Location: Arx Scriptorum, Mediaterra, Continent of Aeridor
Professor Aris snapped the vial. Not glass, it was carved from the armored wing-case of a Arcanum's insect, brittle as a dried beetle shell The shard bit into his palm, mixing blood with the specimen's iridescent dust. "Observe the resonance cascade," he rasped to his three terrified apprentices. The dust sang against his blood, etching faint harmonic patterns onto his skin. The University Chancellor would expel him for this. The Guild would imprison him. But Aris needed to see if resonance could map human decay before the Blight spreading from Dock District reached his daughter's lungs. Ethics were for the uninfected.
Aeridor was a continent split like a cracked crucible with it's individual countries and guilds. To the west, Marisora's glass-domed ports blazed under crystalline lenses that harvested sunlight for Collegium Nauticus' photochemical distilleries. To the east, Austerion's forge-smog stained the sky crimson above piston-driven refineries run by the Confraternitas Ferraria. Between them, straddling the volcanic highlands, lay Mediaterra , a patchwork of scholar-cities where the Collegium Codicum archived the world's secrets in vaults of fossilized wood. Beyond the ocean lay whispers: the rainforests of Silvanora, the storm-plains of Ventora, and the nightmare continent, Acranum.
Perched on jagged basalt cliffs like stubborn lichen, Arx Scriptorum was a city steeped in secrets and slow decay, its five districts each bearing a distinct stain of purpose and corruption. In the heights of Crestview, marble academies gleamed under the watch of the Ordo Memoriae, priests who guarded the Librum Vitae, genetic codices locked away in climate-controlled scriptoria. Below, The Terraces bustled with merchants hawking Adena-charged glow stones and pungent ritual reagents, their streets heavy with the scent of vinegar and ozone. Foundry Lane, dominated by the Collegium Codicum, rose in obsidian towers humming with kinetic resonators that kept the cliffs from crumbling into the sea. Across the city, The Quills sprawled in a maze of student slums, tenements patched together from discarded parchment-bricks, where failed alchemical runoff painted the alleys in sickly stains. At the lowest edge lay the Dock District, once the artery for smuggled Arcanum reagents, now a quarantine zone where the air hung sour with spoiled citrus and rotting metal, and the streets shimmered with slicks of iridescent, leaking coolant.
Professor Aris hadn't meant to catch the Blight. He'd been documenting Dock District's decay for the Department of Civic Alchemical Integration when a Ferraria freighter, unloading raw Hemalith Ore from Arcanum, ruptured. A geyser of ochre slurry, an earthy pigment, drenched him. Three days later, the cough began Wet, grating, and stubborn enough to rattle loose crystalline flakes on his handkerchief. He kept the flakes in a little glass vial more out of habit than hope, turning it in the lamplight until the edges caught like teeth. The Collegium physicians called it Contagio Resonans, The Blight slow, stubborn, and branded fatal on the record. Their words were clinical, but the silence in the exam room was verdict enough.
"You understand what I'm saying, Professor Aris?" Dr. Caelum's hands folded like a judge's " It's Airborne resonant spores from Arcanum's Luminophage Fungus and causes Slow crystallization of lung tissue, your coughs eject sharp silica shards and based on what we currently know about the new continent, We can slow the symptoms but we cannot cure."
Aris laughed once, a small, brittle sound. "And yet you asked me how I was documenting the Dock District." He held up the vial. "If it's a lattice problem… what if something crystalline could re-tune it?"
Caelum's mouth went tight. "You are a scholar, not a miracle worker."
That night, when the city's lights dimmed and Foundry Lane's resonators hummed like a distant heart, Aris stopped being merely a scholar. He became a man with a list.
How he got the chitin was less an act of theory than of necessity. Jax , thin as a wire, a Dock District rat with hands that never stopped working and a sister who coughed blood like someone ringing a bell for help came to Aris in a doorway stained with algae and sympathy.
"You said you might help," Jax said without preamble. His voice scraped like paper. "My sister's getting worse. Medicines cost more than a mouthful of bread."
Aris set the vial of adrenal extract on the doorstep between them. He had stolen the extract from his own lab, experimental, promising in the way desperation makes anything promising. It steamed faintly in the cold.
"You keep this," Aris said. "Get her to stop coughing for a night. In return..." he hesitated, then named the thing he needed, the rumor he'd chased down a dozen nights: "Carapace shards from a Silica-Reaper."
Jax's eyes widened. The Reaper was not a creature to bargain with; it calcified its victims into trophies. "You blind, professor? You'll get skulls for feet asking that in the Dock."
"I will pay with something that keeps a family alive for one more sunset," Aris said. "One vial. No tricks."
Jax touched the glass as if testing whether the promise was real. "One night," he said finally, and slid a scrap of parchment with a place and a time under the vial. "If it's a trick, I'll bring you back my knife."
The specimen arrived at the appointed dusk: a wrapped, jagged thing that glittered like the Dock's foulest puddles. The chitin was pale and cold, slivers catching lamplight into small, precise prisms. Jax watched Aris handle it with the reverence he might afford a crucible.
"Silica-Reapers crystallize their prey," Jax explained, watching the professor's face. "They feed on heat and leave art behind. People collect the shards. Or they die for them."
Aris nodded. "If Contagio is a resonance problem, then perhaps the Reaper's lattice can be coaxed into a different tune."
Getting it past the Collegium's gates would be its own argument. Foundry Lane's scanners were built to catch inorganic threats. Stray ore, illicit resonators, forged obsidian cores. Biologicals slipped by cause their algorithms were trained to look for the wrong kind of danger. Aris used that logic in the same way a locksmith uses a hairpin.
He hollowed an Adena Apple one of Mediaterra gene-worked fruits that held light like a coin and nested the chitin vial inside its core. The apple's photosynthetic signature sang like nothing suspicious, the scanners read ribosomal hums they understood as benign. At the gate, a guard hissed in boredom.
"Anything to declare, professor?" the man asked. The resonators above the arch thrummed, measuring and calculating.
"Just an apple for the lecture," Aris said, and kept his voice steady. He handed the fruit across, feeling Jax's presence behind him, the ache of his sister like a cold stone.
The scanner blinked green. A small sound like the click of a lock, and the gates sighed open.
When the detector's readouts flashed, Aris forced a smile that felt like a mask. "You keep your family well, Jax," he murmured later, once the Foundry's shadow had swallowed them and the city's map of decay settled back into its pieces. "If this works...."
"If it doesn't," Jax said, eyes hard, "you taught me a trick. I taught you a route. We'll both have stories to sell."
Aris tucked the Adena Apple, now a hollow shell of sanctioned light beneath his cloak. In his pocket, the shard's vial was dry and humming with possibility. He had smuggled it in through law and logic, but what it would smuggle out of him was less a thing he could predict, hope, which is no safer than contraband.
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Beneath the Department's clean towers, Room 7B breathed old steam and desperation. Aris had turned a boiler room into a laboratory lead-lined walls, fossil wood panels, a grated floor over a coolant sump. Apprentices clustered like a chorus of differing faiths.
Kira moved with the exactness of her father's glasswork, eyes that read light the way others read scripture. She traced glyphs on the slate and called readings like a cantor. "Lex Stoichiometrica," she murmured, "ratios awry."
Leo, the Ordo acolyte, stood rigid and small, a censer hanging from his belt and a prayer always at his lip. "We must not tempt Resonantia," he said, voice shaking. "Not without Rite."
Benn, a forge-brat, kept his palms open to threats, scorched arms mapped like a road atlas. "Rites or not, if something works I'll trust it. I'm not losing anyone to a cough."
Aris set the borrowed Harmonic Diffractor in place and fed it into a kinetically etched quartz slate. He laid his infected blood in a lead crucible and slit the carapace shard with a jeweler's hand. The chitin crunched.
"Observe the resonance cascade," he rasped, and poured a powder of chitin-dust onto his wound.
For a breath, it was beautiful. The dust sang a high, thin note that vibrated their teeth. Blue fractal veins bloomed across Aris' skin and traced themselves into filigree on the slate. The Diffractor screamed and etched spirals: a map of the Blight inside him.
"Kira, record the harmonics!" Aris whispered, eyes bright with the small manic joy of a man who has found a way in. "If the Reaper chitin tunes to the same lattice, it should trace the decay. We'll see where it begins."
Kira's pen scratched. "It's..." she stopped, lips pressed. "Lex Stoichiometrica… ratios unstable. Energy is spiking."
Benn's hands went for the control runes. "Reverse catalyst polarity, now!" he barked.
They were late. The chitin did not only trace. The Blight inside Aris answered.
The blue went purple. The wound pulsed like a plucked string. Aris gasped. The fractal filigree flared incandescent. Skin split with the brittle, wet sound of stained glass. Instead of blood came a vapor that smelled of burnt copper and overripe plums, a scarlet mist that swallowed the lamp's light.
"No!" Leo threw his censer. Salts flared white as they struck the vapor and then failed; the mist flowed through the flare like smoke through sand and left nothing behind.
Kira's fingers reached out without thought toward Aris, and the mist licked her hand. Her scream cut like a note dropped. She crumpled, her skin desiccating, crumbling into ash, her bones crystallizing mid-fall into a sculpture of red salt. Benn dived into the vapor to wrench her up; the mist flowed around him and took him to a shape standing in a rain of tools and humming with frozen heat. He collapsed as if someone had poured iron and left only the frame of a man: a figure of crimson lattice and clattering metal.
"PULL THE ALARM!" Benn had time to shout as his own face hardened. He shoved Leo toward the lever and the boy's hands found panic-runes carved into a bone handle.
Leo's fingers slipped. "By the Ordo..." he sobbed. He yanked.
The klaxons belched into the pipes. The room shuddered. The Scarlet Mist pooled obedient and sweet against the far wall and then, with a slow patience, it began to eat the lead lining , small, glinting bites that showed a hunger calculated and cold.
The Custodes Vigilum came like a second thunder, bronze helmets under grey cloaks and quartz-tipped glaives that threw harmonic fields. Their leader barked orders in clipped Latin-slate.
"Contain!" his voice cut like a blade. "Seal the vents. Invoke Protocol Ignis Praeteriti. No one leaves."
They found Aris unconscious, one arm a ruin, chitin and crystallized blood fused into something obscene. They found two apprentices frozen as grotesque trophies and one shaking, chanting, a censer clutched to his chest.
"Magister Primus," a Custodes said to the officers, reading the nameplate as if reading an accusation. "This lab is state-sanctioned. This is no trivial failure."
"You invoke Ignis Praeteriti?" an older voice demanded from the corridor, a messenger already sliding the Collegium seal into place. A pale glow bloomed above the door. "High Guild must convene. Codicum will demand the samples. Ferraria will swear compliance. Nauticus will strike the port. We call witnesses."
Protocol Ignis Praeteriti, the old law buried in the Collegium's bones, was a bell that rang for more than containment: it called the guilds, the politics, the blames. The Scarlet Mist's first meal was a lab; its second would be a city.
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You hear the klaxons through cracked shutters. They're calling for You not Jax. They vibrate through the parchment walls of your room in the Quills like a distant heartbeat turned to warning. The sound wakes you in the gutters of sleep and pushes you to the street.
You go scavenging because you must. Food, copper tubing, anything that feeds the Adena-lantern or the sister who coughs at night and spits flecks of glass. The Dock smells of spoiled citrus and rot; the port is heaped in iridescent runoff. A paper, blackened at the edges, flutters across your path and catches in a drain grate. You bend to fish it out, Kira's handwriting, a page of light-scratch glyphs and observations, singed at one corner.
"The mist sings in blue," Kira has written in a neat, glassblower's hand. "It remembers where it has been. Do not let Leo burn the record. If the lattice re-tunes, it will eat the light."
You don't know Kira but you know the shape of desperation. You fold the page into your palm and press the burnt edge to your tongue to read the letters twice. The alley is full of neighbors listening to the same klaxon—some pray, others pull shutters. A wiry smuggler you half-know leans from a doorway.
"You hear that?" he asks. He doesn't wait for an answer. "Foundry's locked down, they say. Custodes took a lab near Crestview. High Guild's moving. If it's true, the Quills will be next."
You look at the notes. Your mother coughs in your head, the sound like the scrape of paper. The salvage you carry feels suddenly small.
"Where?" you ask the smuggler.
He spits. "Room 7B. Under the Integration tower. Aris. Big name. Bad luck. You want work, you keep to the shadows or pay the right man."
You fold Kira's notes into a pocket you never thought to trust. A plan forms that taste like iron and adrenaline: find Aris' backup lab in the Docks, find out what he stole, and take whatever might stop the cough. If the Collegium wants to burn the data, the smoke will take what saves your sister with it.
Behind you, the klaxons fade but the echo remains. Somewhere under the city, Room 7B's lead is failing. The Scarlet Mist is learning what lead tastes like.
Word spreads in whispers and sealed telegrams. Ferraria accuses Codicum of lax quarantine. Nauticus demands embargoes. The Collegium's seal above Room 7B glows like a finger pointed at a man's heart. Leo sits wrapped in a blanket, chanting the Ordo's litanies and mouthing curses between prayers, while Custodes catalog everything with a bureaucrat's cruelty. Messengers sprint to guildhalls, a Council will form and names will be written.
But in the Quills and the Docks, the immediate truth is personal: someone you love is coughing up shards. A man with a stolen jar owes a debt. A page of field notes might be the map to a cure or the proof that the Blight now has appetite enough to be a weapon. Aris is broken and the city has a new scar.
You tuck Kira's glyphs deeper into your sleeve and follow the smell of Hemalith through the alleys. The city has never been kinder to the desperate, but it is honest. The mist that ate the boiler room is contained for now, but it is learning to bite through lead. Protocol Ignis Praeteriti has been invoked, the guilds will come, and the Custodes will keep their list of the dead.
Somewhere in the Foundry, a clerk stamps a seal and writes "Magister Primus" like a verdict. Somewhere in the Dock, Jax counts his coin and thinks of a sister who slept for an entire night. And in your pocket, Kira's line burns a small way through whatever else you carry: "If the lattice re-tunes, it will eat the light."
You make for Aris' other lab, because if the city will decide who lives and who dies, you will try to decide for yourself first. The scarlet glass of Kira's notes sits heavy against your ribs. The klaxons are still in the pipes, but now you have a beat to follow.