turned to steam, dissolving into the air.
Light flared – not from Ari, but from the intricate runes carved into an iron staff, held by a figure that had materialized from the shadows. The beast shrieked, a sound of agony and rage, as hairline cracks spiderwebbed across its mirrored plates. It writhed, a monstrous dance of splintering light, then scattered, dissolving into foul-smelling smoke, a metallic tang, and the scent of old, old dust.
Ari fell to his knees, the broken pipe clattering from his numb fingers. His hands were shaking too hard to hold anything. The three girls, silent and wide-eyed, didn't run. They only stared, their small faces pale with shock and a dawning, fragile hope.
They should have died there.
A figure stepped into the leaking, hesitant light of a broken lamp—his coat heavy with the ancient dust of the tunnels, his iron staff flickering as if it held a storm in chains.
Ruvio.
His gaze swept over them, landing first on the boy crumpled on the floor, then on the girl still shielding the smallest ones with her thin, trembling arms. His eyes, old and sharp, lingered for a moment on the faint silver pulse dying beneath Ari's wrist.
"If you stay alone, you die alone," Elder Ruvio rasped, his voice a low, gravelly sound that seemed to echo from the very stone.
His staff tapped the ground once more—a promise, a threat, an invitation.
Later, Ari would wonder if the glow he had seen was truly fire, or something else entirely — the silver's whisper, the subtle, terrifying hum of Celestia. Elder Ruvio never answered.
He simply led them back through the labyrinthine tunnels, the old man a silent guide in the creeping darkness. Kaela's tiny hand was locked around Ari's wrist, clinging so tightly he could feel her pulse hammer against his skin, a fragile beat of life.
After that night, they stayed together.
Ari, with no family left to claim him.
Kaela, with her sisters clinging to her shoulders like frightened fledgling birds, forever bound by the terror they had shared.
And Elder Ruvio—the enigmatic mentor who taught them how to hold a knife, how to draw a bowstring taut, how to feel for traps hidden beneath crumbling stone, and how to listen for the earth-shaking quake of a glass-back's breath in the cavernous dark.
Years passed. Ari's veins, for a long time, stayed quiet—until they didn't.
Present day:
Years after the comet bled the sky dry, the tunnels of Haven Below pulsed with a restless hush — the hush of people too stubborn to die.
Ari stood at the edge of Haven's last water vein — the silver river, they called it in hushed gossip. Just a trickle now, fed by storms that never stopped above. He watched his reflection waver under the torchlight: a boy nearly grown, hair too long, eyes too quiet. Under his skin, something flickered — thin lines of light, crawling like roots seeking sun.
Kaela found him there.
She didn't say a word at first — just pressed a battered tin cup into his palm. Warm broth, thin but spiced with herbs Mira had found under old metal pipes.
"You're leaking again," Kaela murmured, tapping his wrist where pale veins glowed like dawn under bruised skin.
Ari flexed his fingers, willing the light to die. It flickered, then dimmed — not gone, just hidden deeper. Kaela watched, brow furrowed, fierce as the day they met.
"You keep pushing," she said. "One day it'll push back."
He didn't argue. He never did — not with Kaela.
Behind her, Lise 's giggle echoed off rusted walls. Mira squealed — the little sisters wrestling over scraps of stale bread, pretending it was cake from a world they'd never tasted.
Above them all, the ceiling creaked — wind howling through cracks, singing of the silver core that still whispered in blood and soil.
Farther down the tunnel, past where the lamp's glow bled out into the stale dark, Elder Ruvio stood with his staff planted firmly on the cracked floor.
He'd followed the faint pulse of Ari's light through the winding veins of Haven Below, tracing it the way he might trace a storm's edge with one hand out to taste the rain.
He watched the boy through a crack in the tunnel's rotting support beams — watched Kaela's face soften, watched the map-girl giggle, watched the sleeping one's tiny chest rise and fall.
He felt the old ache in his bones — not age, but weight. The weight of what might come.
His knuckles tightened around the iron staff — the binding rods that kept the storm in his blood from rising. He could almost hear the silver river humming inside the boy's veins.
"Not yet," Elder Ruvio murmured under his breath. His voice was nearly lost to the drip of water and the whisper of distant pipes.
"Not yet, but soon."
Deeper in the dark, someone else watched too. No lamp. No warmth. Just a shape tucked into the hollows behind old support beams, hidden where no lamplight ever reached.
A single mark glowed faint on the watcher's throat — a painted spiral of silvery ash that pulsed in time with Ari's heartbeat. The watcher's breath misted once, then vanished back into stillness.
It turned and melted into the ruin's maze — steps soundless, destination unknown.
Tomorrow, the message would reach ears that should never have known the boy's name at all.
The veins remembered. And so did the spiral.