“The Vox Animus Conflicts of 260 A.S. marked the beginning of the Ashen Crown’s decline. A series of uncontrolled awakenings during the central campaign caused dozens of Irons to cross into full possession mid-theater, destabilizing entire battle lines. Many refused further orders, while others turned violently on both allies and enemies. Civilian losses were catastrophic. The Empire, already stretched thin, failed to contain the spread. What followed was a multi-year series of skirmishes and frame rebellions, culminating in the loss of several provinces and a sharp reduction in the Crown’s military and industrial capacity.

  In the years immediately following, Crown authority weakened significantly. In Emberreach, once a key manufacturing territory, the local nobility fractured from the central court. Claiming that the Church’s spiritual governance had endangered both pilots and Irons, the Assembly of Embercoil was formed in 274 A.S. Its founding doctrine rejected ecclesiastical control over machine spirits, recognized the sentience of Possessed Iron, and declared sovereignty from both Crown and Church. The Assembly's charter outlawed forced bonding, and reclassified Awakened Irons as citizens with legal standing. While Crown officials denounced the action as sedition, no military response followed—likely due to continued post-war instability.

  The Chainless Concord began to secede shortly after. Unlike Embercoil, their cause was not rooted in machine ethics but in political disillusionment. During the war, many Concord city-states had watched their nobles hoard resources and abandon civic duty in favor of personal survival. In the aftermath, a growing number of communities rejected hereditary rule outright. By 276 A.S., over forty city-states had voided Crown charters and enacted local governance under cooperative treaties. They refused religious oversight, disbanded noble titles, and declared all citizens equal before law. Though they maintained no central government, the Concord’s intercity agreements have proven stable, and no attempt to reintegrate them has succeeded.”

  — Excerpt from Foundations of Secession: A Timeline of Divergence, published by the Embercoil Assembly for Educational Use, 308 A.S.

  Portem hadn’t shut up in a while, but I wasn’t complaining. The quiet between us was comfortable, deliberate—rarely awkward, never unintentional—and right now, I needed the chatter to keep my thoughts from running in circles.

  I slouched deeper into the co-pilot’s chair, boots hooked under the console lip, the Archive Root resting in my lap like it had something it wanted to say but wasn’t quite ready to speak. The cube pulsed faintly beneath my fingers, warm in a way that wasn’t heat, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. Copper-toned alloy laced with veins of darker iron, not machined so much as grown from design, each line of filigree curling in on itself like vines.

  The corners were beveled, worn slightly—handled often, maybe even passed down. The base had three shallow indentations, each meant for something to slot into them. One was lit, faint green while the other two slots were empty. I gave it a long look before I spoke up. “What were your thoughts on the conversation with that guy?"

  Portem’s voice crackled over the speaker, dry and unhurried. “He seems... vibrant.”

  “Definitely. He has a rather loud voice. it almost made my ears ring.”

  “Like grenade wearing pants, though one that quotes historical epics and the history of murals.”

  I snorted—quiet, involuntary. Almost a laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who is just the way they are, especially like that. No guile or edge. Just... blunt sincerity. It’s kind of impressive.”

  Portem didn’t follow up, which meant he was either pondering it or working through a systems check. I wasn’t sure which one would surprise me more. I turned the Root over in my hands again.

  It wasn’t just a box. There was something buried in the geometry—something too precise to be random. Its balance was perfect, weight centered around the core, and besides the design there wasn't anything else to identify it by.

  “What do you make of it?” I asked, finally setting it down on the console between us.

  “From the basic probing it seems like it follows the pattern of the other fragments, each segment contains encrypted directional data locked behind a layered decryption key. So whether we like it or not, it has to be done sequentially.”

  I frowned. “So this isn’t the end.”

  “No,” Portem said, tone quiet. “Unfortunately, its just the beginning.”

  I leaned forward, thumb brushing over the slots. I took a slow breath. Then pressed my palm flat against the surface. The Root responded immediately. A soft hum vibrated through the console, followed by a radiant glow as the cube unfolded before me. Light peeled up from its seams in coiling spirals, revealing a slowly spinning construct in the center revealing what the glowing light was. Some type of data stick. I took it out of its receptacle and put it into the console slot. The screen light up with a map. Fourteen points flared one by one. Four inside Crown space. The rest spread like stars across the wider sky, each one flaring faintly as the Wakesong’s interface parsed them into coordinates. Three of them had already been visited.

  The Wakesong spoke just as it clicked into place. “New data signature detected. Partial authorization recognized. Decryption required.”

  “Of course it is.”

  I turned my gaze down the trail. One more point remained in the Ashen Crown. After that, three waited in Embercoil territory, just beyond the border. Past those lay five scattered through the Chainless Concord, and the final two were hidden somewhere in the distant fringes of the Churn

  “Estimated time to decrypt *this* one?” I asked.

  “Twenty four hours. minimum, probably less.”

  “I hope they don't take longer to decrypt as we go."

  It had been three days since the Archive Root slotted into the ship’s systems. Three days of watching it slowly bleed open, code layer by code layer, like it was deciding whether I was worth the answers it held. Portem had handled most of the decrypting. I handled the pacing.

  Now we were coming up on the next dot on the trail—and, conveniently, the designated drop point for the capsule. I stood at the helm with a scribbled list on a scrap of pressed paper in one hand and a half-stale ration bar in the other. The list was short, but heavy: coolant seals, mid-grade battery packs, fresh weldstock, connector leads for one of the mechbay’s rotating clamps, and a few smaller bits of bribe money tucked between the lines labeled as “optional repairs.” Also, food. *Real* food. Unlike whatever had been stocked in here.

  Portem’s voice came in from the background, clear and even. “Approach vector established. Twenty minutes to entry beacon. Traffic density high. I recommend we enter under a false registry broadcast.”

  “Already done,” I said, adjusting the collar of my jacket and stuffing the list into my side pouch. “Broadcast tag reads ‘Concord Trade Vessel—Redline Haul 5.’ Pretty generic. Should be inconspicuous enough right now.”

  I leaned forward, watching the skyline shift through the viewing glass as the city came into focus. Its name was Veinmire. Not one of the capitals, but an old route-city—massive, unwieldy, and impossible to kill. It sprawled across a chain of floating, terraced isles—detached from the mainland, yet clinging to where the peninsula would be. The isles curled southward like the trailing edge of a broken jaw, bound together by chain-strung skybridges. Engine-stacks and railing-lanterns crowded each tier, while smoke rose from the tower-furnaces like incense from a titan’s ribs. The rest of the continent loomed to the northwest, but Veinmire hung there alone and suspended.

  Buildings were built up, not out—four and five stories of cramped stone, wood, and steel, with exterior pipe scaffolds and gear-fed lifts. The lowest levels glowed with the red light of forge kilns and smog-filter lamps. Higher up, the smoke thinned and the light shifted to gold. Signs flickered in half-functional neon: barbers, bolt shops, mechanical tailors, clinics, all wedged between cramped alleys and heavy archways where trade caravans tumbled along on cable-slung skiffs and train cars.

  Small airships glided through above like slow-moving fish, their hulls creaking under the strain of stacked freight compartments. Steam horns echoed over the bay as dockships settled into mooring clamps. I counted two patrol blimps marked with Concord neutrality colors, and one Crown eye-scout looping high on the western wind.

  “Biggest place we’ve been to in a while,” I muttered.

  I kept my eyes on the traffic as we glided into entry range. The Wakesong’s false ID pinged once on the outer ring, then disappeared into the mess of incoming merchant vessels and outbound delivery skiffs. Portem adjusted our drift manually, sliding us into a mid-tier docking tier meant for courier-class frames.

  I reached down and opened the floor compartment beside the helm. The capsule was still locked in its case, the magnetic locks hummed quietly above the seals. Whatever was in there, I probably didn’t want to know. Not really. Just wanted to be rid of it before anyone else took an interest.

  I turned my attention back to the docks as we began to land. The Wakesong’s false registry slipped into the manifest stream without a hiccup, and no one on the outer signal bands challenged our flight path. Portem kept the broadcast signal faint and anonymous—courier-grade, low-priority, boring. But the Wakesong wasn’t built to be boring. She was big, too big for a solo pilot. And while her silhouette wasn’t immediately recognizable, it wasn’t forgettable, either. A ship like this was supposed to have a full crew.

  We were parked at one of the mid-tier industrial docks, nose angled out toward the western lift-gates, hull shadowed by the looming under-structure of one of Veinmire’s many chain-bound islands. The first thing that hit me wasn’t the smell, it was the tenseness of the city.

  Chains as thick as freight rails spanned overhead, creaking under the tension of kilometers of suspended stone and steel. Islands above layered the city into tiers—some drifting gently, others locked tight with tension braces and cantilever spires, all built with the assumption that gravity was a suggestion and altitude, a resource. Towers leaned into the sky like dueling lances. Gears spun endlessly inside braced arms that extended from cliffside buildings, powering lifts and exhaust vents and vertical conveyor rails that looped from street to rooftop and back again.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Beneath it all was the thick smoke. Dirty and choking—the processed smog formed a constant haze of copper-tinted exhaust filtering through soot-stained glass windows, casting the lower streets in warm, rust-colored light. It curled up between the brass-paved avenues and the slanted stone balconies, painted the market corridors and the elevated walkways, and faded as it reached the upper districts.

  The buildings were massive. Stone at the base, steel in the middle, custom filigree over every arch and column. No two blocks looked the same, but every one was tall, stacked with shops, stairwells, home-forges, pulley-rigged warehouses, and winding catwalks that wrapped around water towers like vines.

  The people moved in layers. Groundside foot traffic flowed through arches and narrow tunnel-streets, while gondolas flitted from tower to tower above. Pipe-fed bridges groaned under the weight of pedestrian caravans—merchants, pilgrims, guild runners, and cloth-draped technicians moving like blood. And with every pump of the city's heart you could feel the control. Veinmire was a city with strict rules.

  Every checkpoint at a lift platform had a guard. Every guard had a sigil on their coat: a rising flame split by a chain. The mark of Duke Vash—ruler of the Reach, descendant of Ser Carlen Vash, ironically enough, and Warden of the Border Heights. I kept my hood up, put my rebreather mask on, and tightened my goggles.

  I didn’t stop to stare at the clockwork lion statues that marked the eastern district gates. Didn’t linger near the fountains. Didn’t even look too long at the giant astrolabe hung between the civic towers like some god forgot to finish building a world. The first stop was the open-fork exchange just off the main street—a half-sunken trade bay nestled between two vertical tram rails. Independent vendors there didn’t ask many questions. That’s where I’d start.

  I had half a cargo bay’s worth of ship parts I didn’t need. Extra heat plating, salvage coils, half-melted connector arrays—stuff meant for repairs I hoped I’d never need to make. I’d need to trade it for necessities, then I’d figure out how to vanish in a city built to be seen.

  The undercity was louder than I expected. Not in volume—though it had that, too—but in presence. The sheer density of the thousands of people moving through the maze of steam-grates, cargo lifts, and reinforced stone that hadn’t seen natural light in decades. It seemed Veinmire didn’t just build upward, it also dug.

  The oldest roots of the city stretched downward, deep into the original stone of the isle, carved into cavernous vaults reinforced by black iron and winding pipelines that had long since outgrown their original purpose. What was once a maintenance layer had become a second world—less orderly, more alive. No guards or gates. Just the humdrum of commerce.

  I stepped off the final lift into the heat of it, my filter's fully tightened. The air was damp, full of heat vent runoff and the thick scent of boiled synth-oil and roasted grainmeal. Steam poured from open ducts and hissed through cracked pavement, and light spilled in sharp triangles from broken glass lanterns wired into power taps that were probably illegal.

  Shouts echoed down side alleys. A child darted past me with a sack of contraband augments strapped to his chest, trailed by an old woman who didn’t look nearly as angry as her voice sounded. The market tunnels branched endlessly—arched walkways crammed with stalls, rolling carts, and makeshift workbenches propped up by welding tanks and prayer coils. Everything was for sale. Everything had a buyer.

  Crowds pressed shoulder to shoulder, neon-tagged shawls and crown-marked tool belts, everyone moving fast enough that names didn’t matter. You weren’t supposed to be here. No one was, and that was the point.

  I adjusted the optics on my mask, cycling one of the lenses forward. It clicked into place with a faint chirp and brought the far end of the tunnel into sharper view—market signs tagged with trade glyphs, color-coded pings that flashed on old-world tech frequencies to indicate open stalls or services rendered. Most of it was legit. Some of it wasn’t. I could tell the difference.

  Wickrow had been smaller. Dirtier, in some ways. More open about their happenings, but it was built on the same bones. Veinmire, however, had it tucked away.

  I stopped at a side stall with a half-shielded overhead cover and a spread of salvaged mech parts laid out like a feast. I passed the vendor a bin of unused ship-grade vent coils, still tagged with the Wakesong’s old pre-scrubbed serials. He didn’t look, twice. Just weighed them in his hands, then passed me a chit and focused his attention to the passing traffic. That was one stop down, with two more to go, though with more credits in hand. One coin purse heavier, one satchel lighter.

  As I walked I paid closer attention to the details and felt the numerous glancing eyes that washed over everyone. The mask helped. Covered everything from throat to forehead, built with a Concord export-grade filter set I’d “acquired” a few years back. Low-profile augment lenses, zoom toggle, spectral overlay for reading mech core pulses and heat vents. The kind of thing used by freelance engineers and scrap scouts who didn’t want to eat pipe fumes for a living.

  The deeper I went, the quieter it got. Noise still rolled from the main arteries of the undercity market—vendors shouting prices, steam whistles blaring from cargo lifts, the occasional bark of a dispute turning into a transaction—but down here, in the lower arms where the tunnels curved into colder stone, things calmed.

  Light dimmed to low amber strips run along the walls, casting warped shadows against hanging parts and latticework. The market turned from necessity to curiosity. Here, traders sold less for function and more for taste—specialist mods, rare fittings, aftermarket attunement shells for overclocked cores. The signs started to read “hand-forged" too.

  I passed one window that had a half-built limb on display—Colossi-grade, judging by the scale. A right arm, shoulder to wrist, plated in what looked like scorched copper alloy and marked with old dueling glyphs. Not just a weapon—art. My fingers twitched against my side.

  “You seeing this?” I muttered under my breath.

  Portem didn’t answer.

  “Portem?”

  Still nothing. I tapped the comm bead again, and got a soft buzz of background processing noise. Right. Still syncing with the Archive Root.

  “Fine,” I grumbled. “Be busy.”

  I stopped in front of another stall. This one had a rack of scaled-down prototypes—Colossi shoulder mounts, modular ammo bays, a few large-scale blade frames. But nothing ranged. No cannons. No long-barrel cores. No sniper-class output systems.

  Figures. Colossi parts were rare enough. Specialized weapons? Near impossible without going straight through a Crown requisitions node or scouring six layers of Concord black-market trade. So far we hadn't run into any danger, so Portem had been fine doing all this on a single retractable blade. But it wasn’t enough with the scale of what this journey was growing to be.

  His optics were built for distance—sixfold lenses, tuned to atmospheric distortion, with some real cutting edge precision and dynamic heatline filters. I’d made them myself, back in the workshop. Calibrated them by hand. He could see through a blizzard and track a target four klicks out without adjusting for drift. But without a proper weapon, it was like asking a master cartographer to draw maps with nothing but a hammer and cow hide.

  And thinking back on it, he never complained. Never asked for more. My hands dropped to my sides, eyes dragging from one wall of hardware to the next. It brought me back for just a moment, to my cramped little apartment and far more vast workshop. The entire building sat two levels below a bakery in the outskirts of a Concord district. I kept the shutters closed and the blinds sealed and worked in the dark with only Portem's floodlights to keep the area lit.

  That rifle had been my magnum opus. Long-barrel, shock-insulated, magnetic dampeners on the recoil coil. Meant for Portem and no one else. I’d been halfway through building the charge system when the job came through. The one I took before waking up on the Wakesong. I just hoped it was still stashed in the hidden compartment I had built for it.

  It started with stillness. One second, the market was humming—steam valves hissing from pressure vents, aug-mod vendors arguing over compression ratios, a trio of mechanics laughing too loudly at something I didn’t catch. The next, there was a collective held breath. A pause. Then the alarm screeched out.

  A single, low-toned chime—deep, reverberating, mechanical—rolled through the undercity like a pulse. It didn’t repeat. And everyone around me responded like they’d been trained from birth to do so. Stalls vanished in moments. Shutters slammed. Canopies folded into walls, wiring snapping back into place with practiced speed. The ground-level storefronts disappeared in less than ten seconds, pulled shut by gears and spring-loaded hinges like the place had never been open at all.

  People vanished too. Gone into alleyways, behind shielded doors, into sealed freight crates that had looked like junk just a moment ago. I turned once in a slow circle. Where there had been dozens of bodies a breath ago, there were now none.

  “Portem,” I hissed into the comm. “Status topside?”

  “Shutters are down. Dockside channels suspended. No exit permission being broadcast.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Unknown. The city’s lockdown system is ancient but refined. Whatever just triggered it was high-priority.”

  “Great.”

  My eyes swept the corridor, looking for an out—any sign of movement. But there was nothing besides the creaking of metal. Just red hazard lamps beginning to flicker to life along the walls, bathing the entire undercity in an ugly, scarlet glow. I wasn't keen on waiting for whatever scared everyone in so I ran.

  The lifts were dead. Lockout kicked in after the alarm. But I wasn’t new to this kind of panic, and Veinmire’s builders hadn’t planned for perfection, they'd planned for efficiency.

  There were maintenance stairs two blocks east, hidden behind a vent grill that didn’t quite latch. I climbed fast, lungs burning, coat sticking to my back from heat and fear. Boots hammering metal rungs as I climbed into the upper levels, breath catching with every turn, vision swimming behind my goggles.

  The moment I breached the surface district, I could hear the city again. But it wasn’t the same. The top-level markets hadn’t shut completely, but they’d changed. The tension from when I first entered the city had become palpable. The luxury districts were folding up like card tricks, security shutters rolling down over signage with the hiss of hydraulic locks and the heavy ka-thunk of internal gates dropping.

  I slipped into one of the side vendors still open—barely—flashed my credit chit, and bought three mid-grade coil packs and a sealed ration box. The vendor didn’t speak. Just scanned the chit and handed over the bag before dropping his shutter halfway.

  I stood there a moment in the street, breathing heavy, bag slung over my shoulder, goggles fogged slightly from the heat. Then I looked down at my list. At the line I’d drawn under the word Portem. I’d promised myself I’d buy him something. A proper mount. A mod. Something he could use, but it was going to have to wait.

  “I’ll come back,” I muttered. Then I turned and made for the Wakesong.

  The ramp hissed closed behind me. My thoughts were in disarray the entire way back. Portem was completely silent to my calls but the ship seemed like it was fine still.

  “Portem,” I called out, tugging the mask loose and tossing it onto the console. “Talk to me.”

  “Welcome back,” he replied, almost too calm.

  I dropped the supply bag onto the floor and pulled off my gloves.

  “What the hell triggered that lockdown?”

  A pause. Short, but telling.

  “There was a spike in network activity once the Archive Root finished decrypting. Subtle, but enough to sync with a dormant Crown listening node.”

  I froze. “You didn’t think that might matter?”

  “I assumed the signal was inert. I was mistaken.”

  “Great,” I muttered, rubbing a hand down my face. “So what now? We just kicked the city’s security net and flashed a flare on our back?”

  “Only briefly. The beacon was cloaked in outdated Crown protocols due to the encryption. They likely interpreted it as an anomaly.”

  “Likely.”

  I paced once, then exhaled and leaned on the side rail of the helm.

  “Do we at least have the next point?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  Another pause.

  Then: “Here. In Veinmire.”

  I didn’t move. Just stared out the viewglass at the glowing towers and the gears still slowly turning in the sky above.

  Of course it was.