The city had never sounded like that before.
Under the brass plates and glass promenades, under the markets and the guild halls, the pipes hummed in a pitch that made the teeth ache. It was not wind, not the usual mechanical murmur of Velith — it was a low, wrong note that threaded through the bones of the streets. The sound made lanterns flicker and clever men look away from clocks they trusted.
A technician named Merin was the one who found the first literal echo. He worked the lower maintenance tunnels, small and quick, with grease under his nails and a pocket full of bolts. He was not a hero. He had not been to any battlefield. He had been saving for a better soldering iron.
When the call came, it was routine: check the sensor array at Ring Five. The message had the same dull politeness as all administrative things in Velith. But the corridor he walked into looked different — dust in the air hung like a frozen snowfall, and the rivets on the wall throbbed faintly, as if the whole place were pulse and bruise.
Merin put his hand on a pipe. It shivered under his palm like a living thing. He listened. There was a rhythm there, a half-memory of a song. It sounded like someone pacing a hallway far above and then forgetting the step. He thumbed his scanner — the readouts were garbled, time-stamped with seconds that didn't line up.
He tried fixing valves, tightening seals, replacing a sensor that refused to read a single clean line. Each time he turned a wrench, the pipes answered with a small translation of the night's violence: a quiet hiss that sounded like a breathing man, an afterbeat of a distant explosion, the soft metallic ring of something breaking and not breaking all at once. He worked until the metal at his fingertips burned from the friction of a world trying to remember what it had just lost.
Aboveground, the Guild mounted shows of control — processions of armored men, notices that ordered calm, decrees that spoke of stability. Below, Merin kept finding things the screens did not show: smears of unknown oil that burned at the edges of his gloves, tiny crystalline shards with a blue inner glow tucked into pipe joints, and a thin film of dust that hummed when he scraped it.
Rumors fit into the city like spilled wine. They soaked through taverns and market stalls faster than official notices. "The city stopped," an old vendor told anyone who would stand. "It forgot how to breathe." Children repeated the phrase with curiosity, as if it were a riddle. A watchman whispered that he'd seen a man climb a tower and watch the streets like a man who had killed the sun and now wanted to see the scoreboard.
Merchants kept two ledgers now: the official and the true. The true one listed missing shipments, strange delays, and men who'd left and never quite arrived. The official ledger lied. It had to.
Far from Velith, in a dusty inn by the road, Rynn and Eren were halfway through a cheap stew and some worse ale. They were small strangers in a town that smelled of horse and wood smoke. They had no business with great cities and had yet to earn the right to call themselves Seekers. They were, at best, hopeful.
"Did you hear?" the innkeeper asked, wiping a mug with a rag that had seen better wars. "Velith lost its pulse. Lights stopped. People saying the clocks are wrong." His voice had the thrill of a rumor that bought him customers.
Rynn and Eren exchanged looks. "Velith?" Eren asked, mouth half-full.
"Big city," the innkeeper said. "Gilded towers. Guildsmen with teeth like polished screws. They say a group took something from the heart of the city and left it bleeding."
Rynn felt his chest tighten, an echo not entirely like fear. He had been small in Charon's market, smaller still when men with coarse fingers called him boy and asked if he could carry parcels. The idea that a city could be broken — that a hole might open in the strong places — sounded like possibility and danger braided together.
Eren scraped his bowl. "Where'd they go?" he asked, more interested in routes than meaning.
"Roads," the innkeeper said. "Tracks to the west. To the ruins. People talking about a name — Ninefold. Dangerous, he said. If I was you, I'd sleep with one eye open."
They had heard the name once before, a rumor along a wagon. Now it had a weight: spoken in reverent fear at the edge of a fire. Rynn's fingers curled under the table. He imagined a city that could not keep time, and felt the world widen by a single, terrible inch.
Back in Velith, Merin left his toolbox under a grate and climbed toward the surface because men upstairs liked to see bodies returning with their hands still. He passed a market where traders were arguing with clocks and a child tried to catch the sound of a broken bell. He wondered if the city would forgive him for not fixing everything at once.
The pipes sang under his nails as he walked, a tiny chorus that would not be quieted. Somewhere, the Ninefold moved with purpose through shadowed lanes, a small and terrible clean machine. Somewhere else, a Guild commander drafted letters that would never wash away what had happened. And somewhere beyond the known roads, two boys who were not yet Seekers turned that rumor into a map.
Velith whispered its wounds to those who would listen. The rest of the world, until they heard, would make do with stories.
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