Chapter Text
The soldier didn’t notice when his eyes opened. Light pressed against them—dim, blurred, trembling as if seen through water. The air smelled of cold metal, unnaturally clean.
He laid on a table, naked. The sound of machines filling the room like a low endless breath.
“Where… am I?” he whispered.
“In the basement of the world, pal.”
The reply came from nowhere, a thin, almost metallic voice.
A moment later, he saw it: a silver-white ghost, half there, half gone. It flickered twice before resolving into the shape of a man whose face wore a smirk that never quite reached his eyes.
There was something off about this man. He didn’t look Carja or Oseram, not even Tenakth. His face was too smooth, too intentional, like it had been crafted rather than born of blood. Even his stance carried that same precision, as if he existed slightly out of tune with the world.
Only the eyes—dark, sharp, knowing—felt human.
The soldier gritted his teeth. His vision swam, the room bending at wrong angles, as if he were seeing everything from just outside himself.
“Physically, you’re in a dead-end RnD hole my earlier self slapped together,” the ghost said. “Spiritually? Call it purgatory with a bad network link.”
The soldier struggled to focus.
“You… saved me?”
The ghost gave a low, rasping laugh. A metal stool fizzled into existence beside him, pretending to obey gravity. A thin roll materialized between the ghost’s fingers. The soldier thought of the vision-sticks Banuk shamans burned to see beyond. Its tip burned ember-bright, yet the smoke unraveled into static, vanishing before it could climb.
"Let's not hand out halos just yet."
The ghost sat and rolled the smoking stick between his fingers. "I built this place to keep the lights on after everybody left the room. Looks like you tripped a wire."
“Are you… some kind of god?” the soldier asked.
The ghost laughed again, short and sharp.
“Hell no. If I’m a god, we’re already in the last damn days. Mama’d have a verse for it if she were still kickin’,” he inhaled the smoke, embers burning bright in half-darkness.
“Me? I’m a satanic janitor,” the ghost grinned, “who never figured out when to quit sweepin’.”
A faint cloud of light slipped from him, bearing the distant suggestion of slow-rising smoke.
“Eight centuries of peace and quiet,” he continued, “Just me and a corrupted log file, pretending to be friends. Didn’t figure any of my toys still booted up without catching fire.”
The soldier lay still, confused. Everything felt wrong. He could see his whole body as if from above, like he was floating near the ceiling, disconnected, weightless. He couldn’t feel his limbs, but they moved when he willed them to, like borrowed tools.
“Name’s Travis,” the ghost said, letting smoke out of his mouth. “Once upon a time, I used to be someone. Now I’m just staring into the digital noise. All hiss and no riff. You?”
“I’m… nothing,” the soldier whispered. “A dead poet.”
His head turned away from the ghost, but his sight did not follow, still anchored somewhere above his body, as if he wore the world like an ill-fitted mask.
“Nothin’?” Travis echoed, the smoke-stick clenched in his teeth.
Two white machines drifted into the room, each carrying a box that clunked faintly giving an eerie sound.
“That’s a hell of a name, partner. Like zip, zero, zilch... Kinda rolls off the tongue.”
The ghost grinned, dark eyes glinting with mischief.
“Nil, maybe? Sounds kinda poetic, ain’t it?”
The machines moved around Travis as though tethered to his gestures, unpacking, assembling, fitting strange tools into place, like extensions of his own thought.
“Alrighty, patient zero,” the Travis-ghost said at last, his grin slanting with irony. “Guess nothing makes two of us. I knew a gal once, real sharp, real stubborn, she had a thing for zeroes.”
He paused, the smirk thinning into something more human.
“Didn’t end well for either of us.”
He turned to a machine nearby, an ungainly construct of arms, lenses, cables and glass tubes that looked like an Oseram tinker’s nightmare. Sparks glimmered faintly along its joints as the ghost brought it to life.
“Tell you what,” he went on, dropping the smoke-stick to the floor, where it vanished before touching the ground. “I’ll patch you up with what I got left. Which, lucky you, hovers right around nil. Tools, decency, take your pick. Ain’t much of a setup down here. Just a pulse generator, a neural stitcher, and bad ideas. My holy trinity.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the soldier, the light from his eyes flickered like falling stars.
“Before you start scribblin’ me a thank-you note, do me a favor: tell the next century ol’Trav gave it a try.”
He flipped an invisible switch. The machines hummed to life around them.
"Hell, tell 'em I gave it two."
And then the lights died out, swallowed by black nothingness.
—
It had been years since he woke up alive in the desert, sands still shining like a lake of glass, his memory of that day remained vivid.
The light was blinding, cruel, as the Sun’s own judgement.
The ghost was gone.
Only the machines remained, white against the red sand, watching him from a distance. When he called, they came.
He had never believed in the Sun, not in the way his Father demanded, with his will or his fist. But that morning, standing amid the remnants of battle, on scorched sand and shattered glass, something pierced the hollow of his heart. A miracle, or something close enough to hurt.
He had been dead. And yet, he lived.
All the knowledge his Father had beaten into him over the years of study could not explain what happened in that dark place beneath the earth where he was brought back to life.
The world had forever changed. So did he.
Now he struggled to make sense of it.
—
After that, all things blurred into the same hum. Metal striking metal, metal tearing flesh. There was a strange beauty to it, a rhythm, a song. His own inner melody was long gone, hollowed out by silence, buried beneath the desert, so he let this new one claim him. He became its singer.
He fought at the Battle of the Daunt, though no one had called him. Carja officials believed him dead, lost to the Sands. But the whisper of his bow came from a place before language, and he obeyed. Casting aside his Carja Legion helm he took up a Tenakth mask painted with red teeth.
Some of the legionnaires recognized him despite his new appearances. That was how the legend began. A Carja warrior so fierce he’d learned to fight like a Tenakth.
He told himself it was strategy, a way to survive among enemies. But he knew better. He could no longer march beneath the same crown his Father had served. The old man’s face haunted every horizon.
Only the song of death could drown it out.
He never pretended the song came without cost. Every voice he silenced left something behind—not remorse, he was too broken for that, but record. He kept count. Not because it mattered. Because someone should.
When Avad overthrew the Mad King, he returned to Meridian.
He found the Asareth Verad estate in ruins, its walls defaced, its halls burned hollow. His Father lay buried beneath the stones of the family crypt, killed in the assault on the Palace of the Sun, they told him.
From that moment he felt nothing.
Sometimes, he tried to remember Lyris: her voice, her laugh, the warmth of her hands. But the memory of her had faded.
And so had he.
He surrendered himself to Avad’s justice soon after. There was nothing left for him to do. Any fate the crown decreed seemed preferable to the one he’d already carved for himself.
—
Now, in the darkness of his cell, he sat with his worst companion.
Only the echo of his own heartbeat, steady, indifferent.
A structure, a cage.
For the first time since the Sands, he wondered whether the ghost had saved him… or cursed him to walk forever between death and emptiness.
Warden Jeneva came often, sometimes to gloat, sometimes out of sheer boredom. They seemed to find sport in his silence, as if trying to humiliate him further might give their posting a purpose.
When the guards dragged him out in shackles to work the prison fields, the machines came often. Behemoths. Ravagers. Things that shouldn’t have wandered so close.
The guards would scatter, leave the prisoners to fend for themselves. Then he fought, because fighting was all he had left.
Each time the machines grew stronger, more savage. Sometimes, in the split-second before the killing blow, he almost felt a connection, like a note of the same song echoing back from the long forgotten past.
—
One day Jeneva came by again.
“Hey, Verad,” they drawled, leaning against the stone wall. “Had ourselves a trader passing through last night. The boys and I shared a few drinks, good company, better gossip.”
They watched him for a reaction. He didn’t move. He rarely did. Jeneva had never been subtle, but boredom made them daring.
“The story he told us, you’d love it,” they continued, smiling as though savoring a secret. “Said your poor mother ran off with some lowborn scribe before the Red Raids even started. Got herself killed near Tenakth lands.”
He stayed silent. The dim light caught his ice-cold eyes.
Jeneva smirked, encouraged by his stillness.
“And your sweet sister,” they went on, “the story goes she planned to elope with her lover, that rebel, Taren Vesk. At least until your dear old father caught them in the act.”
Their laugh was too loud in the narrow cell.
“Tell me, was whoring some kind of family tradition for the great House of Asareth Verad?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t blink.
The silence between them grew heavy, the kind that makes even cruelty sound unsure of itself.
Then the walls trembled.
Not from impact alone — but as if something ancient beneath the stone had drawn a breath.
A low, thunderous fracture rolled through the corridor, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat splitting the earth open.
The machines had reached Sunstone Rock again. Not for the first time. But this time the stone didn’t resist. It listened.
A crack crept along the ceiling, branching like a dark root, shedding dust in thin veils of ash.
His eyes met Jeneva’s.
And there he saw it, the raw and unmasked primal fear.
Something inside him ignited—stepped through the place where his soul had been. Something he’d buried so deep he’d forgotten its shape. The hollowness filled with the thrill, the rage, the old familiar song resurrected from the ashes.
He attuned to the rhythm of chaos as if the machines ravaging outside were singing it back into him through the stone walls. His breath slowed. His pulse steadied. The panic around him faded into silence.
Then the rhythm reached him.
Not noise. Not violence.
A call.
The guards screamed. The bars twisted with a shriek of torn metal.
He watched, head tilted, almost curious. Dust swirled like a stormcloud.
His gaze found Jeneva’s again.
“And now,” he said softly, “we finally have our first dance.”