By the time the sun clawed its way above Velith, the city was already pretending.
The Guild draped new banners across shattered towers, the kind that said Order in clean, confident colors. Technicians scrubbed ash from the glass, replaced cracked lenses, and filled reports with words like contained incident and structural resonance anomaly.
But under the streets, the hum hadn't stopped.
The pipes still whispered.
The air still remembered.
Captain Ireth hadn't slept. His eyes were red-veined, his uniform immaculate. He stood in the central command hall, staring at a projected map of the city's energy flow — all wrong. Mirra currents twisted in impossible loops, like the veins of something that had learned to bleed the wrong way.
"How much did we lose?" he asked.
The techs hesitated. "Not much, sir. Infrastructure holding."
He didn't believe them. "The truth."
Another voice, quiet: "Thirty-two blocks offline. Four hundred unregistered fatalities. Six Guild operatives missing. The Vault's lower circuit… gone."
The word gone hung in the air.
"Gone?" Ireth asked. "As in—"
"As in erased, sir. The Vault's memory sector doesn't exist anymore."
For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Ireth turned away from the map. His face was calm. "Seal the records. We'll rebuild the Vault. Nobody outside the Guild hears the word Ninefold."
---
Far below, where the pipes still hummed, Merin (the technician from earlier) walked through the ruins. His fingers traced a wall that pulsed faintly beneath the soot — warm, almost living.
He leaned in and thought he heard voices again.
Faint. Layered.
Not screaming this time. Whispering.
He pressed his ear to the wall.
"…heartbeat… returned… incomplete…"
He stumbled back, heart hammering. He wanted to report it, but the Guild had already confiscated half the lower sectors. So he did what frightened men do best — he told no one.
---
At the city's edge, a column of smoke marked where the Ninefold had emerged. They were scattered, limping, half-covered in dust.
Lirra's arm was wrapped in bloodied cloth, Raal's eyes hollow from Mirra exhaustion, and one of the twins no longer spoke.
Mael stood at the edge of the ruins, looking back toward Velith.
His hand twitched — a faint tremor that hadn't been there before. He watched the tremor with curiosity, not fear. "The city's still alive," he murmured.
Raal frowned. "You mean the Guild?"
Mael's lips curled into the faintest ghost of a smile. "No. The city."
He turned away, coat flicking ash from its hem. "Let's disappear before it remembers us."
---
Two days later, on a dusty road far from the capital, Rynn and Eren passed a merchant wagon. The driver, an old man with more words than teeth, was telling anyone who'd listen:
"They say Velith died last week. Guild says it didn't. But my cousin swears the streets forgot their names — signs blanked out, people lost their houses because the walls didn't remember them."
Eren laughed, not sure if it was a joke. "Cities don't forget things."
The old man shrugged. "Then why do the clocks there stop at the same time every night?"
Rynn didn't laugh. He looked at the map in his lap — the one they'd started marking after each city — and drew a small, black circle where Velith was.
He didn't know why, but it felt right.
That night, when they camped by the river, Rynn couldn't sleep. He watched the stars reflected in the water, thinking about the city that had supposedly forgotten itself. He didn't know what it meant yet, only that something was changing.
And far away, under the ruins of Velith, a faint pulse began again — slow, steady, waiting.
---