The alley behind the Old Mill was narrow, and a low mist filled the space between the damp wooden walls. Alucent crouched in the mud before Tavin while Raya stood watch at the entrance and Gryan guarded the canal side. The boy was shivering violently now that the adrenaline from his vision had faded, leaving him pale and unsteady on his feet.
"You said he's waiting," Alucent said gently. "Where is the knot, Tavin? Can you show me?"
Tavin didn't answer immediately. His eyes wandered around the alley without focus, clearly still struggling to separate the physical world from the threads he saw. Finally, his gaze landed on a piece of discarded slate half-buried in the mud. He lunged forward and grabbed it, pulling it free with desperate strength.
"Give me something to draw with," he whispered hoarsely.
Gryan reached into his coat and produced a stub of charcoal. Tavin snatched it from his fingers and immediately began scratching lines onto the slate. His hand trembled, and the strokes came out crude and uneven, but Alucent recognized the shapes taking form. Tunnels. Branching passages that crossed and intersected in a chaotic web.
The Steam-Veins, he thought. The maintenance tunnels beneath the city.
Tavin circled a junction where several passages met, pressing down so hard the charcoal nearly snapped in his grip. "Here," he said, tapping the mark repeatedly. "The threads are knotted here. I can hear them screaming when I close my eyes."
Alucent studied the crude map for a moment, memorizing the layout. Then he reached into his purse and withdrew the Journal. Raya shifted beside him at the sight of the book, her hand drifting toward the dagger at her belt, but she remained silent.
Alucent opened to a blank page and held it near the slate. Nothing happened for several seconds, so he focused his intent and willed the Journal to activate. The book lifted gently from his palm and hovered in the air, its pages rustling without wind as a soft cyan-and-gold radiance spilled from between the covers. Lines began to trace themselves across the blank page in amber ink, but they weren't simply copying Tavin's sketch. The ink was refining the image, straightening the tunnels, adding passages the boy hadn't drawn, and filling in architectural details with precise strokes.
Within moments, the page displayed a detailed blueprint of the Undercity's heating system. A small dot appeared near one edge of the map, pulsing faintly. When Alucent leaned slightly to the left, the dot moved a corresponding distance on the page.
That's my position, he realized. This was the Journal's Dynamic Content ability, a function that generated maps updating continuously to track his location and reflect environmental changes in real time.
Near the junction Tavin had marked, the ink behaved differently. It swirled on the paper, refusing to settle into stable lines, as though the reality of that location was in flux. Gryan stepped closer and peered at the hovering page, his eyes widening.
"The ink," he said slowly. "It's crawling around on its own."
Alucent willed the Journal closed. It settled back into his hand, and the radiance faded. "It's showing us the path," he said, tucking the book away. "Let's go."
---
They returned to the Rusty Cog before attempting the descent. The tavern owner, a thick-armed woman named Breta, led them to a private back room without asking questions, having owed Raya a favor from years past. Tavin was taken up to the loft above the kitchen where he could rest out of sight.
Alucent placed the velvet purse on the table and loosened the drawstring. The Silverweaves spilled across the scarred wood, one hundred notes bearing the watermark of the Upper Vale treasury. He stared at the currency for a moment. This money wouldn't matter if they were dead by morning.
"We need to prepare," he said, looking up at his team. "Whatever is down there, we go tonight."
Raya pulled out a chair and sat across from him. "What do you need?"
Alucent divided the notes into three stacks. He pushed the largest toward Gryan. "Forty Silverweaves. Find Brass-Hydraulic Cylinders, the high-pressure ones. And get Aether-Coal for the Steamwagon."
Gryan picked up the stack and counted it quickly. Brass-Hydraulic Cylinders were specialized components that could overclock mechanical prosthetics, pushing them past their normal output limits at the cost of increased wear. Aether-Coal was a refined fuel that burned hotter and cleaner than standard coal, giving steam engines significantly more power when needed.
"I know a supplier in the eastern markets," Gryan said, tucking the notes into his coat. "He deals in restricted goods. Never asks questions."
Alucent pushed the second stack toward Raya. "Twenty Silverweaves. Get Ironvine-infused honing oil for your blade, and as many Alchemical Flares as you can carry."
Raya nodded and took the money. Ironvine oil strengthened weapon edges against magical interference, while Alchemical Flares were canisters packed with magnesium and crushed runestones that produced light intense enough to disrupt shadow-based entities.
"And you?" she asked, gesturing to the remaining pile.
"I'm keeping forty," Alucent said. "Bribes if we need them. Emergency rune-components."
Gryan weighed the notes in his hand, staring at them with an odd expression. "A week ago, we were at hallow ," he muttered. "Couldn't afford a decent meal most days." He shook his head. "Now we're spending a year's wages on supplies for one night."
"A week ago, we weren't being hunted by a Fate-Weaver," Raya said flatly.
Gryan let out a short breath. "Fair point." He headed for the door. "I'll be back in an hour."
"Make it forty minutes," Raya called after him. She stood and checked her blade in its sheath before following him out.
Alucent sat alone in the dim room, staring at the Journal on the table. After a moment, he willed it to open. The book lifted slightly, pages rustling, and the amber dot pulsed steadily on the map. The swirling ink at the target junction seemed to move faster now, agitated.
What are we walking into? he thought. The Journal offered no answer.
---
Forty-three minutes later, they gathered at a rusted maintenance hatch near the canal district. The hatch groaned loudly as Gryan hauled it open, the old hinges protesting against years of corrosion. A wave of heat and the smell of sulfur rose from the darkness below. Metal rungs descended into the shaft, slick with condensation.
Alucent went first. He willed the Journal to activate, and it lifted from his hand to hover beside him. The cyan-and-gold radiance was faint but enough to see the rungs, and his Runequill floated nearby to add soft amber illumination. The shaft went deeper than he expected, at least thirty meters before his boots finally hit solid ground.
The tunnel at the bottom was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to stand abreast. Pipes of various sizes ran along the walls and ceiling, some hissing with escaping steam, others silent and cold. The floor was metal grating, wet with moisture that had dripped from above.
Alucent looked at the Journal floating beside him. The amber dot sat near the edge of the mapped area. As he took a step forward, the dot moved a corresponding distance on the page. Raya dropped down behind him, landing quietly on the grating. Then came Gryan, his mechanical arm whirring softly as it absorbed the impact.
"Which way?" Raya asked in a low voice.
Alucent consulted the map. "Left at the first junction. Then straight for about two hundred meters."
They moved in single file, with Alucent leading and Gryan at the rear. The tunnel was too narrow for any other formation. The hissing of pipes was constant, occasionally punctuated by the groan of stressed metal somewhere deeper in the system.
After a minute of walking, a loud bang echoed from ahead. Steam erupted from a pipe junction, filling the passage with white vapor. Alucent looked at the Journal. A jagged line had already appeared across one of the tunnel passages on the map, marking the new obstruction. The Dynamic Content had updated instantly.
"Path's blocked," he said. "There's a parallel route. Twenty meters back."
They reversed course and found the alternate passage, a smaller maintenance corridor that branched off from the main tunnel. Gryan had to duck to fit through the low opening. The deeper they went, the worse the air became. The sulfur smell intensified, and beneath it was something else. Wet fur. Rotting meat.
Alucent noticed the rats first. Dozens of them were pressed against the base of the walls, running in tight circles. The same pattern repeated over and over, their movements perfectly synchronized and their eyes glassy.
This has to be Logic Loops, he thought. Something has trapped their minds in a repeating sequence.
He checked the Journal again. The map showed their position approaching the junction Tavin had marked, but something was wrong with the ink ahead of the amber dot. The clean architectural lines were fraying at the edges, bleeding outward, turning into jagged scribbles. Then text appeared in the margin, the ink crawling into position and forming elegant script:
"The cartography falters, Scion. Semantic integrity ahead has grown rather threadbare. Reality, as one might observe, has developed a bruise. Do step with care. I should hate to see you become permanent décor."
Alucent looked up from the page. The steam ahead wasn't white anymore. It was Grey, translucent and sickly, drifting in slow currents that didn't match the air movement.
"Something's wrong with the steam," Raya said quietly from behind him.
"We're close," Alucent replied.
They pressed forward, stepping carefully around the looping rats. After another fifty meters, the tunnel opened into a larger space.
The junction was a massive room where four main arteries of the city's heating system converged. Alucent could see pipes as thick as old trees fed into a central hub from every direction. Pressure gauges and valve wheels lined the walls, all covered in a layer of grime. The floor was metal grating, and patches of it had corroded through, revealing darkness below.
At the center of the room, grafted onto the main brass valve, was a cluster of crystals. They were black and jagged, jutting from the metal at unnatural angles. Each one pulsed with a rhythm that felt wrong, not producing light, but somehow the opposite.
Voidshard Cluster, Alucent thought. He had read about them in restricted texts at the Scriptorium. These were crystallized fragments of corrupted Runeforce that absorbed energy from their surroundings and channeled it elsewhere. No doubt, this is a a Runeforce-Siphon. Someone had installed this deliberately to drain the city's ambient power.
To Veyris, he realized. It's feeding him.
He looked at the Journal floating beside him. The ink representing the cluster on the map had expanded, rearranging itself into a new shape. A skull with empty eye sockets staring up from the page. Text crawled beneath it:
"How delightfully predictable, the lamb arrives at the altar. But do consider, Scion: shepherds waste no effort guarding empty pastures. THEY ARE NOT GUARDING IT. THEY ARE THE DOOR."
Alucent's stomach tightened. "Raya," he said quietly, without raising his head. "Gryan. Check the walls."
Gryan raised his mechanical arm instantly. Raya's hand went to her Weaveblade. For a long moment, nothing happened. The only sounds were the hissing of distant steam and the rhythmic pulse of the Voidshard Cluster.
Then the shadows along the walls began to move.
---
In the subterranean chambers of TR-Site 07 on Earth, Dr. Kheira Virell sat before the monitoring array. The Weave Anchor Ring's energy readings had been erratic for days, spikes and dips without any discernible pattern. But now the signature had changed. A steady pulse. Consistent interval. Consistent amplitude.
She ran the data through the analysis algorithms, and the results came back within seconds. "Director," one of her technicians said, looking up from his terminal. "The pulse pattern matches a targeting beacon signature."
Kheira stared at the screen. The ring wasn't just transmitting anymore. It was receiving. "Someone painted a target on his back," she said quietly.
She didn't know who. She didn't know how. But something on the other side was homing in on their subject. She initiated a priority log entry.
---
The shadows peeled away from the junction walls, separating from the darkness like skin from muscle. They had form... bodies, limbs, but they weren't human. Alucent counted six of them as they emerged from the spaces between pipes.
At first, they looked like standard Shadebinders, constructs of flesh and shadow, animated by stolen life force. Then he saw the brass plating bolted to their torsos and the violet runes glowing along the metal.
His blood went cold. Upgraded Shadebinders.
Raya stiffened beside him, taking a step back as her face drained of color. "No," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Not again. Not these."
Alucent understood immediately. Three months ago, before Verdant Hollow, they had encountered one of these upgraded constructs during a routine test of Alucent's emotional instability, Just one. It had nearly killed all three of them, and Raya still carried the scars across her ribs where its claws had torn through her armor.
And now there were six.
Raya drew her Weaveblade with a shaking hand. The weapon's edge was designed to glow with amber Runeforce, but the light sputtered and flickered weakly. "The crystals," she said through gritted teeth. "They're dampening my blade."
Gryan stepped forward, positioning himself between the constructs and the others. His mechanical arm whirred as pressure built in the new Brass-Hydraulic Cylinders, and steam vented from the shoulder joint. "How many?" he asked, his voice steady despite the tension in his jaw.
"Six," Alucent replied. The Journal's pages had gone dark beside him.
One of the Shadebinders moved. It blurred, crossing half the distance to them in a single lunging stride. Raya intercepted it on instinct. Her blade caught the construct across the chest, but the dampened edge barely scratched the brass plating. The Shadebinder swung an arm at her head, and she ducked and rolled backward, scrambling for distance.
"It's faster than the one before," she yelled.
Two more constructs were flanking left, and another two circled toward the right, moving with coordinated precision to cut off the exits. The sixth came straight at Alucent. He saw the violet runes along its plating flare bright as it accelerated. Its arm extended, fingers splayed wide, reaching for his throat.
Three meters. Two.
Alucent's fingers closed around his Runequill. The construct lunged, and its claws filled his vision.