Nibelheim slept like it was pretending.
A handful of window-lights still burned in the dark—small, human, fragile—and every few seconds they flickered in unison, like the town was taking shallow breaths and forgetting to exhale.
Above it all, the refinery loomed.
It didn't sit on the horizon like a building. It hung there like a metal stormfront: scaffolding and gantries and pipes, an ugly geometry bolted straight into the mountain's ribs. Red hazard beacons pulsed along its edges, slow and patient, like something watching.
And beneath the refinery, visible even from this far away, the reason the whole place existed:
A river of exposed mako ran through the facility like neon lava. It was bright enough to stain the clouds green, bright enough to make the snow on distant peaks look sickly. The flow wasn't smooth. It surged in thick luminous waves, like something alive being forced through a throat too narrow.
The sound reached the town as a deep mourning hum—so low it crawled into your teeth—threaded with the harsher grind of turbines chewing and chewing and chewing. When the wind shifted just right, there was a moment where it almost resembled singing. Not a song you'd ever call comforting, but one you'd recognize in your bones anyway, like the planet trying to speak through a mouth full of iron.
For a heartbeat, it was almost beautiful.
Then the grinders bit down again, and whatever softness had been there got crushed back into noise.
Green light bled from the refinery and crept over the town in slow, shameless sheets, sliding across street stones, shutters, rooftops—turning every familiar "welcome home" shape into something staged. Too clean. Too arranged. Like a village someone built to convince you the world was still normal.
A wind slipped through the empty street. A hanging sign complained softly on its chain. Somewhere a dog barked once—sharp, startled—and then went quiet as if it remembered it shouldn't draw attention.
The hum swelled. Not louder, exactly. Sharper. As if it had leaned closer. The hair on the back of your neck rose with it, not from sound, but from the feeling that the sound had intent.
Down the main road into town, two figures approached out of the darkness. Their outlines were swallowed and re-lit by the mako glow in alternating pulses, like the planet itself was deciding whether it recognized them—or whether it was about to name them as something else.