The sky over Junk Pit was a miser's blanket, thin and patched with shades of rust and chemical gray. Down below, in the grime-slick alleys between scrap heaps, Liam was trying to steal a piece of it. Not the sky itself, but the next best thing: a shard of polished sky-steel, probably sheared off a Wind Kingdom skiff during a border skirmish and discarded. It was lodged deep in a fresh pile of refuse dumped from the high-level conveyor belts that serviced the kingdoms above. To the world, this was a trash heap. To Liam, it was the larder.
He was fifteen, a fact he only knew because Old Man Hemlock, the Pit's resident gear-toothed historian, had declared it so a few weeks back based on the length of Liam's limbs and the alarming rate at which he devoured Hemlock's roasted gloomcaps. Fifteen meant the clock was ticking. Fifteen was the age of the Mana Rite.
"Almost… there…" Liam grunted, his fingers straining. His arm was wedged up to the shoulder between a busted alchemy vat leaking something viscous and purple, and the cast-iron chassis of a Terrastone golem that had been decommissioned with extreme prejudice. The sky-steel shard, no bigger than his palm, glinted a tantalizing, clean blue—a color so pure it felt like a curse in the monochrome squalor of the Pit.
A sharp, metallic *skreee* echoed from above. Liam froze. That was the sound of a Prowler, the semi-sentient scrap-golems that patrolled the upper layers of the junk heaps, ensuring nothing valuable—or dangerous—was scavenged by the likes of him. He held his breath, the reek of ozone and decay filling his lungs. The Prowler's single, glowing red optic swept across the canyon of trash, its beam cutting through the perpetual twilight. It paused, then moved on.
Liam exhaled, a shaky cloud of vapor in the cool air. He gave his arm one last, desperate wrench. His knuckles scraped against rusted metal, but his fingers finally closed around the cool, smooth edge of the sky-steel. Victory. He pulled it free with a triumphant gasp.
"Gotcha, you shiny bastard," he whispered, a grin splitting his dirt-streaked face. This was a Grade-C find, maybe even Grade-B if the mana signature was still stable. Enough to trade for a week's worth of nutrient paste, a new filter for his breather mask, and maybe, just maybe, a sliver of sun-dried flarewisp jerky. Luxury.
He was shimmying backward out of the crevice when a voice, thin and reedy, cut through the quiet.
"Find something good, Scrap-rat?"
Liam's heart hammered against his ribs. He knew that voice. Kaelen. A bully who ran a small crew of other desperate kids, using fear and a slightly-better-than-average Fire cantrip to rule their small section of the Pit. Kaelen was the kind of person who'd break your legs for a half-eaten ration bar, not because he was hungry, but because he could.
Liam scrambled out of the hole, clutching the sky-steel shard to his chest. Kaelen stood there, flanked by two of his usual goons, Lunk and Weasel. Kaelen was wiry, with a cruel smirk and eyes that held the dull, smoky red of a dying ember. He could barely manage a flicker of heat from his palms, but in a place where most people had no magic at all, a spark was as good as an inferno.
"Just junk, Kaelen," Liam said, trying to keep his voice steady. He held up his empty hand. "Same as always." It was a classic Pit maneuver: deny everything, show nothing.
Kaelen's smirk widened. "Liar. Weasel saw the glint. Hand it over. My Prowler tax."
"You don't own a Prowler," Liam shot back, his survival instincts warring with his smart mouth.
"I own the scrap under it," Kaelen sneered. "Now, give it here before I decide to practice my aim on your face." He raised a hand, and a pathetic, fist-sized ball of orange flame sputtered to life in his palm. It was weak, a low-tier Thread spell at best, but it was hot enough to melt flesh.
Liam's mind raced. He could run, but they'd catch him. He could fight, but it was three against one, and one of them had fire. He looked at the shard in his hand, then at Kaelen's smug face. An idea, stupid and brilliant and born of pure desperation, sparked in his mind.
"Alright, alright, you want it? It's yours," Liam said, holding up the sky-steel. He polished it dramatically on his filthy shirt. "But this isn't just any old scrap. This is a limited edition piece. A relic."
Kaelen's eyes narrowed. Lunk and Weasel exchanged a confused glance.
"It's a Zephyrion Officer's Blade fragment," Liam declared, his voice taking on the cadence of the traders who sometimes hawked their wares near the Pit's edge. "See that shimmer? That's not just metal. It's a stored motion-spell. They say if you hold it just right, it'll guide your hand to a true strike."
Weasel leaned in, intrigued. "Really?"
"Don't be an idiot," Kaelen snapped, though his gaze lingered on the shard. "He's bluffing."
"Am I?" Liam's grin was all bravado. "Tell you what. You can have it. But a piece this rare… it's worth more than just letting me go. It's worth your entire stash of gloomcaps for a week."
It was an insane gamble. Kaelen's crew had a small monopoly on the best gloomcap patch in the sector.
Kaelen laughed, a harsh, grating sound. "You've got guts, Scrap-rat. Or you're just stupid. I'm taking the shard *and* I'm going to enjoy burning those stupid jokes off your face."
He flicked his wrist. The small fireball shot forward.
Liam didn't dodge. He couldn't. Instead, he did the only thing he could think of. He thrust the sky-steel shard out, holding it like a shield. It was a fool's hope, a prayer to a god he didn't believe in.
The fireball hit the shard.
And vanished.
There was no sizzle, no puff of smoke, no ricochet. The flame, a structure of pure mana, simply touched the metal in Liam's hand and ceased to exist. One moment it was there, a flickering threat of heat and light; the next, it was gone. The air grew colder, the light dimmer, as if the very energy of the attack had been… eaten.
Everyone stared. Kaelen's jaw hung open. Lunk blinked his slow, heavy-lidded eyes.
Liam looked at the shard. It felt… different. The cool, passive metal now held a faint, almost imperceptible warmth. And deep within him, in a place he never knew existed, he felt a flicker. A tiny, hungry void that had just been fed its first meal.
"What… what did you do?" Kaelen stammered, his bravado evaporating like morning mist.
Liam had no idea. But he wasn't about to let a miracle go to waste. He puffed out his chest, channeling the ghost of a thousand story-weavers.
"I told you," he said, his voice a low, theatrical whisper. "It's a relic. It *absorbs* fire magic. A rare counter-artifact from the Pyraxis-Zephyrion wars." He took a step forward. "Your little spark just charged it up. Want to see what it does when it's full?"
He was lying through his teeth, but his heart was pounding with a terrifying, exhilarating truth. Something had happened. Something inside *him*.
Kaelen, for the first time since Liam had known him, looked scared. He glanced at his goons, who were already backing away, their eyes wide with superstitious fear. Magic they understood. Anti-magic was witchery.
"This ain't over, Scrap-rat," Kaelen snarled, but his threat was hollow. He turned and practically fled, his cronies stumbling after him into the metallic gloom.
Liam stood alone, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He looked down at the sky-steel shard, then at his own trembling hands. The warmth in the metal was fading, as was the strange, full feeling in his gut. He was just a boy again, holding a piece of junk.
But something had changed. The world felt bigger, and the oppressive gray sky of Junk Pit seemed, for the first time, to have a crack in it.
He spent the next hour in a daze, trading the now-inert shard for a pittance—the trader found no lingering mana signature—and buying his nutrient paste. The thrill of his victory was replaced by a gnawing unease. What had he done? Was it the shard? Or was it… him?
He found his way to Hemlock's hovel, a cozy den built into the hull of a giant, overturned earth-mover. Gears and cogs hung from the ceiling like metallic vines, and the air smelled of rust, old paper, and the sweet, earthy scent of roasting gloomcaps.
Old Man Hemlock was hunched over a workbench, polishing a lens with a scrap of leysilk. His face was a roadmap of wrinkles, his eyes magnified to comical proportions by the thick goggles perched on his nose.
"Liam, my boy," he rasped without looking up. "You smell of trouble and ozone. Kaelen again?"
"He started it," Liam mumbled, slumping onto a stool made from a stack of petrified books. "But… something weird happened."
He explained the encounter, his voice barely a whisper, feeling foolish as he said the words aloud. The fireball, the shard, the way the magic just… disappeared.
Hemlock stopped his polishing. He turned slowly, pushing his goggles up onto his forehead. His gaze was sharp, analytical. "You're certain? It didn't reflect? It didn't fizzle? It was consumed?"
"It was like… it was eaten," Liam said, rubbing his stomach. "I felt it. It was warm."
The old man was silent for a long moment, his eyes distant. He looked at Liam, truly looked at him, with an intensity that made Liam squirm.
"The Mana Rite," Hemlock said, his voice low and urgent. "It's in two weeks. The caravans to Concord Spire leave at dawn tomorrow."
Liam blinked. "The Rite? That's for kids with a Spark. People who can actually *do* things. I'm a Scrap-rat, Hemlock. My only talent is knowing which rust is poisonous."
"A boy who can make magic disappear is not a Scrap-rat," Hemlock countered, his voice firm. He hobbled over to a heavy, locked chest in the corner. He fumbled with a key, his hands shaking slightly, and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, was a small, leather pouch and a worn but sturdy traveler's cloak.
"I have been saving this," Hemlock said, his voice thick with emotion. "For a hope. For a chance that one of our children might escape this place."
He pressed the pouch into Liam's hand. It was heavy with coins—Crownmarks, real ones, not the bent trade chits of the Pit. It was a fortune. More money than Liam had ever seen.
"Hemlock, I can't…"
"You can, and you will," the old man insisted, draping the heavy cloak over Liam's shoulders. It smelled of dust and distance. "You will take the morning caravan. You will go to the capital. And you will put your hand on that Aether Diamond."
"But what if it was just the shard?" Liam protested, his mind reeling. "What if I get there and I'm nothing? They'll just turn me away."
"And what if you are something, Liam?" Hemlock's eyes bored into him. "What if you are *so much* something that it terrifies them? It is a risk you must take. There is no future for you in this Pit. Only more scrap, more rust, and more bullies like Kaelen."
He paused, his hand resting on Liam's shoulder. His voice dropped to a whisper, filled with a pain that was decades old.
"I had a daughter once. She had a Spark. A tiny one, a little flicker of blue. Healing. We couldn't afford the passage to the Rite. A plague came through the lower levels… the kind a touch of healing magic could have stopped." He squeezed Liam's shoulder, his grip surprisingly strong. "Go. For all the children of the Pit who never could. Find out what you are."
Liam looked down at the coins in his hand, then at the earnest, desperate hope in the old man's eyes. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach. But for the first time, it was joined by something else. A flicker of purpose. The memory of the fireball vanishing, the echo of that strange, hungry power inside him.
Junk Pit was his home, his prison, his whole world. Leaving it was more terrifying than facing a hundred Kaelens. But staying, knowing that he might be… *something*… felt like a betrayal.
He pulled the cloak tighter around himself, the rough fabric a comforting weight. He met Hemlock's gaze and nodded, a single, sharp dip of his chin.
"Okay," Liam said, his voice clear and steady. "I'll go."
Outside, the Prowlers continued their patrol, their red eyes sweeping over a kingdom of refuse. But for one boy, the endless piles of junk were no longer a home. They were a starting line.