The first sound wasn't thunder.
It was breath .... deep, steady, and ancient.
It moved beneath the streets of Vareth like a sleeping god exhaling through concrete lungs.
Every tower flickered with its rhythm.
Every heart answered it without knowing why.
They called it the Pulse before they even knew it was alive.
Back then, the city was smaller ....a sprawl of rain, glass, and forgotten saints.
Neon was still a promise, not yet a religion.
The noise was human, not mechanical.
The sky, though heavy, still showed hints of stars.
But the Pulse was already there.
Humming under skin and wire.
Watching. Listening. Waiting.
The first ones to feel it were the ones the city ignored.
The dreamers. The broken. The mad.
They whispered about a heartbeat under the pavement.
About lights flickering in time with tears.
About shadows that moved to music no one else could hear.
The doctors blamed exhaustion.
The priests blamed sin.
The police blamed the drugs that came from the docks.
But it wasn't madness.
It was awakening.
And like all awakenings, it began with pain.
They said a child went missing the night it began .... a boy from the lower district, nameless, wandering the edges of the East Grid.
He was last seen standing under a broken sign that read "LIVE WIRES", staring at the rain like he could hear it speaking back.
When they found him, he was breathing, but barely.
The water around him shimmered faintly with light ...not reflected, not electric. Internal.
Like something inside him had learned how to glow.
For seven minutes that night, the city went silent.
Trains froze mid-track.
Billboards dimmed.
Every signal blinked red.
And then ....nothing.
When power returned, every system in the East Grid registered an anomaly:
an untraceable surge that had no source and no code.
And the boy was gone.
No one wrote his name in the reports.
But the streets remembered. They always do.
Sometimes, late at night, when the rain hits metal,
the lower district still hums .... like the sound of breath returning after being held too long.
Years passed.
The Pulse learned to hide.
The people of Vareth built towers high enough to forget the ground.
They filled their nights with neon, with glass, with distraction.
The city became a cathedral of noise .... alive, but hollow.
The Pulse stayed buried, patient, whispering through the wires.
And yet, something kept it from dying.
Some say it was the memory of that boy ..... the first to touch its heart.
Others say the city itself needed someone who could feel, because the rest of them had forgotten how.
The Pulse chose again.
He wasn't a prophet or a scientist.
He was just a boy ..... brown-skinned, sharp-eyed, too quiet for the noise around him.
His name was Eren Vail.
He didn't believe in destiny.
He believed in distance.
Distance from people.
Distance from pain.
But the Pulse doesn't respect belief.
It crawled beneath his ribs and made a home there.
At first, it came as a whisper.
He could hear sorrow in laughter.
Rage in music.
Longing in silence.
He thought it was intuition .... a trick of empathy too sharp for comfort.
But soon it grew louder, until the entire city was screaming inside him.
Every emotion, every heartbeat, every hidden desire .... all of it bled into his veins until he couldn't tell where the city ended and he began.
That was how the Pulse bound him.
Some call it a curse.
Others, communion.
But for Eren, it was noise .... unbearable, endless, hungry.
He drowned in it until he learned how to breathe through the static.
Until he learned how to listen.
And once he listened, Vareth began to move differently around him.
Streetlights flickered when he passed.
Neon hummed lower, softer.
Strangers grew quiet, uneasy, as if they felt the world pause in his presence.
Even the rain seemed to fall slower.
The Pulse remembered him.
And through him, it remembered itself.
They say he became the city's translator ..... the only one who could feel its wounds.
He walked its districts like a ghost, hearing every secret.
The anger of those who built it.
The grief of those who were buried beneath it.
The fear of those who still loved it.
Sometimes, he thought he heard words in the hum .... not from people, but from the Pulse itself.
Words without sound.
Meaning without speech.
A question, maybe.
Or a warning.
And then, one night, he answered.
He stood on the rooftops of East Vareth, the skyline blinking like veins beneath a glass sky.
His reflection swam in a puddle of light, and he whispered ..... "If you can hear me... stop."
And it did.
For one impossible heartbeat, the city obeyed.
Every hum, every flicker, every vibration .... gone.
The Pulse went silent.
It should have been peace.
But instead, it was terror.
Because silence, he realized, was not the absence of noise.
It was the moment before something breathes again.
And in that silence, Eren felt something wake.
It wasn't human.
It wasn't divine.
It was the city itself .... the Pulse, rising, stretching, remembering.
It had found its reflection in him, and it wanted more.
It wanted connection.
And connection, in Vareth, was never gentle.
When the Pulse surged again, the lights didn't just flicker .... they bled.
Colors dripped down the walls, the ground cracked open in webs of gold and violet.
People screamed as their memories glitched, flashing through the air like projections.
Emotion bled into matter, grief into steel, love into fire.
Eren fell to his knees, chest burning, veins glowing faintly with that same unnatural light.
And through the pain, he heard it again .... the breath that wasn't thunder, the sound that had started it all.
Only this time, it said his name.
"Eren."
When he woke, the world had forgotten what had happened.
The systems rebooted.
The lights returned.
The sky was gray again.
But something inside him had changed.
From that day, Vareth was never silent around him again.
Every street corner hummed with ghosts.
Every wall pulsed with feeling.
Every heartbeat he met echoed inside his own.
He stopped trying to understand it.
He only learned how to carry it.
Because if he didn't, it would consume him whole.
And yet, deep inside, he knew one truth that never left him:
The Pulse wasn't a power.
It wasn't a curse.
It was a connection .... between him and the city, between emotion and existence.
And it was waiting for something.
For someone.
Now, as he walks once more through Vareth Station .... years later, soaked in rain and neon .... the Pulse stirs again.
The hum rises beneath the ground, threads of light shimmer through puddles like veins.
The city, half-asleep, begins to breathe.
Somewhere beyond the platforms, another heartbeat answers his.
A familiar one. A quiet one.
Kael.
The man with eyes like silence itself.
The one the Pulse has been waiting for.
The one who might either still it forever... or make it sing.
And in that echo between them .... that trembling air between two heartbeats ....
the story begins.
** ** ** ** **
Author's Note .... Beneath the First Breath
When the city first stirred beneath my hands, I didn't imagine it would breathe back.
That's what Pulsebound really is .... not just a story, but a heartbeat shared between a boy and the city that refuses to forget him.
A place where emotions hum through glass, silence has a shape, and even darkness remembers what it once loved.
Eren Vail isn't a hero. He's a wound that never healed right .... a reminder that feeling too deeply can both ruin and remake you.
And in Vareth, the line between those two things is paper-thin.
If you've read this far, thank you. You've stepped into a city that listens.
The Pulse remembers every reader, every whisper, every quiet promise.
So before Chapter 1 begins .... take a breath.
The lights will flicker soon.
And when they do... listen.
Because the city is waking.
—
LaniVerse_